It was hard to concentrate on the digging, out there in the Iraqi marshlands. Even though I had been at war for nearly a fortnight, I still hadn’t become acclimatized to the man-made thunder sending pressure waves through the mud banks every few minutes. The tremors were so violent they would surely have registered on the Richter scale. I was, however, beginning to learn the difference between them: The distant rumbles were bombs dropped by F-15 fighter jets; the face-slapping pops were rounds from our own unit’s 155mm howitzer cannons; the pfut-pfut-pfuts, meanwhile, were incoming Iraqi mortars. Of all the noises, that one was the worst.
Naturally, I tried to react with a mixture of machismo and nonchalance. It didn’t work. Nearly every blast made me drop my shovel and involuntarily scream, “What the fuck was that?” The Marines would turn to look at me, squint into the weak, dusty sun, and explain: “Someone’s gettin’ some.” Then they would shake their heads, possibly out of frustration with the “media dude,” or more likely out of awe for the sheer force of the firepower around them.
“Boy, would I not like to be gettin’ some of that,” they would add thoughtfully, with another head shake.
“That shit would suck.”
It was hard not to agree. “Yes,” I would offer, “that would certainly be unpleasant.” I mentally pictured the bloodbath going on a few miles away, as rounds the size of gasoline cans from our howitzers whooshed overhead and separated into scores of mini-bomblets, raining down pure misery on those below. “Good work, Marines,” I had heard a major say the day before. “The tanks up front had nothing to fight but body parts.” It was no surprise that the Marines to whom I had been assigned proudly called themselves the Long Distance Death Dealers. They were as efficient as factory workers; a disassembly line, churning out Iraqi body parts.
There’s no doubt about it: I should have just said no to Fletcher. But my competitive instincts got the better of me. In other words, I didn’t have the guts. Fletcher is an old-school Times man. Tall and marathon-runner lean, with tousled dark hair, a billion-gigabyte brain, and inscrutable smile, he is an English foreign correspondent from central casting. Although he is technically an executive, he turns up to the office on a bicycle and never wears a tie. He is, needless to say, irritatingly dashing for a man entering his fifth decade with a wife and three teenage children (“Fletcher’s yummy,” a female colleague once confided in me). His career, meanwhile, has been relentlessly brilliant: Educated in Edinburgh and Pennsylvania, he spent the best part of a decade as The Times’s Washington bureau chief and American editor—the journalistic equivalent of being the lead singer of the Rolling Stones—before reporting from Belfast and publishing a best-seller about his U.S. travels called Almost Heaven. It’s no secret in London that Fletcher hates being wedged behind a desk. As he towers over his computer terminal, he makes it look like some trivial toy. Fletcher belongs out in the field. Preferably an exotic and dangerous field.
Fletcher could barely suppress the envy in his voice when he sent me on assignments in far-flung corners of the U.S. “Go! Enjoy!” he would cry. “It’ll be great fun! And think of us poor souls back here on the desk… Okay? Good.” Fletcher ended almost all his sentences with “Good,” delivered so quickly and sharply the double-o became almost redundant. It was as though he was so busy he had to abbreviate his speech, like a hastily written e-maiclass="underline" “Gd.” I desperately wanted Fletcher to respect me. And if I turned Fletcher down, I thought, he would no longer consider me a “proper” foreign correspondent and send someone else—making a mental note to recall me from Los Angeles as soon as possible.
So I had only myself to blame for the fact that I was digging harder than a convict in a chain gang, wearing a suffocating camouflage chemical suit, gas mask, water canteen, and heavy blue flak jacket that was probably visible from space. Every few minutes I would reflexively check to see if my gas mask was still in place and, more important, if the holster still contained the self-injectable ten-milligram canister of Diazepam that had been given to me in Kuwait. The Diazepam was to give me a happy death in the event of an Iraqi chemical attack.
“The time to use it’s if you start dancin’ the funky chicken,” I had been told with a giggle by the butch female army instructor back in Kuwait City. She did a jerky dance routine to illustrate her point. The “funky chicken,” I assumed, would be my final, violent convulsions as I clawed at my eyeballs while the blister agent inside my lungs choked me with blood and vomit. On several occasions since entering Iraq, I had been tempted to self-administer the Diazepam preemptively.
Eventually, with the sun near the top of its upward arc, I had created a hole the size of a small bathtub. Then I smoked a Marlboro Light, one of my last before the carton of two hundred that I had impulsively bought in Kuwait City ran out. Every time I inhaled I sucked up airborne mud, which at this point was running out of my nose and making my eyes water. The gusts of wind were getting more powerful by the minute, and the orange-brown tint caused by the mud was deepening, making it hard to see. I wondered, not for the first time, if the foxhole would become my grave; or if we would move positions again, forcing me to burn another three thousand calories digging a new one. Our unit, which called itself Katana, after the samurai sword—because it had been stationed on Okinawa Island in Japan before moving to Iraq—had never stayed in any one position for more than a few hours since crossing the border into Iraq. As I leaned on my shovel and smoked, I saw Buck approaching me through the mudstorm. My day might have started badly, but it was about to get a lot worse.
Rick “Buck” Rogers was thirty-one, black, and athletic, with family in Trinidad and Britain. I liked Buck a lot—he wore a hunting knife strapped to his flak jacket and talked about English football and cricket in a singsong staccato that reminded me of Will Smith—but I could tell he wasn’t happy about having a foreign journalist riding with him on his first combat mission. Especially not a terrified Brit whose luggage took up vital water and rations space in the Humvee.
To be honest, I didn’t blame Buck for getting frustrated. During my time in the Humvee, I got to know Buck—and Hustler and Murphy—pretty well. Well enough, at least, to know that what they wanted more than anything else in the world was exactly what I was trying to avoid: a fight. Later, much later, when I was convinced that Buck had lied to me in a patch of mud by Highway 1, about ninety miles south of Baghdad, I understood: I really did. It was what he had to do. And perhaps, in some strange way, Buck was looking out for the media dude.
Since leaving northern Kuwait, Buck had been promising to show me the guidelines he had been given on dealing with journalists—to prove, he said, that he wasn’t withholding any information from me.
“I found it,” he declared, pulling a creased and muddy booklet from his camouflage flak jacket. He handed it to me. It was pretty thin. “Everything is ‘on the record,’” it said, somewhere near the beginning. I soon lost interest in that, however, when I found the far lengthier section entitled “How to Deal with a Dead Media Representative.” “Treat a dead or wounded media representative as you would one of your own United States Marines,” it advised.
“Thanks,” I said, spitting out more orange filth, but Buck was already sprinting away, back toward the Humvee.
I heard shouting, enfeebled by the increasingly powerful gale. Then more shouting. I could see a blur of activity around the howitzers—it could mean only one thing: We were on the move again. I looked sadly at my foxhole. When I climbed into the back of the Humvee, Buck was clearly agitated. The weather would make finding a new position almost impossible—but the commanders had ordered it. Our unit’s GPS devices—which used satellites to track our position—were unreliable even in good weather. And the night-vision goggles, essential for driving offroad at night, didn’t work in a sandstorm, so they probably wouldn’t work in a blizzard of dried mud, either. But orders were orders. I tried to take notes, but my laptop’s battery icon was flashing red, and my spiral-bound reporter’s notebooks were ripped and filthy.