The routine of finding a new position went something like this: The captain’s Humvee—our Humvee—would be the advance party, finding a piece of ground where the Long Distance Death Dealers could set up shop, churn out a few hundred more Iraqi body parts, then move on quickly. Being the advance party—not in it, actually it—had redefined the concept of terror for me. And it was the reason my bruised buttocks had remained clenched since leaving Kuwait.
Every time we swerved off fresh tracks I expected us to hit a land mine, or for some Iraqi “irregulars” to jump out of the bushes with grenade launchers. Capture was what I feared most. In Pakistan, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had been beheaded, on videotape. Perhaps the Iraqi Republican Guard would do the same to me. I also carried with me a copy of Bravo Two Zero, Andy McNab’s account of his SAS unit’s failed Gulf War I mission—not the wisest choice of reading material, given its long description of McNab’s torture by the Iraqis. When we eventually found a firing position, we could be alone for hours before the howitzers, towed by all-terrain trucks, eventually turned up. Often we would just drive around in circles, the first sergeant scanning the horizon through the sights of the Humvee’s machine gun, his heavy boots tap dancing on the circular footplate next to me. He would chew gum so loudly I could hear it above the diesel groans of the Humvee’s engine.
After receiving our orders to move, the Long Distance Death Dealers started to pack up their howitzers, and we roared off into the eerie orange glow in search of a new position. Darkness was only a few hours away, but the mudstorm had already reduced visibility to just a few feet. I sat grimly in the back of the growling, rattling Humvee, staring at the gun rack in front of me.
I might not have been given a weapon, but I had been unofficially taught how to fire a standard-issue M-16 rifle by Murphy. Not that I wanted to take the lesson, of course. “I think there might be an ethical problem with this,” I laughed nervously, aware that my English accent probably sounded pompous and absurd to the musclebound Vermont Marine. Of all the men in Katana, or Kilo Battery, I spent perhaps the most time with Murphy, largely because he kept stealing my Marlboro Lights. He told me his nickname was Fightin’ Dan, because of the number of nightclub brawls he had been involved in. “Do they do a lot of fightin’ in London?” was his opening conversational gambit on the first morning we met.
Murphy, who possessed one of the filthiest vocabularies I had ever heard, was no amateur philosopher, and he certainly didn’t understand my ethical dilemma. He just looked me in the eye and drawled: “So if there’s a shitstorm, and you can shoot an Iraqi and save my life, or NOT shoot an Iraqi and let me die, what you gonna do?” It was more of an instruction than a question. And I had to spend the rest of the war sharing a Humvee with Murphy. I internally sneered at the notion that “embedded” journalists—reporters such as myself, assigned to U.S. military units—were in any way impartial. I wanted Buck and his men to beat the Iraqis as much as they did. After all, my own life was at stake. “I’d shoot the bastard,” I said quickly.
Then I took the weapon from his hands.
As we crawled up a partly built highway, our faces now orange from the mud, I wondered if I would finally get to use the M-16. I noticed that Saddam had built ugly concrete picnic stops, complete with concrete umbrellas, at regular intervals up the highway. I made a mental note never to complain about McDonald’s again. The blizzard of mud, meanwhile, intensified. By this time we were coughing up orange phlegm and reaching for the painters’ masks we’d brought for the smoke from oil well fires. They weren’t much use. Eventually the storm brought us to a halt.
The howitzers were somewhere a long way behind us—perhaps still in the old firing position. Only a couple of other Humvees from our unit had caught up. We waited. We appeared to be alone, and stuck. Over the radio we heard reports of trucks overturning in the wind and of Humvees shunting into the back of each other. It would have been insanity to continue driving.
It was now getting dark. Buck picked up the radio and ordered the Marines to stay put and not to leave their vehicles—they could have been lost in seconds, and the search parties would have been lost equally quickly. And who knew what lurked over the berm to our right, or in the marsh banks to our left?
I remembered how the Marine commanders in Kuwait had boasted that the Marines were an “all-weather fighting force,” unstoppable by anything that Iraq’s annual spring storm season could hurl at them. But the wind and the mud made me feel like a character in one of the Wilfred Owen poems I had studied in high school (Owen, unluckily, was killed by German gunfire one week before the Great War ended; his mother received the telegram on Armistice Day). At the time, those poems had seemed so old, so irrelevant. Modern war, after all, was clean, quick, and efficient. The Americans could move across entire countries in the time it took the Germans to advance three feet during the Battle of the Somme. To me, the five-day Gulf War I had seemed like a thrilling video game, fought with laser guidance and aircraft that looked as though they had been designed and built on Mars.
This, however, was no video game. I imagined what my face must have looked like, caked, like everything else, with orange-brown slime. Just to make matters worse—quite a feat in the circumstances, I thought—a thunderstorm arrived from the north, making us flinch with every rumble.
The lightning created a problem: The radio code name for a chemical Scud missile attack was also “Lightning.” As a result, every time Buck mentioned the storm, everyone reached for their gas masks. By this point it was so dark I couldn’t even see my gloved hand in front of my face. I felt short of breath. “If I was an Iraqi, this would be my ideal time to attack,” muttered Buck.
Then came a blast of radio static and some catastrophic news. This was, indeed, a very bad day. “We have contact,” crackled a distant bass monotone. Contact, in the language of the Marines, where all emotion is surgically removed to avoid collateral damage to troop morale, means being attacked by the enemy. When fire is returned, it becomes engagement. A nuclear exchange, presumably, is a white wedding. I attempted to reassure myself that since the first night of the invasion we had been “contacted” only by amateurish Iraqi fighters—they drove Toyotas and Nissans with machine guns fitted to the roofs. They wouldn’t be a problem.
Wrong. We were being contacted, the radio informed us, by a dozen Soviet-built Iraqi tanks: probably Republican Guard. I immediately thought of home and family. This was serious, more serious than anything that had happened to us since we left Kuwait. We couldn’t see more than a yard or so in front of us. We were blind and lame and alone in the dark. It may have been my imagination, but I was sure I could hear the grinding of the tanks’ engines being carried on the wind. The tanks had been spotted only because one of the artillery batteries behind us had illuminated the battlefield by firing a round of white phosphorus into the gloom. Each round of “lume” effectively turns 250 acres of night into day and can last for up to two minutes. Its brightness is measured in “candlepower,” a bizarre anachronism, with each of our white phosphorus rounds the equivalent of 1 million naked flames.