The door to Xtreme 19 swung open with a strangled buzz. In front of me was an alien landscape of camping equipment, mountain bikes, and cardboard cutout rocks. Outdoorsy people browsed the merchandise. Exotic birdsong played over the PA system. The place stank of athlete’s foot, crotch powder, and butane gas. This is more like it, I thought, looking around. The male and female staff members were indistinguishable: both were wearing Gore-Tex boots, baggy sweaters, and lip balm. I felt a sudden and almost overwhelming urge to drive to the nearest fashionable bar, order a martini, and light a cigarette. I fought it and took a deep breath. Having learned my lesson from The North Face, I decided to come clean with the shop assistant. I would tell him all about Iraq, hand over the list, and let him do the rest.
“How y’doin?” said a friendly male voice. “Need help?”
I took a long look at the Xtreme 19 employee who was about to make the biggest sales commission of his career. Brock was my height, with a knoll of earthy brown, neglected hair, which kept his forehead in heavy shade. At the end of his folded arms were farmer’s hands, raw with rock grazes and bramble pricks. Dirt was crusted under his broken fingernails. Judging by his flush of postadolescent acne, Brock was in his early twenties and a sophomore at Cal-State, or UCLA. He spoke with a stoner’s drawl, but was in good condition under his shapeless hikewear: He clearly spent more time scaling mountains than smoking weed in his dorm.
“I have a shopping list,” I said.
“Big trip comin’ up,” he replied with a nod, but no question mark.
“Yeah, a big one. A very big one.”
“Cool.”
I wondered if outdoorsy people could sense their own kind. I wondered if Brock already knew I was a camping amateur.
He took the list and stared at it for what felt like an hour.
Finally he coughed and said: “Dude, what the hell are y’gonna do with all this? Invade Mexico?” He looked up.
“Iraq,” I said. “Not Mexico.”
Brock made a whistling noise, like a World War II shell. He was now staring at me through the dense overgrowth of his hair. This English guy can’t be in the Marines, he was thinking. He’s way to much of a pussy.
“I’m a reporter,” I explained. “London Times. I’m being embedded.”
“All right,” said Brock, nodding slowly; somewhere, his logic gears were grinding and smoking.
“London Times?” he asked.
“Based here,” I clarified. “I write about, er, Hollywood. And stuff, y’know?”
“And they’re sending you to… Iraq?”
“Yeah. They are.”
Brock nodded again. Under that mound of hair, I could have sworn there was a raised eyebrow. He seemed paralyzed. Then he said: “I mean, no offense: You don’t look the type. Doesn’t the London Times have, like, war correspondents? Don’t they need you to cover the Oscars or something?”
“Yes, we do have war correspondents,” I said through a sigh. “But it’s going to be a big story, so they need a lot of people covering it. War reporters have to start their careers somewhere, y’know.”
I felt as though I were talking to Alana, or my mother.
Brock nodded again. He was beginning to irritate me. “Cool,” he said again. “Not that, y’know, I think killing Iraqis so that rich guys can drive big-assed SUVs is, like, a good idea. But whatever, man. Let’s get started.” Then Brock froze again. “Whoah,” he said, looking down at the Pentagon’s list.
I waited for the inevitable.
“Dude, what the hell is a MOPP suit?”
It was a long afternoon. After initially assuming that I had some background knowledge, Brock gave up and started to openly patronize me. I was grateful. A canteen, I learned, is something you drink water out of—apparently they don’t have Coke machines up in the mountains, or in war zones. A camelback, meanwhile, is a kind of canteen: It looks like a hot water bottle that you strap to your back and drink from with a plastic tube. After studying the Pentagon’s list, Brock recommended a backpack with seven thousand cubic inches of storage space, with a separate compartment for my North Face sleeping bag and straps to attach my inflatable mattress and ground cover. When Brock took it off the wall display, it was almost as tall as me. Then he handed me a bivvy sack, which turned out to be a waterproof Gore-Tex cover for my sleeping back. “By the looks of this list, you’re gonna be sleeping in shit every damn night,” said Brock. By the time we were finished, the shop’s staff had locked the front door and started shutting off the lights. I looked outside; the parking lot was almost empty.
