Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (20 page)

‘Why?’ the father said, ‘Why my son? He was so good, he helped us all.’

As a journalist, there is not much more you can do but write up such things. In cases like this, where corruption sinks so deep you can’t see its end, you can hardly hope for an arrest or a review. Or
even an interview. But everyone in that close room was affected and not just by the loss of their loved one. They had seen a destruction of trust, something that can never be truly regained. And it was an abuse of power that was certainly not confined to the Philippines.

Every year, Brazilian police are reported to be responsible for at least 2,000 deaths nationwide – an average of five people a day.
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The victims are often recorded as having been ‘killed while resisting arrest’. And then you read that one policeman killed sixty-two people and registered each of their deaths as such, and it all becomes a black joke, not even an excuse.
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Elsewhere it is just as bad. In India, reported incidents of police firing on civilians have almost doubled in the last decade.
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Many are called ‘encounter killings’, confrontations used to justify extra-judicial murders – implicitly seen as an acceptable response to crime or terrorism.

In Jamaica it is said that one of every two police officers who spends twenty-five years on active duty will kill in the line of duty.
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The worrying thing is that such brutal police tactics are often seen as the only way to clean up the streets. The idea of a noble cop taking the law into his own hands is the stuff of countless Hollywood movies. But the abuse of power, the arbitrary use of capital punishment, the absence of a fair trial and the risk the police might accidentally kill an innocent – all of these mean that the moment a cop purposefully takes a life he ceases to be a policeman and becomes a killer. And when your police are killers, there’s really not much room for hope.

8. THE MILITARY

The tragedies of war – Iraq – travelling to the bloody circus in 2004 – visiting the Tree of Knowledge – getting shot at – madness and violence unfurling – Israel’s violent past reflected in guns – tea with an unusual sniper – a visit to a Jewish anti-terror training camp – Palestine’s tragedy – a wounded boy, a grieving father – Liberia’s past visited – child soldiers and adult tales

Militaries and guns are synonymous; an army that is not armed cannot really be called as such. It’s no surprise there are 200 million guns in the hands of armed forces around the world: about one in five of all guns. So you can’t write a book about firearms without understanding the gun’s role in war and its military use – for good or bad – in defending a nation’s sovereignty. After all, there are only fifteen countries in the world that do not have a military, and six countries that have militaries but no standing army.
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In the remaining countries, the 200 million weapons are unevenly distributed: the armies of just two states, China and Russia, have almost 25 per cent of them. And they are certainly not all in use. Around 76 million guns in the hands of armed forces lie idle; they are deemed ‘surplus’ – stockpiles make up about 38 per cent of all military small arms.
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But when war does break out, it is clear that there are enough guns out there to cause untold carnage. Since the end of the Second World War there have been over 2,100 conflicts in more than 150
locations.
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In 1998 a charity called Project Ploughshares said that in over ‘three dozen current wars, probably 90 per cent of killings are by small arms . . . in the past decade alone they have caused more than 3 million deaths’.
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This is a bold statement and one that led some to say that about 300,000 people were dying from guns fired in conflicts every year.

But charities have reasons to sound the death knell a little too loudly, and you can’t believe every fact you are told, not least because, in this case, the Geneva Declaration, a diplomatic initiative endorsed by 100 countries, has a much lower figure for those killed by all weapons of violence – bombs and guns included. It estimates that, of over half a million people killed globally by armed violence every year, only 10 per cent of violent deaths, about 55,000, happen in conflict or a terrorist attack. An even lower number, then, would have been killed specifically by guns.
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Of course, these statistics don’t include the numbers of those injured by guns in wars. This should concern us because, as I had seen in South Africa, it is clear that there have been marked improvements in trauma surgery. So the death toll today in some wars might be lower than it would have been years ago, but this does not mean that wars are getting less violent. We are just better at fixing people.

What we are pretty clear about, though, is that the role of the gun differs markedly from war to war. The AK47’s popularity in the Republic of Congo meant over 93 per cent of deaths were from gunshots there.
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We know thousands of civilians were killed by guns in Iraq – all too often the result of kidnappings and assassinations. But in Uganda, the conflict waged by the Lords Resistance Army – a militant cult led by Joseph Kony, which seeks to establish a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments – shows that knives and clubs are also frequently used to murder and terrorise.

The widespread military use of explosive weapons has also had an impact. In Cambodia in the mid 1990s and in Thailand in 1980 more civilians were killed by mines than by guns. And, at the other end of the spectrum, the sheer quantity of air-dropped bombs in Lebanon in 2006 meant that less than 1 per cent of people were killed in that conflict from gunshots.
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In general, though, it’s
estimated that guns account for between 60 and 90 per cent of all direct casualties in war – a heavy toll however you look at it.

The harm guns cause has also changed over time. In the American Civil War, guns accounted for about 75 per cent of combat casualties. By the Second World War only about 18 per cent of military casualties had been shot. This shift is down to a few things. The nature of warfare has changed over time: explosive weapons are much more likely to be used now than they once were, and this pushes down the proportion of those injured by gunshot. Soldiers are also now much better protected: improvements in bulletproof vests, armoured personnel carriers and helmets mean getting shot is now less likely to kill you. And soldiers are increasingly taking on targets from miles away – as the use of drones makes clear – further reducing their chances of being caught in the crossfire.

