The media and pop culture have given us an idea of what death is
like. When it's the bad guys they jerk from side to side like each
bullet is pushing them backwards another inch and then slump onto the
ground as they fling their gun to the side. The good guys stay alive
just long enough to say a final goodbye. In a video game, legs and
arms go sprawling the instant death strikes with a lot of tumbling of
the body for good measure. In dramas the sick relative dies surrounded
by loving family members and with their hand being held by someone
tearfully sitting in a chair.
The first time I saw someone die wasn't like any of that. I was
watching Frontline, the story they covered being too controversial
for the mainstream media. It was a metareport about the change in the
way war reporting has been done in our War on Terror compared to
previous wars. The first person I saw die was an Iraqi fighting to
kill American soldiers.
He was a young man with thick black hair. He was wearing a beat up
t-shirt, blue jeans and a pair of sandals and would have passed as a
respectably dressed college student in the streets of any city. There
was no keffiyeh or ghutra on his head nor was he wearing long white
robes like the stereotypes would have you believe. He was in his
early twenties; old enough to know that he was not invincible. All of
this I saw on the screen as he ran out of a doorway on the opposite
side of the street, RPG bouncing on his shoulder. The camera shook
as it was rearranged to get a better view out of the darkened building
where the reporter was hiding. The man knelt down in the middle of the
street and began to aim the rocket. Small puffs of dust erupted out of
the street as a few, surprisingly few, metal slugs pounded their way
through flesh into the ground. Without a sound, the weapon slid off his
shoulder unfired and he slowly leaned backwards until he was laying on
the street.
People don't flail when they die.