I was never particularly brave. As a toddler my mother stayed at home to look after me. She would bake bread and read me stories about Snoopy and Willo the Wisp. When I was old enough to go to school, my father was there to keep an eye on me: He was, after all, the head teacher, who walked down the corridors on his hands. My mother eventually got a teaching job at the same school, meaning I was near both parents, twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps it was this idyllic childhood that stopped me toughening up. But there were downsides. The head teacher’s son is never a popular kid, and by the time acne and adolescence had ruined me at the age of thirteen, I was sullen and silent company. I emerged from the worst of it three or four years later, with a terrible haircut and even worse taste in music. I was determined to move to London in search of some kind of compensatory fame and wealth. It was only when I finally left Wooler, however, that I realized how lucky I had been: Sometimes, I wondered if my parents were the only happily married couple left in England.
I told my Mum about Iraq the day I left London for the Surviving Dangerous Countries course. Passengers standing next to me at Paddington station heard the following one-sided conversation:
“Mum, I’m being sent to, er, Kuwait for a while.”
“KUWAIT. It’s very safe.”
“I’m going to be, write about… I’m going to spend some time at a military base. It’s very safe. Really, very safe.”
“It’s for the wa—”
“I know I’m not a war correspondent.”
“Like Walter Cronkite, yes.”
“I know I’m not the type.”
“Because no one wants to read about celebrities at the moment.”
“Well, y’know Mum, war correspondents have to start their careers somewhere.”
“Yes, it’s near Iraq.”
“Yes, I know he used chemical weapons on the Kurds.”
“I’m in England. Doing a course with the SAS.”
“I am taking this seriously.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to my father.”
The conversation reminded me of an ethical problem I had once studied in philosophy class at Hull. It concerned a young Frenchman who, during World War II, was forced to choose between joining the Allied forces in England or staying at home and looking after his sick mother. The man desperately wanted to fight the Nazis, but felt an overwhelming guilt at abandoning his beloved mum, who begged him to stay. The dilemma, posed by Jean-Paul Sartre, had no solution. According to Sartre, it simply proved the anguish of man, and the absence of God. “Everything is permissible if God does not exist,” wrote Sartre, “and as a result man is forlorn.” He was a cheerful soul, old Sartre. On the positive side, he argued that man was free. The freedom part made it worse, though. It reminded me that I didn’t have to go to Iraq. I was, as Sartre said, in anguish. Come to think of it, I also felt pretty damn forlorn.
There was no way, of course, that I could tell my parents about what I feared the embedding scheme might involve. So I told them what we both wanted to hear: I would go to Kuwait, live at a military base, and perhaps go on “day trips” into Iraq, after it had been safely invaded by the Americans. But then I did something really unforgivable: I asked my father’s opinion on whether I should go. “Yes, son, I think you should go,” he said hesitantly. “The Times wouldn’t put you in any danger. And it sounds like a great honor. You must be doing well, son. Best of luck.” My father’s bogus approval made me feel better, for a while. But I knew he would have given me different advice if he’d known the Pentagon’s real plan for the embeds. I also knew that if I died in Iraq, my poor old man would never forgive himself.
At Heathrow, after the course, I called Alana. It was early in Los Angeles, but I knew she would be up, jet-lagged from her business trip.
“How was it?” she asked, trying to sound enthusiastic.
“Oh, y’know, pretty useful. I think.”
“Geez, I can’t believe you did all that,” she said.
I paused for a second.
“All what?”
“Oh, I had a look online. Your friend Oliver wrote about going on one of these military courses. Must have been grueling…”
“Poole?”
“Y’know, Oliver. From the Telegraph. The good-looking one. We met him once in Chateau Marmont, I think.”
“I know exactly who he is,” I said a bit too quickly, through a clenched jaw. “What kind of things did he do?”
“Oh, the same stuff you did, probably. The five-mile tactical march with the fifty-pound rucksack; being shot at with live rounds; applying facial camouflage; chemical decontamination; jumping from helic—”
“It wasn’t the same course,” I interrupted. “He did the Pentagon course. He did it at Fort Dix, New Jersey.”
“I know, Chris. But it’s the same thing, right? Did they teach you how to self-inject the nerve gas antidote?”
“No.”
“What about how to ‘dead-reckon’?”
“Look. It’s not the same—”
“Did you create a field latrine with a shovel, wooden planks, and baby wipes?”
What the hell was a field latrine?
“No,” I croaked. “Look—”
“Tourniquets?”
“YES! We did tourniquets.” In my relief, I almost told her about the near-fainting incident, but caught myself in time.
“Cool,” said Alana. “Missed you.”
“Yeah, missed you, too.”
“It’s hard to imagine you putting on a gas mask. Oliver said he had to get it over his head and seal it in nine seconds.”
It was then, in a moment of exquisite torment, that I realized the most important thing about the Surviving Dangerous Countries course: We hadn’t learned a single thing about chemical or biological weapons. My blood turned to iced panic. “Hang on, Alana,” I mumbled as I fought my hand luggage, pulling out the glossy brochure with my schedule on it. I found the section entitled “Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical.” This, I learned, was a separate course, to be held the following week in London. “Of particular importance to those embedding with the American miltiary,” it said. By next week, however, I would be in Los Angeles, making final preparations for Iraq. I couldn’t believe it: I had taken the wrong bloody course.
“Is everything okay?” I heard Alana say.
10
THE LIST
There were thunderstorms over Greenland. The Boeing 747, like a great basking shark, tumbled and twitched as its pilots sweated over glowing instruments. Through my rain-splashed window, I stared at the wing as it bounced in a downdraft. We banked starboard and lost altitude quickly. Transatlantic flight remains one of humankind’s most unnatural acts: 524 people, breathing a ton of pressurized air, falling ten thousand feet at 567 miles per hour as they travel backward in time. No wonder the kids of the seventies, the war virgins, are so strung out on Zoloft and Xanax: Our lives are built on technology, and stalked by fear of technology failing.
So how did I feel as I sat in the cheapest seat of the American Airlines jumbo, downing miniatures with my back to the stench and gargle of the chemical toilet? I was pretty worried about the gas mask situation, that was for sure. And I felt terrible about conning my father into giving me approval to go to war. Strangely, however, the thunderstorms weren’t bothering me. My flight on the navy Greyhound had shown me the real meaning of turbulence: This was nothing. Perhaps, I thought, I wouldn’t be scared of anything if I survived Iraq. Perhaps, after being denied comfort and technology, and forced to sleep rough in the desert, I’d be cured forever of anxiety. Or perhaps I’d come back like one of the “mental cases” in the World War I poem by Wilfred Owen: “… purgatorial shadows / Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish / Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked…”