From The New York Times

Newstrader, Donnerstag, 07. August 2003, 19:36 (vor 7783 Tagen) @ Newstrader

Sweltering soldiers have tried dispelling the
myths about their gear by letting Iraqis touch
their vests and try on their sunglasses, but some
legends will not die.

"I let a kid put on my sunglasses, and he was
still convinced they had X-ray vision," said Sgt.
Stephen Roach, a soldier from Lufkin, Tex. "He
kept saying to me, `Turn it on, turn it on.´ "

When they are not peering through women´s clothes,
the male soldiers are said to be groping
underneath the clothes during searches at
checkpoints, supposedly provoking some of the
attacks on soldiers. (Never mind the absence of
evidence for this theory.)

Other versions of the ugly-American stories have
the soldiers drinking beer (or sometimes Kool-Aid
laced with alcohol) inside their tanks near
mosques. They have been accused in the Arab press
of using pages from the Koran for toilet paper and
of giving children candy packets containing
pornography.

The rumors became so numerous that Al Sabah, a new
daily paper run by Iraqis with financial backing
from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the
American-run administrative organization, printed
a supplement debunking them. "It will take awhile
for people to reject the conspiracy theories,"
said its editor, Ismael Zayer. "Under Saddam,
people had to depend on rumor because they could
not trust the media."

Some of the stories seem intended to encourage the
fighters who have been attacking Americans. G.I.´s
are said to be so demoralized that 30 percent of
them have already abandoned their posts and paid
$600 apiece to escape by an underground railroad
to Turkey or Syria.

Others have supposedly converted to Islam and fled
to marry women in Saudi Arabia. There are also
rumors that Americans are hiding their casualties
by dumping large numbers of soldiers´ bodies each
night into the Tigris River.

Frustration seems to feed many of the rumors. Why
would the builders of smart bombs and X-ray
sunglasses take longer to restore power than Mr.
Hussein did after the 1991 Persian Gulf war? The
Americans must be withholding electricity as
revenge for the attacks on soldiers. People swear
there have been Army vehicles driving around with
signs announcing that power will be restored when
the attacks stop.

For all the frustration, there remains some
admiration for the occupiers, as seen in a popular
fashion accessory on teenagers like Zahra Thaer,
13. She was walking down a sidewalk in Baghdad
wearing a new pair of wraparound sunglasses.

"These are the latest style," she said, explaining
that she had been lucky to get one of the last
pairs left in the store.

Did she believe the soldiers´ glasses gave them
X-ray vision?

"I am not so sure about their sunglasses," she
said. "But I know about the helmet. Inside each
helmet is a map showing the soldier the location
of every house in Iraq. My friends at school told
me about it."