By the waters of Babylon

By the waters of Babylon is a recurring chapter heading that places the aftermath of war in a landscape where devastation can begin to look ancient. Under this expression, two postwar scenes—one dated March 1991 and another April 2003—turn from the immediate human consequences of destruction to the slow transformations of ruins, scavenging, and memory. The repeated heading links those scenes without erasing their differences: one surveys a plant after a missile strike; the other follows a young marine beside ruins and ends on the fallen image of a country’s late leader.

Recurring Heading and Historical Distance

The expression appears above both scenes, while the dates set them more than a decade apart. In March 1991, the war has been over for three weeks, but reconstruction is still only a future possibility. The plant remains much as it was twenty-four hours after the missiles struck. In April 2003, the opening again places the reader three weeks after a war has ended. This deliberate recurrence gives the passages a shared postwar frame: the cessation of fighting does not restore ordinary life, and the landscape remains marked by what happened before recovery can begin.

The heading’s reference to Babylon gains force from the 1991 passage’s own comparison. Dust, sun, and wind soften the exposed concrete until the ruins are difficult to distinguish from the baked earth; a traveller in the antique land might mistake them for remains as old as those of the great city of Babylon, only a few miles away. The comparison makes time itself part of the scene. A plant destroyed only weeks earlier seems to have crossed, through weathering and distance, into an almost archaeological past. Yet the account preserves the material evidence of its recent violence: cracked concrete, wrecked machinery, and bodies that have not all been reached.

The expression therefore frames more than a physical resemblance between new ruins and old ones. It holds together the recent war and a landscape already associated with antiquity, making the present destruction look as though it could be absorbed into a much longer history. The scenes do not present that absorption as recovery. In the 1991 account, the machinery remains unrecognizable and reconstruction has not begun; what changes is the appearance of the ruins and the possibility of approaching them.

The Plant After the Missile Strike

The 1991 passage establishes the aftermath through a sequence of practical facts. Survivors have been hospitalized, and the accessible dead have been removed. The inaccessible dead remain, and the smell rising from them becomes intolerable. It does not last: approaching summer heat accelerates decay, while flies and small rodents act as nature’s cleansers. This progression does not soften the account’s recognition of death. Instead, it shows how the passage of time alters what people can bear and what the landscape does in the absence of organized recovery.

The ruins change in appearance as well as smell. Dust settles; sun and wind airbrush the rawness of cracked concrete until it nearly merges with the surrounding baked earth. The phrase-like movement from exposed damage toward visual blending is unsettling because the landscape seems to erase the distinction between a wrecked industrial site and its surroundings. The passage’s comparison with Babylon follows from that transformation: the plant’s destruction is recent, but its weathered surface makes it appear to belong to an older world.

Only when the smells have become bearable do some local residents make exploratory forays. The dogs picking through the ruins show no sign of becoming even mangier, a grimly ordinary detail that measures the passage of time without suggesting that the danger or devastation has ended. The new scavengers encounter wreckage so extensive that even the most technically minded cannot determine what the machinery was for. They take whatever can be sold, traded, or adapted for domestic use, then leave. The plant that once had a function is now legible chiefly as a source of materials; its machinery has become both unusable evidence of destruction and potential household resource.

The 2003 Scene and the Fallen Statue

The April 2003 scene shifts from a broad account of a ruined plant to the limited, immediate attention of Tod Lessing, a young marine on his first spell of active service. Sitting on rubble, he lights a cigarette to mask the faint smell of decay. He belongs to a unit searching for weapons of mass destruction, a task in which he personally has little interest. Experience has quickly taught him to focus instead on weapons of personal destruction: those that could pose an immediate danger to him and his comrades. The contrast narrows the scale of the scene from a large official search to a soldier’s practical concern for survival.

Tod takes the chance for rest and recreation while men in white suits work, without success so far, in a relatively undamaged building a couple of hundred yards away. His brief respite remains part of the military operation: after calling that he will do his best, he grins and heads back toward the searchers, who seem to have concluded that their work there is fruitless. The sequence holds together exhaustion, duty, and uncertainty without turning the search into a discovery. The people in protective suits continue their work; Tod’s immediate attention is elsewhere; no successful result is reported.

As the small convoy drives away, it passes a shattered statue of the country’s late leader. Its head is dented and its nose knocked off, though its features remain recognizable. The eyes that once looked down upon the people with menacing benevolence now stare sightlessly from ground level across the ruins and into the desert. The closing image reverses the statue’s former position: a figure made to look down over the population has been brought low, and its surviving gaze reaches no farther than the barren landscape. The final description of sands stretching away makes the image expansive but not restorative. In the two scenes joined by the recurring expression, war’s aftermath is neither neatly concluded nor repaired: the plant’s function disappears beneath wreckage and scavenged parts, while the leader’s damaged image remains as a relic of authority amid the desert.