If a soldier from a relatively developed military force is unlucky enough to be shot, the swiftness of getting treatment to them has massively improved their chances of getting off the field of battle alive. Gunshot lethality prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom was about 33 per cent. Now, according to US military data, it’s less than 5 per cent. The only thing that has not changed over time is the lethality of headshots.
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The impact of guns in war also changes during the course of each conflict, and not only because surgeons are getting better at what they do. At the start of the Russian involvement in Afghanistan in 1980 about two-thirds of conflict casualties were from gunfire. By the end of the decade the Russians had learned the hard way about the skilled marksmanship of the mujahedeen, and so they kept their heads down. By 1990 only 28 per cent were from gunshots.

All of this shows one thing: that the role of the gun in soldiers’ lives has changed as much as the nature of war itself. As part of my work, I have walked beside troops around the world and I have seen that each military deployment is unique. From filming the menacing metal bristle of the borders of South and North Korea to watching British squaddies walk in stern silence in the soft fields of Kosovo, I have just one simple observation: for most soldiers, in peacetime the gun is just a thing, something they carry with them, something
they oil and clean, eat with, shit with, even sleep with, not something that they really talk about, unless they lose it, or a screaming sergeant makes them run with it over their heads for an hour. But in war the relationship between the soldier and the gun changes completely. This is why, in order to understand how the world of guns impacts militaries, you have to travel to war itself.

April 2004 – I was in Basra, working for the BBC with my reporter, Sam Poling, one of those journalists who chases at stories with a ferocity that you can only admire. She and I were embedded with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a Scottish regiment that had fought in Korea and in Aden, in the Boer War and in the fields of Flanders, and now it was raising its colours here in southern Iraq.

We had just seen the Tree of Knowledge – a broken tree in a broken land, neglected and unloved, but the infamous tree all the same. It stood in the centre of Al-Qurnah, a small, windswept town about 70 kilometres north-west of Basra. This jujube tree was near the confluence point of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – where they joined to form the Shatt al-Arab. It was the place where Iraqis claimed Eve had plucked that forbidden apple and with her first bite allowed knowledge to ruin paradise.

On the day we went there the tree stood dying, plastic bags eddying around it, and boys with snot on their faces and holes in their trousers kicked the dust at its roots. But they only did this during the day, because no one walked the streets here at night, except killers. After all, this was Iraq, and this was war.

We turned and began the long drive back to the British army base in silence, as no one likes to see paradise lost.

Then came the gunshot: a stark, blue staccato snap and a screech of brakes and a tumbling out of the Land Rover. Out we ran, onto the sandy banks of the road, over the pebbles and plastic that littered the sides of the highway, and, breathless, we landed in a gully.

‘They shot at us! They fucking shot at us!’ screamed one of the
British soldiers. They tensed and raised their rifles, but the car was already speeding away.

We had been due to return to Britain that day, but the road to the airport was too dangerous. The army had already lost a few soldiers on the way to that baked tarmac strip, and with the threat as high as it was, the colonel said we would just have to wait. Something bitter, disconcerting and violent was happening.

On the flight coming in I had been strapped into a stand-up harness at the front of a Hercules troop carrier. We were flying down low straight from Cyprus, and the silver line of the Qamat Ali canal glinted beneath us in the night; on either side stretched the silhouette of ancient desert lands. We were flying blacked out, a dark speck in a dark sky, but then a red button flared upon the pilot’s dashboard, and the crackle of a command came into the headset.

‘Incoming. Release one. Release two.’ A ground-to-air missile was fast approaching, and the pilot fired off decoy flares, lights spinning behind us into the pitch-black. Our plane tilted sharp to the right, and the threat passed as fast as it had come. But it was clear we had begun our descent into something.

The ragheads were fuckin’ losing it, the soldiers had said to us later, and with swagger. There was excitement in their voices at the prospect of having a decent ‘contact’ to tell their mates about back home, but then you saw the youth in their eyes. They yearned for what they should have feared.

If I was honest, I too was glad we had been shot at in such a neat little way, because journalists can’t go to a war zone and not wish to see a gun in action, no matter how much they wrap it in platitudes. That’s why you are there: not to film soldiers grumbling about their fat-saturated dinners or how much they miss their mothers, but to film the coursing adrenaline rush of wide-eyed terror and the sharp crack of a gun’s retort.

This is why the Iraq War, above all the others, defines my view of the military use of the gun. I had been to many conflict zones – Somalia, Pakistan, Colombia, Nagorno-Karabakh – places marked as much by war as peace. But Iraq was different. The war there, perhaps because tensions were so high and because I was
unarmed and yet everywhere surrounded by guns, was compelling and vivid and unlike anything I had felt before. Guns here defined life; they were the only things that mattered.

The Americans had begun the now infamous battle of Fallujah on the day we landed: a huge assault to clear a city far to the northwest of us. Their targets were those responsible for the gruesome killing of four US Blackwater military contractors. Stumps of burned American flesh had been dragged through the streets, captured on a thousand broadcasts. And the US, as the US does best, retaliated with heavy force.

On the night of 4 April 2004, forces under Lieutenant-General James T. Conway launched a major assault to ‘re-establish security in Fallujah’, circling it with 2,000 troops. The subsequent violence had shaken Iraq, sending ripples through the country as far south as Basra.

So what started as an ordinary media embed with a British infantry regiment changed into something much more dangerous, as a slow unfurling of anger and blood-revenge gripped the city. We had had bricks thrown at us by baying mobs, seen army Land Rovers transformed into black, burned-out skeletons on the lawless roads. Sam had even been attacked by one of the Iraqi soldiers the British were training. And now, in a ditch beside a village we had never heard of, we were being shot at.