Bombs and Guitars: Songs from Iraq 2003-2004

Twenty-seven-year-old Shane Claiborne returned to America last week, his left arm in a sling, injured in an accident while exiting Iraq.

He came home with a heart heavy with the thoughts of friends still in Baghdad.

''I spent about 2 1/2 weeks in Baghdad,'' Claiborne says, visiting with relatives in his native Tennessee.

Claiborne, of Philadelphia, arrived in Baghdad on March 12, joining a group of about 30 others from the Iraq Peace Team, an organizational arm of the Voices in the Wilderness group,
based in Chicago.

Since September, more than 150 Americans from about 40 states have traveled to Iraq to live among the Iraqi people and to offer help in hospitals and schools and to document the lives of people in crisis.

Claiborne's arrival in Baghdad coincided with the opening days of the war. He became a part of IPT members-turned-reporters, interviewed by phone and by e-mails from the media for a sense at what the war looked like from the inside.

Since his return, Claiborne says the images he sees on American TV are limited in their
presentation of what is really going on.
'You're only seeing one side of the story. It is very difficult to find the truth of what is
happening there. My heart is very heavy. Because I love the Iraqi people,
and I love the (U.S.) soldiers, I grieve for my country.''

When he first arrived in Baghdad, Claiborne says he was afraid of what the reaction would be when he said he was an American.

''I didn't know what the Iraqi people would think, but they said 'We love Americans.
We love the American people.' They have the ability to separate between the American government and the American people,'' Claiborne says. ''What they couldn't understand
is why we, as American citizens, couldn't stop the government from aggressive actions on the Iraqi people.''

Claiborne's e-mails while in Baghdad became part of daily diaries posted on the IPT's Web site.

His group erected a camp site in a residential neighborhood in between the Al Monzer
Pediatric Hospital and the Al Wathba water plant.

''Each night, about 10 of us sleep there, spending time with (Iraqi) workers and neighbors.
They have brought us blankets, fresh cookies, let us use their phone,'' Claiborne wrote in his diary. ''They stay up all night with us, telling stories. When the bombs begin to drop each night, we light a candle and sing songs.''

Claiborne remembers seeing a flock of geese ''flying in V-formation,'' that seemed to signal the first wave of aircraft overhead, describing the thunderous sound of bombs dropping,
the shaking earth, the smell of smoke, and the desperate-sounding howling of dogs
in the alley behind him.

His notes of the first hours of the air invasion: ''I can hear the bombs falling as I write this.
I find myself curling up like a little child at night in a lightning storm. Every time I see
a flash of light, I begin to count - 'one thousand-one, one thousand-two' -
to see how far away it is. Now when I count, I rarely get past the first 'one thous...'''

The lesson he learned, he says: 'There are better ways to deal with conflict than shooting the enemy.''

''People throughout the world know that Saddam Hussein is a wicked leader, and that he
has an oppressive regime,'' Claiborne says, but after the bombing began, many Iraqis were asking, ''Is this what liberation looks like?''

''We saw so many beautiful kids, they were scared and confused. I was with a man who was standing next to his child - the child shredded with shrapnel, and the father was saying,
'What kind of liberation would do this to my child?'
It breaks my heart, I don't believe with this action we have made a safer world. Violence only spirals and begets the same things it seeks to destroy.''

One of the fondest memories Claiborne has of his time in Iraq is of the day they celebrated the 13th birthday of a girl named Amal Shamuri.

''It was a tremendous day, the resilience of the children continuing to sing and laugh and celebrate the day," Claiborne says, "even as the bombs were falling.''

One Year Later

First they fired the rockets and missiles and launched the grenades. Then they sent in the bombers and battle tanks, dropped bunker busters and cluster bombs, and only then - after they placed more boots on the ground than lined Imelda Marcos' closet - only then did they finally bring on the noise.

The volatile streets of Fallujah, Iraq, were wired for sound last Friday, the Associated Press reported. U.S. troops turned their attentions to the high-watt loudspeakers that lined the city. They turned the volume up to 10 and blasted the town with the sounds of rock 'n' roll in hopes of getting the bad guys to give up.

