The Great War For Civilisation (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
and the Fast Train to Paradise What candles may be held to speed them all?Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyesShall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.—Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”IN THE HUSH OF THE CURTAINED front room, the two former Iraqi pilots and the man who had been second-in-command of Saddam Hussein’s air force sat in front of me in silence. The pilots spoke the heavily accented French they had learned while training on their Mirage fighter-bombers at Cherbourg. I had asked them about the USS Stark. But why now? they wanted to know. Why, sixteen years after an Iraqi Mirage had fired two missiles at the American guided-missile frigate in the Gulf—incinerating thirty-seven of its crew—did I want to know why they had almost sunk the ship? Why not discuss the growing anarchy in Baghdad under American occupation? That very morning in 2003, a car bomb had exploded outside the gates of the American headquarters at Saddam’s former Republican palace.All three men feared that I was a spy, that I was trying to identify the pilot who killed the young American seamen more than a decade and a half ago.
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