Free Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perisic Page B

“You can do it. You’ll be great.”
    She hugged me. Tight, like I was a traveler returned from a distant journey. Happy that I was back.

       From: Boris < [email protected] >
To: Toni < [email protected] >
       Terrific, terrific, terrific! The Tomahawk missile introduced during the First Gulf War is still a terrific miracle of technology that flies, flies, flies just below the speed of sound, follows the terrain and hits a programmed target with a 450kg warhead up to 1,600km away. How beautiful it is to write that? Nothing hurts! The US Navy has around 1,000 Tomahawks and each one of them costs $600,000, so I can tell you, it’s simple: you’ve gotta have a good fucking reason to want to hit someone with it, I mean, to fire at someone with a thingo worth $600,000, you have to have a damn good financial reason, otherwise it’s not worth it, cuz. It’s no good if a missile’s worth more than what it hits. I’ve realized that’s the main problem with American involvement around the world. You can’t target every idiot. You can only fight wars where it’s worth it. In Africa, for example, it really doesn’t make financial sense. Whatever you hit is cheap. The damage in no way justifies the costof the missile. That’s the problem with wars in the Third World—low real-estate prices. They’d say you’re producing losses.
       That’s right, losses. Look how far it’s gone. The Africans ought to develop a bit, they have to be given a boost, then they can be targeted. But it’s pointless the way things are at the moment. There’s no sense to it, and sense is the most important thing.
When the price of Tomahawks comes down the world will change. When they come up with advanced weaponry at an acceptable price, the world will be different. Then the Yanks will also be able to intervene where there’s no money. But the question is when that’s going to happen. I think advanced weaponry will stay expensive. Purely so that not everyone blasts away at everyone else. If some down-and-out guy got hold of a Tomahawk, everything would be up shit creek. At least the rich go round their properties and do a cost-benefit analysis first. But if a poor man has weapons—I mean weapons and nothing else—uh-oh! It really makes you want to fire on them yourself to show you have a weapon as well. You simply can’t resist, you have to fire a bit. That’s the problem with the wars of the poor. You decide what you’re going to do with this, but I have to philosophize a bit; I’ve got nothing else to do here.
       The Serbs, for example, the losers, were warring for all of the ‘90s, but they don’t have a fiscal plan. They fight and fight and get more and more fucked up. That can’t happen to the advanced nations. Our Serbian bros blam away their resources, run up huge losses, and then they don’t know what to do. They seize half of Bosnia and then sit there doing nothing.
       You know, all that stuff ruins people mentally as well. After the war and all that wretched stress a man wants to have a bit of a rest. And not, fucking hell, drudge away to make up for the damage. Who’ll force a warrior to work? That’s an old Indian question. Youcan’t stick him in a reservation to sow corn. Geronimo and his braves would rot there—as soon as it was time for a scrap they’d have to go to the shrink. As long as the shit is going on, as long as you’re taking rock after rock, hill after hill, ditch after ditch, thicket after thicket, as long as you’re pushing back the borders, it all looks like you’re going somewhere, like things are evolving, like there’s some perspective.
That’s a serious problem for us pauper warriors! We have no idea what to do when the war is over. Be a philosopher? A priest? Who? What?
    “You called?” I said to Markatović in place of a greeting.
    “Have you got time for coffee? It’s important.”
    Why couldn’t he invite me out for a beer like normal people do? Why were we constantly