The musical overtures blaring through the streets of Fallujah embraced some well-chosen
sonic barbs: Metallica's 'Enter Sandman,' Jimi Hendrix's rendition of 'The Star-Spangled
Banner' and an assortment of AC/DC tunes.

In a particular stroke of genius from the U.S. Defense Department's Psychological Operations Branch (PSYOPS), the mission was the repetitive broadcasting of the theme song from
'Barney' mixed with an assortment of verbal assaults like 'You shoot like a goat herder.'
An achievement as near to a slam-dunk as possible to disassemble and disorient the
insurgents we keep hearing about.

The playing of obnoxious tunes came at the same time that the folks at Blender magazine
issued a list of what they called the worst 50 songs of all-time.

Among the most horrific on the list are Wang Chung's 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight,'
Billy Ray Cyrus' 'Achy Breaky Heart' and Whitney Houston's 'Greatest Love of All.'
With some last-minute tweaking, the play list of sonic sludge being blasted throughout
Fallujah could benefit with the addition of some selections from Blender's list of truly bad tunes.

The government's policy of delivering the noise that annoys is not a new idea. When General Manuel Noriega fled for cover during the Panama invasion in 1989, loudspeakers blared Jimi Hendrix's 'Voodoo Chile' and Linda Ronstadt's 'You're No Good.'

In 1993, David Koresh and a group of Branch Davidians spent more than a month surrounded by FBI agents at their Waco, Texas, compound while a PA system blared Nancy Sinatra tunes, Tibetan chants and the sounds of sirens, seagulls, crying babies and dental drills.

The problem came when the playlist was programmed to include Alice Cooper tunes.
This was vintage, classic Alice and the sort of stuff that any kid growing up in the 1970s
would enjoy hearing again. Big mistake.

The selection of more recent Alice Cooper tunes, where much of the dreck resides, would
have done the trick.

More recently, Barbra Streisand and James Brolin tore a page out of the PSYOPS book
when they got married in 1998. The couple kept gawkers and paparazzi at bay outside
their Malibu estate by blaring White Zombie tunes.

So there is this note of caution: As anyone who has seen Jack Black in the recent film
'School of Rock' will attest, rock 'n' roll can be an empowering and unifying force.
But the tunes must be chosen wisely.

Selections like REM's 'Everybody Hurts,' B.J. Thomas' 'Hey Won't You Play Another
Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,' or Bruce Springsteen's 'Badlands' would
just be unwise.

On the other hand, the English-speaking world might shutter and recoil if Blondie's
'One Way or Another (I'm gonna get-ya, get-ya, get-ya, get-ya)' and the Police's
'Every Breath You Take (I'll be watching you),' blasted interminably.

Others tunes falling under the barrage of noise banner, could be riskier. While pieces like Philip Glass' 'Einstein on the Beach,' or Patti Smith's 'Radio Ethiopia' might drive many to near madness, 'Hey Ya' may have too much rhythmic intensity to disorient the masses.

In a compromising move to coordinate federal agencies working together, FCC exiles like Howard Stern, Janet Jackson and Florida disc jockey Bubba the Love Sponge could be
exported from the banned America airwaves and delivered directly to the offending
source at full volume.

The safest thing of all is to stick with the bland stuff. Classicists may want to venture
back to the days of Pat Benatar and Richard Marx, of Styx and Huey Lewis & the News.

For the truly awful, there are the likes of Rick Dees and his 'Disco Duck' and the
Captain & Tenille's 'Do It To Me One More Time.'

And something as innocent as a tune as 'It's a Small World After All' could easily be spun
into a nightmare for listeners forced to endure its repetitive play at full volume,
over and over and over.

With contemporary music, just about anything from today's Top 40 will do the trick,
filling even the most tenacious of souls with a lazy malaise.
It seems to have worked just fine here back home.


by Thomas Dimopoulos
originally published in The Saratogian, April 13, 2003 and April 23, 2004.

(Photograph courtesy of Shane Claiborne, pictured blowing bubbles at a young Iraqi girl's birthday party in a residential neighborhood in Baghdad on March 23, 2003.)