19 Aug Iran – You, too, can be a Revolutionary Guardsman

If your fashion sense leans toward revolutionary-chic, forget about berets and retro Che Guevara T-shirts. Go to the Islamic Republic, and you can return home outfitted as a fully-fledged state-sponsored terrorist.

When you join Iran’s fighting forces nobody issues you a uniform. They send you to a tailor to be fitted for one, which makes Iranian soldiers a lot spiffier in the personal appearance department than the baggy fatigues our guys wear.

The tailors have a full line of insignia to complete the look and, like merchants all over the Middle East, aren’t squeamish about whom they sell to. Which means you can walk into a shop as a patriotic American and come out a full colonel in the Iranian air force. Or, like I did, sporting a black Revolutionary Guard shoulder patch

resplendent in gold thread showing a hand clutching an automatic rifle, and a globe in the background. Or, maybe, it’s a bomb. In any event, it has what looks like a lit fuse sticking out from where Norway should be. There were Hamas shoulder patches as well, but I didn’t spring for one.

In what, if the Tehran Times wasn’t a serious, government-censored newspaper, would strike most Americans as a grade school joke, the Revolutionary Guard is headed by a gentleman named Salami

who’s persuaded himself that COVID 19 is a biological weapon unleashed by Americans.

Despite the easy availability of military accouterments, I find it very difficult to believe that anybody in the entire country has any stomach for war with America, or any other place for that matter. In the been-there-done-that department, Iran is top of the line. Back in the Eighties . . . almost the whole of the Eighties . . . it got into a dispute with Iraq and re-fought World War I. Trenches. Machine guns. Gas. Shells. Barbed wire. And a lot of Iranians died. Two-hundred-thousand. Six-hundred-thousand. Eight-hundred-thousand, you can take your choice because nobody believes the official stats.

Unlike the men whose names are chiseled beneath the words, “We shall never forget,” on obelisks and into the bases of statues in Britain and America, these dead really are hard to forget. Their faces are on photographs hanging, two at a time, every twenty meters or so along the center strips of highways as you drive into town. Every town, and back out the other side. Kilometers of young men. Miles of young men leading into Tehran and Qom and Kashan and Isfahan and Yazd and Shiraz and every little village and berg in between. And into the countryside beyond. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

Their pictures hang from bridges. They’re on lampposts. On the sides of buildings. Posted along lonely desert roads

and beside marginal farmland.

They sway from banners in busy markets

and trail off into the distance

beside streets in small towns

As with people in photographs everywhere, you feel like you can look them in the eye, that you can sense who they were and who they could have become. Skinny, scared boys. Smirking scoundrels. Athletes. Sad-sacks. Somebody’s big brother. Some girl’s beloved.

You make up stories in your mind. That one was proud to serve. Or a scholar. Or wishing he were home. Or at school. Or back in his uncle’s shop, or just hanging out on a street corner. All . . . because you know what trench warfare is like, because you know what machine guns and gas and shells and barbed wire do to human flesh . . . destined for horrible, filthy deaths. The very fact that you’re looking at their pictures tells you all you need to know, all you want to know, about what became of them.

I don’t have any better idea than any other ordinary American what’s really going on between our governments, or what it will lead to, but Iranians are people who, in a different world would be our closest friends. They are funny and spontaneous and laughing and much more like us than anybody else I know about in the Middle East. More so than many Europeans, for that matter, but I’m not sanguine about what’s going to happen. Not that I think we’ll get into a shooting war with them, I just can’t see how we can ever get out of each other’s faces. And that’s a tragedy for the living.