PLEASE DON'T LET HIS FAMILY WATCH

Just watched the horrific video of Nick Berg being executed by beheading. You can find it here at Salon (subscription required or you can watch a commercial for a free day's access).

The video begins with Berg dressed in an American-like orange prison jumpsuit, sitting in a chair, then switches to him bound hands and feet, sitting on the floor (crude edit between shots). Five terrorists stand behind him, with the center man reading a long diatribe in Arabic. About 4:30 into the video the horror begins. Though the video is fuzzy at this point, you can clearly see Nick knocked to his side on the floor, as one of the men takes a large knife and seems to strike him in the back of the neck with it. There is a lot of screaming, I can't tell if it's Nick or for how long, because some of the screaming is obviously the terrorists chanting at the top of their lungs. The really awful thing that I hadn't heard anyone describe is that it seems to take a minute for them to saw completely around his head before it is severed and held up for display in a grisly John-the-Baptist-Herod-and-Salome kind of thing. Because you can't see if Nick's eyes are open you are not sure if he is unconscious or dead after the first blow or if he endured some of that sawing before he mercifully passed away.

[A couple of odd notes struck me. The first blood-curdling screams come before they knock Nick to the floor, while he's still sitting there stolidly. But the scream sounds identical to the ones we hear as they begin to behead him. So did he ever scream at all, or is there some other explanation? There's a crude edit just before they knock him to the floor. What was the purpose for that? And when the man with the knife holds Berg's head up for the camera, not a solitary drop of blood drips from it...and he holds it up for some time.]

This reminds me of a scene in James Michener's Caravans, which I read many years ago and have since reread over the years about five times. It's a novel about post-WWII Afghanistan and has been influential in my thinking about that country and region ever since. In the scene to which I refer, an Afghan who fancies that he has been dishonored or robbed or something (I don't remember the offense) takes an ancient bayonet and saws his victim's head off in a public meeting spot until the head is severed. The people of the town accepted this as a just resolution to the conflict between the two men; in fact, the murderer waltzed off with his victim's possessions, which included the man's young male lover.

The reactions of the young American foreign service official watching as Michener describes it is pretty much what I felt -- horrified revulsion; realization that this is a region of the world with a totally different cultural context from ours and very different mores; and a feeling of "what in the world are we doing here?" I don't know if I'm the only one, but I didn't get angry or furious so much as suffering a feeling of profound despair.

I'll be praying for Nick Berg's family...and my prayers will include my hope that his family never sees his horrific end.