And so began a two-day navy junket—and my first experience of the American military. We spent our time onboard talking to the crew, watching F/A-18 Hornets leap off the deck like flying reptiles, and eating stodgy food in the officers’ mess. We also spent a lot of time sitting around and doing nothing. “Hurry up and wait,” I learned, is the military’s motto. I asked the sailors about Iraq. Some said they blamed Saddam Hussein for September 11 and anthrax. “After all the pain and suffering he has given us,” a mechanic told me from a room several hundred feet below Connie’s deck, “we’re going to go over there and take care of business.”
Surely not, I thought.
A week later, back at home in West Hollywood, Fletcher called. The time was 6:30 A.M., much earlier than usual.
“Ayres, do you want to go to war?” he asked.
Still half asleep, I struggled to understand the question.
“Yes! Love to!” I blurted.
“Gd. Enjoyed your piece on the Constellation, by the way. You might as well go to the Gulf; there won’t be much of a market for L.A. when the war starts. No one wants to read about celebrities anymore.”
“Absolutely,” I said, feeling dizzy.
“The Americans seem to have some kind of scheme. It’s called ‘embedding.’ Make sure you get on it, Ayres.”
“Okay.”
“Gd.”
He hung up.
Oh no.
This was my plan: If I had to spend the war with the American military, I would do it in the safest place possible: belowdecks, on the USS Constellation. As The Times’s designated “embed coordinator,” I called the Pentagon and asked for as many slots as they could give us, citing my experience of reporting from aircraft carriers. “It would be great if we could get some places on, say, the Constellation,” I said, “or a logistics unit.” I nearly added: “But not, y’know, if it’s too much trouble.” I secretly hoped that a London newspaper, albeit an influential one, would be considered unimportant and therefore given boring positions at the rear. A few weeks later I received an e-mail from the Pentagon. “Thank you for your interest in embedding,” it said. “Your embed allocation will be faxed to your section editor soon.”
As the Christmas holidays approached, I tried to forget about war. I was in denial. The invasion would never happen, I reassured myself. I didn’t want to believe Alana’s theories that President Bush wanted revenge on behalf of his father; or that he had his eye on Iraq’s oil reserves. From a coward’s perspective, however, Saddam’s regime was troubling. As recently as 1997, UN weapons inspectors had found Iraqi briefcases containing Clostridium perfringens, the bacteria that causes “gas gangrene,” a disgusting and lethal infection that covers the skin with huge blood blisters while turning it a bronze color. Why would Saddam develop such bioweapons—when most other countries were destroying them—if not to use them? Perhaps Saddam thought he could get away with an attack as long he outsourced it, and blamed it on Osama bin Laden. But why not go further? Why not supersize the attack and buy a couple of old Soviet nukes from the alleged stockpile of eighty thousand warheads poorly guarded by the Russians? Saddam could simply FedEx them to the White House. After all, any instability in the world, as long as it wasn’t blamed on Saddam, could give Iraq the opportunity to reinvade one of its wealthy neighbors, such as Kuwait or Iran.
It was a cliché, but the terror-thon of 2001 had changed everything: If Congress could be shut down with a spoonful of bootleg anthrax, and Wall Street closed for nearly a week by two hijacked airliners, what kind of attack could Saddam bankroll with his oil billions? It was a bowel-loosening thought. And it was clear that sanctions against Saddam weren’t working. They were simply allowing Iraq to get sympathy from the Arab world (according to some unverifiable figures, 2 million Iraqis died from the economic sanctions, half of them children) while simultaneously earning him billions from the UN’s flawed oil-for-food program. It seemed to me that President Bush had three options: lift the sanctions, and make Saddam the world’s first psychopathic trillionaire; keep the sanctions, along with the alleged seven-figure child fatalities and the hatred of the Arab world; or invade. It was certainly a crappy set of options, and hard to work out which was more terrifying than the other. An invasion was by no means the obvious answer, given that it was almost insanely ambitious and had no precedent for success (apart from, some would argue, Afghanistan). And if Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist terror troupe were pissed off before September 11, what would they do after an Arab country’s sovereignty was violated? War footage, some of it from the embeds, would serve as a free, global al-Qaeda recruitment campaign: Look how the Americans are plundering the Holy Land! Join us in jihad! The legitimacy of the 1991 coalition against Saddam, meanwhile, would be hard, if not impossible, to reproduce. A war would be a lonely, bloody venture.
I flew back to Wooler for Christmas while Alana flew back to her family in Ohio. The headlines, meanwhile, informed me that a new team of UN weapons inspectors had entered Iraq, and that Turkey had moved fifteen thousand soldiers to the Iraqi border. The Turks, clearly, knew exactly what was about to happen. It was hard to enjoy my Christmas pudding or wear the silly paper hat I found in my Christmas cracker with much conviction. Never before had I felt that my life was in the hands of political leaders. I would rather have had my life in the hands of a ten-year-old child. Every night, from the womb of my parents’ living room, I would watch miserable-looking BBC journalists report from the sandstorms of Kuwait.
“Oh Christopher, I’m so glad you’re in California and not somewhere horrible like Iraq,” said my mother on more than one occasion. My father at one point chipped in: “You’d have to have a screw loose to go there, wouldn’t you son? Best sticking to Hollywood, eh? A bit more fun than Iraq.”
I got back to Los Angeles in January, just in time for a heat wave. It was as though California was taunting me: showing off the outdoor cafés, open-topped Porsches, and palm tree–lined boulevards I would miss if I was sent to war in the Middle East. I had told Alana all about the embedding scheme, but she refused to believe that The Times would send her boyfriend to a battle zone. “But you’re not a war correspondent,” she huffed. “So why would they send you?” I told her that war reporters had to start their careers somewhere. “But you’re not the type who would become a war correspondent,” she said. “It’s just so stupid.” I agreed: It was stupid. But I also knew it was true. Alana, of course, was immersed in deniaclass="underline" She didn’t want to be left alone, for the length of an entire war, in a city she hated. To make matters worse, Alana was bitterly against an invasion. She even drove to San Francisco to take part in a protest march. “Regime change begins at home,” said her placard.
By February, I was dreading the fax from the Pentagon or the phone call I would get from Fletcher. When it finally came, I was sitting outside the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Sunset Strip, sipping a nonfat cappuccino. As my cell phone chirruped and vibrated, causing the metal table to rattle, I looked jealously at the aspiring actors, models, and rock stars surrounding me. For the first time since arriving in Hollywood, I desperately wanted to be one of them. None of them, after all, would ever be asked to join the front lines to keep their jobs.