something you said
triggered the memory
i'm gonna get a drink and i'll be right back
So I was in college. CNN was pretty new, and it always felt to me like they didn't really know what to do with it. There were news shows, sure, but then they would repeat and it seemed like they were pretty thin on news and maybe they even showed infomercials ( I can't quite remember). Anyway, I was super intrigued by the idea of a cable channel which was all news, all the time.
I wasn't getting all my news from CNN. I checked, just now, and Democracy Now! wasn't around yet, but I did listen to news on my affiliate Pacifica station. I was against it, the war. It seemed ginned up. Saddam had told April Glaspie all about the slant drilling and whatnot. She hadn't indicated that it was a problem. She pretty much said: yeah, fine, whatever. Now that he was getting a little uncooperative, wanted to change from dollars to euros....
I didn't remember seeing the Vietnam War on the news when I was a kid, maybe I did. I do remember seeing the body bags come home from Jonestown. It took a while. I found that pretty traumatizing and I can still see the body bags in my mind. I was some where around six or seven for that. I've since seen additional footage and re-enactments and still photograhs, but it's all coded together and I don't remember which is authentic to my original experience and which was added later-- except that I know the seemingly endless parade of body bags was original.
Anyway. The Gulf War (the first one) seemed to give CNN a purpose. They could endlessly go to correspondents on rooftops. Correspondents in their rooms with the walls shaking. But, even more essential, addictive in a cannot look away sort of psychosis-- smart bombs. Low resolution monochromatic video game nightmare-scape. So "smart" that we seemed to be constantly targeting things which turned out to be schools. Nursery schools. Hospitals, maybe. Well, you see, those are legitimate targets-- they are just using those children as human shields.
I felt like I was in a constant state of agitation. I couldn't stop feeling like I was bombing the children and I wanted it to stop. I couldn't make it stop. But it turned out those weren't the images that were going to stick with me forever, those have mostly faded.
One night i was up late, I couldn't sleep. The Iraqis were retreating. They had been told that they had to surrender. They were retreating. And I don't know exactly what they did. What we did, I mean. I can only assume that we bombed them. But it looked mare like fire.
There was what seemed to me to be an endless line of vehicles. I think they were trucks or busses or personnel carriers of some sort but in the image in my mind, the intrusive image, they have been altered to bright orange school busses. And in the busses. Charred black bodies. Crispy and ghoulish. Almost a solid mass of them twined together into an allegorical horror of smiling skeletal remains with the camera panning-- like, endlessly.
I never found any other human being who admitted to seeing this image. I looked for the footage to repeat, like everything always did. It made me question my sanity. But I later confirmed that the retreating Iraqis had been attacked. CNN never showed it again.
