Curing amnesia

As Iraq fades from view so does our outrage at the crimes it provoked. Three monologues by Judith Thompson may cure our amnesia. Forgetting atrocities is an essential preliminary to repeating them. We meet a girl soldier (based on Lynndie England although not identified as her), who faces trial for brutalising prisoners at Abu Ghraib. At school she was a bullied bully, an opportunistic sadist who instigated attacks on others as a survival mechanism. Once she invited a girl with a false leg to a house-party where a gang removed the prosthetic limb, cut it to pieces, and jeeringly ordered the girl to crawl home.

At Abu Ghraib, this self-defence technique serves her again, and she strives to impress the male soldiers by devising pantomime humiliations. The famous pyramid of naked Iraqis she claims as her inspiration. But the cameras recorded only the mildest abuses. Trigger-happy guards would fire at prisoners’ feet and force them to eat excrement and perform homosexual couplings. It’s not clear how much fictional latitude the author has allowed herself here but the minor details ring true.

Languishing in military prison, the girl soldier becomes masochistically obsessed with online denunciations of her crimes. She sentimentalises Abu Ghraib, recalling it as a place of sexual adventure and joy, and she clings to a perverse fantasy that history will honour her as an American patriot.

The second monologue explores the back story of the weapons inspector David Kelly. The script presents him as a sophisticated, much-travelled bibliophile. His best friend in Baghdad owned an enormous bookshop, ‘the finest in the world’, Kelly says. The priceless stock should have been stored in a national library. There were ancient books written in blood, books so heavy three men couldn’t lift them, miniature books with pages as delicate as moths’ wings.