tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3841671.post-920299592003-04-05T02:24:00.000-05:002003-04-05T02:40:10.000-05:00Michael Kelly, RIP. I was saddened to learn of the death of columnist and editor Michael Kelly while reporting in Iraq. I looked forward to his columns in the WaPo--always insightful, sometimes angry (some obituaries are saying "caustic" and "savage"), but always well written. What I didn't know was that he was also a first-rate reporter. That had started to come out in his more recent columns, filed from the front lines, but I had no idea, for example, that he rose to fame as a reporter in the first Gulf War in 1991. I will soon (I hope) be reading his book on those experiences, Martyrs' Day. (The book, as of this writing, has climbed to 109 over at Amazon. It's unfortunate that many people will discover his writing now that he will produce no more.) I have also spent some time with those articles written back in 1991 for the New Republic. Some particularly stunning excerpts:<blockquote>The one-sidedness could be seen in the air. In the nighttime raids, the anti-aircraft fire would begin a few minutes before the bombers came, in scenes of incandescent hysteria and beauty, the tracer shells tracking lovely curves, and Ss and parabolas of orange-red light against the backdrop of a blacked-out city skyline. Only every fifth or sixth shell was a tracer, which created a spacing that gave the ack-ack trails a pleasingly deliberate, almost lazy look. You could see the tracers hit their apogee and then explode in delicate bright-white starbursts, like the better sort of fireworks. You could hear the defense too, in a big sweeping wash of noise, the sharp staccato bursts of the lighter guns punctuated by the thuds of the big ones. ("Blitzed," TNR, February 11, 1991) Captain Douglas Morrison, 31, of Westmoreland, New York, headquarters troop commander of 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 1st Division, is the ideal face of the new American Army. He is handsome, tall and fit, and trim of line from his Kevlar helmet to his LPCs (leather personnel carriers, or combat boots). He is the voice of the new American Army too, a crisp, assured mix of casual toughness, techno-idolatrous jargon, and nonsensical euphemisms -- the voice of delivery systems and collateral damage and kicking ass. It is Tom Clancy's voice, and the voice of the military briefers in Riyadh and Washington. ("Highway to Hell," TNR, April 1, 1991) Ten days after what George Bush termed a cessation of hostilities, this road presented a perfectly clear picture of the nature of those hostilities. It was untouched except by scavengers. Bedouins had siphoned the gas tanks, and American soldiers were still touring through the carnage in search of souvenirs. A pack of lean and sharp-fanged wild dogs, white and yellow curs, swarmed and snarled around the corpse of one soldier. They had eaten most of his flesh. The ribs gleamed bare and white. Because, I suppose, the skin had gotten so tough and leathery from ten days in the sun, the dogs had eaten the legs from the inside out, and the epidermis lay in collapsed and hairy folds, like leg-shaped blankets, with feet attached. The beasts skirted the stomach, which lay to one side of the ribs, a black and yellow balloon. A few miles up the road, a small flock of great raptors wheeled over another body. The dogs had been there first, and little remained except the head. The birds were working on the more vulnerable parts of that. The dead man's face was darkly yellow-green, except where his eyeballs had been; there, the sockets glistened red and wet. ("Highway to Hell," TNR, April 1, 1991) In the old bucolic days the concrete and corrugated tin barns held beasts. Now they hold humans treated like beasts. Each building has been divided into pens, with sheets of tin tied together with twine. The pens fill the barns and the people fill the pens. I counted twenty-three in one ten-by twenty-foot square. The refugees sleep in the pens, on worn and dirty blankets on the concrete floor; the children play in them; the women cook in them, on crude kerosene stoves that are tipsy on the uneven floor. The sick lie still, staring or sleeping, and the others fit themselves around them, in a squalid, squirming zigzag. Rain leaks through the roof and through the windows and doors that are covered only with plastic sheets. The air is fetid and close, rich with the stink of sweat and kerosene and the shit that is everywhere, and that peculiar smell of apple-sweet rottenness that emanates from the lungs and pores of the gravely ill. ("The Other Hell," TNR, May 13, 1991)</blockquote>The world has lost a fine, fine reporter, whose gifts for describing the reality of war--in all its bloodiness, all its devastation, all its strange, unsettling beauty--were truly great. And because of his loss, the story of this current war will never be complete.Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09469631120776212711noreply@blogger.com