“You haven’t told her?” he asked.
“Nah. Waiting for a good time.”
We munched in silence for a few seconds, then Glen said: “It doesn’t feel quite right, does it? The war, I mean.”
“Part of me thinks it’s justified,” I said with a frown. “And part of me thinks it’s one of stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard.”
“At least in ’91 we had Stormin’ Norman,” said Glen, “and the Saudis on our side. But he’s a complete bastard, Saddam. Makes you feel quite bellicose, really. Especially when you see what he did to the Kurds…”
Our concentration returned to the food. I remembered reading about the shells of mustard gas that fell on the Kurdish city of Halabja on March 16, 1988. The gas apparently smelled like fertilizer, or rotten garlic. Those who breathed too deeply ended up going blind, while their skin bubbled and blistered. Survivors arguably got a worse deal than those killed by immediate asphyxiation: They suffered brain damage, leukemia, infertility, and disfigurement.
Then I said: “He’s going to use chemical weapons, isn’t he?”
“Without a doubt,” said Glen.
I pushed my plate away. It smelled like garlic.
The SAS course turned out to be a bit of a blow to morale. I had no idea there were so many things that could kill you, injure you, maim you, or otherwise ruin your day on a battlefield: heavy artillery, light artillery, tanks, machine guns, handguns, submachine guns, land mines that explode upward, land mines that explode downward, land mines that jump out of their craters and explode in front of your balls, and, of course, snipers. I had completely forgotten about snipers. But apparently we’d be hearing a lot from them in Baghdad, if we ever got there. And we hadn’t even started on chemical or biological weapons. It was a wonder, I thought, that soldiers even bothered to turn up for wars. There didn’t seem to be much point.
We were shown footage of dead people, nearly dead people, beheaded people, alive people who were soon to be dead people, and gruesomely injured people. We were advised to carry a Ziploc bag in our backpacks, for severed fingers or toes. I wondered if we should also carry freezer-size bags, for larger appendages. A good deal of time was spent learning how to tie and loosen tourniquets, to stop the faucet of blood from limbless joints. I practiced applying a tourniquet to myself, but nearly passed out when my leg went numb. The appendage I was most worried about losing, however, was my head. But tourniquets don’t work on the neck.
The climax of the course was “field training.” It involved our flabby press battalion, commanded by a clearly bored David Silver, taking a pleasant walk through the frosted countryside, eating Mars bars, and fumbling with maps. When we got back to the hotel, I took Silver aside and asked if he thought it was a good idea to be embedded. “Wouldn’t be too keen on it meeself,” he said. “Seems to me, if Saddam’s got chemicals, ’e’s gonna use ’em, int’ee? But to be honest, I can’t see the Yanks lettin’ your lot anywhere near the action. No offense, but you’ll just slow ’em down. And if you do end up with a frontline unit, I can’t imagine the Americans will be very ’appy about it.” There were three ways, I concluded, to look at Silver’s analysis: as good news, because it meant I would probably be kept away from the fighting; bad news, because if I was allowed near the fighting, the Marines would resent me for slowing them down; or very bad news, because the prospect of chemical warfare in Iraq was too scary even for Silver. And Silver had been in the bloody SAS.
No one on the Surviving Dangerous Countries course seemed to believe that embeds would face any serious danger. Surely, I thought, The Times, the BBC, and Granada Television couldn’t all have misjudged the situation. If embeds really did end up at the front, I thought, the British and American public would be lucky if they recognized a single correspondent—all of them would be under the age of thirty and, if I was anything to go by, cowering in foxholes.
The online edition of the New York Times, which I checked every morning from my hotel room, told a different story about the embeds. “In many ways, this is going to be historic,” the paper quoted a U.S. Defense Department spokesman as saying. He added that more than 500 reporters, 100 of them from international organizations, including the Arabic-language Al Jazeera cable channel and Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency, had signed up. Even Men’s Health had an embed, as did People magazine and Rolling Stone, still known for its hippie, pot-smoking sympathies during Vietnam. I wondered what on earth Men’s Health would write about; war was the antithesis of men’s health. The embedding scheme was the biggest media mobilization of all time, The Times said, requiring a massive logistical operation of its own. The Defense Department spokesman explained that embeds would not be allowed to carry weapons and would not have to pay for their units’ transport, food, or accommodations. “There’s no cost for the six feet of ground they’ll lay on and the rations, although they may not like them,” he said. Six feet of ground? Wouldn’t we get a bunk bed?
The only full-time war correspondents in the SAS course were the Dutch crew. The chief reporter, Gottfried, was a heavy, saturnine figure with a carcinogenic suntan and worry lines as deep as the Grand Canyon, hardened by the fumes from his forty-a-day Marlboro habit. He reeked of death and tobacco. Gottfried had witnessed some of the most depraved acts of humankind, in all the world’s major terror-tourist destinations, including Kosovo, Rwanda, Liberia, Chechnya, and the Sudan. He looked as though he hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since 1974.
“So what’s it like?” I asked him over a pint of warm Boddingtons in the hotel bar one evening. “Going to war, I mean.”
He looked at me with black eyes. I expected to hear tales of adventure, heroism, bad rations, and the honesty of soldiers.
“I lost my wife,” he said, emptying his glass with a single wrist movement. “And my children. I lost my children, too.”
“They died?”
“She left me. My wife left me, and she took the kids. I was gone for six months of the year covering the wars. She couldn’t wait any longer. I don’t blame her. Why wait for Gottfried? Gottfried talks only of hell.”
I began to feel immense pity for the giant Dutchman, whose elaborate television hairdo seemed at odds with his face. For a moment I thought Gottfried might cry. But his tear ducts had dried up long ago.
“It’s a great job, of course,” he told me. “But a dangerous one. And a lonely one, also. You have a wife at home?”
A great job? Being Bono was a great job. Being Gottfried? Surely not.
“Girlfriend,” I replied.
Gottfried laughed. It was a harrowing sound; gentle, like weeping.
“My advice to you, Christoffeclass="underline" Get rid of your beautiful woman now, before it starts. It won’t work. It never does.”
We are all born fearless. Perhaps we lose it as we get older and realize the value, and the responsibility, of love. When I was a choirboy at St. Mary’s Church in Wooler, forced every Sunday into a white vestment and frilly ruff collar, I was sure I wanted to be a man of action. The vicar once asked me, in front of the entire church, what I wanted to do when I grew up. The answer was obvious, because I had just seen Who Dares Wins on Betamax. “I’m going to be in the SAS,” I replied quite seriously. The carrot-haired boy, with his milky, freckled face and scaffolded teeth, couldn’t understand why the congregation laughed so hard, for so long.