The Gulf: Children’s Lit

Pages from a primer for war

The body lying in a marsh outside the Iraqi village of Al Beida was badly decomposed, but the swollen face appeared to be that of a youth. The Iranian soldier had apparently died of a head wound suffered in the battle to keep Al Beida, now little more than a ghost town of rubble, from slipping back into Iraqi hands. He would have remained an unknown casualty of an equally unknown skirmish in the Persian Gulf war, if the Iraqi information officer who was leading foreign journalists on a tour of the front had not stopped to pick up a 6½-in. by 4½-in.. book found with the dead soldier. He then handed it to Iranian-born Journalist Helene Kafi. A name was scrawled inside the volume in boyish Persian script: Abbas Shahverdi.

The signature offered a poignant reminder that during the 42 months that Iran and Iraq have waged war for control of the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, an estimated 100,000 soldiers as young as Abbas Shahverdi have fallen in battle. With characteristic zeal, propaganda ministries in Tehran and Baghdad continued last week to churn out the usual contradictory news bulletins of air strikes, casualty figures, shellings and border skirmishes lost and won.

Iraqi aircraft attacked Iranian forces, which clung tenaciously to Majnoon oilfield. At week’s end military officials in Baghdad claimed that Iraqi forces had also destroyed four oil tankers and commercial ships near Kharg Island, the major terminal for Iran’s oil exports. Along the border near Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, troops loyal to the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini massed for yet another offensive. Iraq appeared to have lost a bit of its much vaunted technological edge with the news that one of the five Super Etendard fighter-bombers it had bought from France had been damaged in a training flight. But for the moment the mass carnage appeared to subside. Still, the end of the fratricidal bloodletting was not in sight.

The mud-spattered book that was found with the body of the soldier offered a revealing glimpse of the fanaticism that has kept the war at its fevered pitch. The 193-page battlefront primer, titled Book of Souvenirs: Propaganda for the Front and for the War is the work of the Ayatullah’s Revolutionary Guards and was intended to embolden the young volunteers in suicidal human-wave attacks. The bottom corner of each page of the book bears a printed blood-red splotch, symbolizing glorious martyrdom. There are photographs showing the Ayatullah in the midst of adoring Iranian masses, and crude political cartoons depicting a crumbling Star of David or a malevolent Menachem Begin loading a cannon with shells provided by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. A message emblazoned on the back cover reads: WHY DO WE WANT TO LIBERATE JERUSALEM? WE CAN DO IT THROUGH THE LIBERATION OF IRAQ AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE BAATH PARTY.

The theme of Holy War pervades the entire text. One prayer (or is it tactical advice?) offered on behalf of the Iranian forces begins: “At the moment when our soldiers attack the heart of the enemy, make them forget their lives, so they will no longer be attached to its illusions.” The soldiers are encouraged, instead, to look forward to paradise and the rivers flowing with milk and honey, the rewards of wine and fruits, the angels clothed in blue and the voluptuous maidens that await them there. Another prayer calls upon God to yank out the “ferocious fingernails” of the enemy and “torment them so much that they can no longer dare to attack our families, violate and invade us.” Predictably, the propaganda primer has nothing good to say about the U.S. “The real leaders of America are Zionists,” concludes one passage of invective. “We understand that Zionists are the manifest Satans of our epoch.”

Iranian soldiers are encouraged to jot down their impressions of the battlefield. On blank pages with ruled lines, sample questions are provided: “How do I feel about my slain comrades?,” “What do I feel about my family?,” “How do I feel about the spontaneous efforts of the Islamic people?” Apparently Abbas Shahverdi had little time or desire to reflect on the horrors of the desert war. Under a quotation attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that reads, “Those who ask God for nothing, anger God,” the young soldier wrote his sole entry: “a soft drink.” This was his only legacy for the thousands of zealous child volunteers shown on Iranian television last week, leaving by the truckload to join in the next offensive.