“My Big Fat Collateral Damage Wedding”

From The Guardian/UK, six years ago:

The attack on Qalaye Niazi was as sudden and devastating as the Pentagon intended. American special forces on the ground confirmed the target and three bombers, a B-52 and two B-1Bs, did the rest, zapping Taliban and al-Qaida leaders in their sleep as well as an ammunition dump.

The war on terrorism came no cleaner and Commander Matthew Klee, a spokesman at the US central command in Tampa, Florida, had reassuring news: “Follow-on reporting indicates that there was no collateral damage.”

Some of the things his follow-on reporters missed: bloodied children’s shoes and skirts, bloodied school books, the scalp of a woman with braided grey hair, butter toffees in red wrappers, wedding decorations.

The charred meat sticking to rubble in black lumps could have been Osama bin Laden’s henchmen but survivors said it was the remains of farmers, their wives and children, and wedding guests.

They said more than 100 civilians died at this village in eastern Afghanistan.

Tom Englehardt discusses US bombings of four wedding celebrations, possibly five:

The mainstream media tends to pick up such stories as he said/she said affairs. Of course, “she” never actually “says” anything, being dead. But you get the idea. As with the most recent Afghan wedding-party slaughter, such pieces — generally wire service stories — are to be found deep inside American newspapers where only the news jockeys are reading. In fact, your basic wedding party wipe-out report is almost certain to share at least some space in the story with a mini-round-up of other kinds of recent death and mayhem in the region in question. The language in which such stories are written is generally humdrum and, in the military mode, death is sanitized (except in rare instances like Carroll’s fine reports for the Guardian).

We Americans have only had one experience of death delivered from the air since World War II — the attacks of September 11, 2001. As no one is likely to forget, they shocked us to our core. And you know how those deaths were covered, right down to the special pages filled with bios of civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the repeated invocations of the barbarism of al-Qaeda’s killers (and barbarism it truly was).

These wedding parties, however, get no such treatment. Initially, they are automatically assumed to be malevolent — until the reports begin to filter in from the hospitals, the ruined villages, and the graveyards, and, by then, it’s usually too late for much press attention. When that does happen, their deaths are chalked up to an “errant bomb,” or that celebratory gunfire, or no explanation is even offered.

Nothing barbaric lurks here, even though we can be sure that these civilians were hardly less surprised by the arrival of the attacking planes than were the victims of 9/11. For their deaths, no word portraits are ever painted. No one in our world thinks to memorialize them, nor is there any cumulative record of their deaths. Whole extended families have been wiped out, while the dead and wounded run into the hundreds, and yet who remembers?

Here’s the truth of it: In Bush’s wars, the wedding singer dies, the bride does not get a chance to run away, and the event might be relabeled my big, fat, collateral damage wedding.