Valkyries of War

It was dusk, of course. Through the open gun port of the helicopter, past the crewman, and the heavy machine gun and its muzzle, I could see the open water beneath us, the line of the mangrove swamps to the left and the red and green tracer fire that pulsed up in long, lazy bursts from the jungle and then fell back into the grey foliage. We had taken off from a British army base, a strip of bright red mud carved from among the trees, a few minutes earlier. Three helicopters in formation flying low across the light swell of the waves out of the sunset towards a headland. Through the headset I listened to the captain. He spoke to the other pilots for a few minutes then asked: 'Ready chaps? Ready?' And then the crews of all the aircraft starting humming into their intercoms. And what were they humming? 'The Ride of the Valkyries', of course. Ironically, naturally. Referentially, without doubt. Laughing as they did it. But the Wagner melody made famous by the classic scene in Apocalypse Now nonetheless. Ridiculous, I thought.


Music, I thought briefly at the time before the idea got overtaken by the general chaos of life in sub-Saharan Africa, does not disappear in times of crisis. In fact, music, if anyone actually stopped for a moment to listen, is everywhere in a war, amplified as if to contest with, accentuate or drown out the cacophony of sound that is a conflict.



So when, a year after my trip to Sierra Leone, I saw the Afghan fighters coming down from the Tora Bora mountains after a long day battling the remnants of al-Qaeda, I was not surprised to see them tune in the few scratchy short-wave radios they shared to listen, with disappointment if all they could find were the drums and flutes of local traditional music; with joy if they found Bollywood film soundtracks. The American soldiers in the country at the time favoured, officially, maudlin country and western - with lyrics such as 'I may not be a political man, I'm not sure if I can tell Iraq from Iran' - but, unofficially, they preferred Rock with a capital R if white, R&B if they were black.

Iraq in August 2004 was not a particularly pleasant place to be. Apart from the fact that it was extremely hot, it was the time when, for the first time, foreigners had started to become genuine targets of kidnapping. I spent several days in Najaf during some heavy fighting there and then had to return to Baghdad along a road on which many people had been kidnapped. I hid under a blanket on the back seats and tried to distract myself. Soothing music - random bits of chill out, lounge, Bach, remixed lounge-Bach - did not work, nor did those odd bits of house pirated from friends' computers at a party. I moved steadily up the register and back in time - through the Dead 60s, White Stripes, Kings of Leon - finally ending up among early recordings of the Damned in 1978. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, my shuffle spat out Guns'N'Roses. Which did not last long. Mainly because the thought of having to explain that I had been kidnapped while listening to 'Sweet Child o' Mine' was too ignominious to contemplate. I put the music away and sweated in silence instead.



A friend of mine, a Briton working in Kabul for an aid agency, had several score CDs seized by the Taliban authorities. They thought the silver discs were videos and thus highly illegal. In order to prove they were not, and to reclaim his treasured collection, he went before a jirga, a traditional Afghan gathering of notables. These included several of the most senior religious scholars in the country and two ministers. My friend offered the most venerable greybeard there his portable CD player and watched as, having arranged the headphones around his turban, the old man reached into the stack of discs and pulled out The Greatest Punk Album in the World Ever Vol 1. My friend watched in horror as the first bars of 'God Save the Queen' blasted the eardrums of the Afghan equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The cleric rapidly detached the headphones. 'It is not a video,' he pronounced. 'But it is not music either.'

After all, everybody employs music in different ways and there had been an honesty in the ridiculous humming of the 'Ride of the Valkyries' by the navy pilots that perhaps I could have learnt from. There was not much of a gap between that and listening to the Doors in Tikrit or the glacial trip hop of Red Snapper in Kandahar last month (very, very depressing, I can tell you), or the American or Estonians listening to their tunes in their camps. Everyone uses music to construct a soundtrack to their lives, to make sense of events, to help situate themselves and their emotions. And there was another lesson that I felt I would do well to take on board. When I came back from one hellish trip to the Gaza Strip during which I had seen six teenagers shot a few yards from me, I went pretty much straight to the Brixton Academy to hear one of the last gigs of the late, great Joe Strummer. When I heard the opening chords of one song, I knew it summed up much of what I had been feeling. 'I've just got back and I wish I never leave now,' ran the passionate 'Safe European Home'. At least I've got one. There are many who don't.


by war correspondent Jason Burke

source: The Observer