In the end it took three staff members to help me carry my purchases to the cash register. I had hiking boots, hiking boot laces, spare hiking boot laces, hiking socks, hiking foot powder, thermal underwear, a portable shaving mirror, shortwave radio (to pick up BBC World Service), sewing kit, and three different kinds of floppy sun hats, all of which looked ridiculous. I even had a two-man tent, picked out by Brock, and a combat-proof case for my laptop computer. At one point I flirted with the idea of buying a mountain bike and a kayak. The only things Brock couldn’t help me with were the MOPP suit or any of the other technical-sounding equipment on the Pentagon’s embed list. I concluded I could probably survive without “NBC caps” or an “M291 Chemical Decon. Kit In M-40 Carrier.” The MOPP suit, however, was number two on the list of “Things To Be Worn.” It had to be important.
Perhaps I could get one in London, I thought.
“That’ll be, let’s see, $5,132.16, please,” said Brock. I gave him my Barclaycard, which was immediately declined. I tried American Express: It worked, but only after I had spoken to a fraud officer in Memphis. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ayres,” he said, “but your purchases at North Face and Xtreme 19 appear to have triggered our ‘unusual spending behavior’ fraud detection system. Have you ever bought goods from an outdoor store before, Mr. Ayres?” I told him that I hadn’t, as Brock and his colleagues looked each other with laughter in their eyes.
Finally, at 7:41 P.M., I left the empty, shuttered shop. It was a relief to taste the toxic smog of the Los Angeles traffic.
“Be careful, man,” said Brock as he gave me an ironic salute.
It struck me as absurd advice. How could I be careful in a war zone? The only way to be careful was to not go. Perhaps that’s what Brock meant. The cabdriver in London, I remembered, had ended our conversation on a similar note. “Take care of yourself, son, wontcha?” he had said.
“I’ll try,” I said to Brock as I loaded my bags into the jeep.
“Hey,” said Brock from the doorway. I turned to look at him. “Is it really going to happen?” he asked. “The war, I mean?”
I paused. Then I said: “Brock, if it’s got to the stage where someone like me is buying a tent from someone like you, I think we can assume it’s going to happen. To be honest, I don’t think there’s any doubt at all.”
“Right,” said Brock. He looked depressed.
“Cheerio,” I said, slamming the jeep’s tailgate. For the first time, I realized, I actually believed it: I was going to war.
It wasn’t until Friday night, hours before my flight back to London, that I decided to practice erecting the tent. I thought it might avoid some embarrassment later on, in front of the Marines. So with a six-pack of Heineken beside me, I ripped open the box containing my Two-Man Xtreme 19 Mountain Adventure Pod. For the next hour I fumbled with metal rods and waterproof canvas, swearing periodically. Eventually, feeling so pumped up with male hormones I could have beaten a drum, I had constructed a small, space-age dome in my living room. It was then, however, that I realized the problem. Brock had sold me a tent in the same canary yellow color as The North Face jacket I had tried on in Beverly Hills. Admittedly it wasn’t all yellow: It had a two-tone color scheme, with dark, military green on the lower half. The yellow half, however, was bright enough to cause temporary blindness. I stood up and scratched my head. It was then I noticed another problem: The tent had a fluorescent red cross on its roof, so that it could be identified from the air by mountain rescue teams. “Brock, you fuckwit,” I muttered. I looked at Alana. She seemed on the verge of laughter, or tears, I wasn’t sure which. “Didn’t you know it was this color?” she asked. I took another look at the luminous battlefield liability in front of me. If I put it up anywhere near the Marines, I thought, I would get court-martialed or shot; if, that is, I didn’t get hit by an incoming Scud first. I imagined a huge yellow blob appearing on an Iraqi radar screen and a Republican Guard intelligence officer pointing excitedly. But it was too late now. Xtreme 19 had closed an hour ago, and I had to fly to London the next day. “The tent is coming with me,” I declared. “I’m not sleeping on the floor.”