I looked again at Alana.
“Darling,” she said, softly. “It’s yellow, and it’s got a bull’s-eye on top.”
“I don’t care,” I replied. “I’m packing it.”
KUWAIT CITY, KUWAIT
2003
11
LAST STARBUCKS BEFORE BAGHDAD
If war is hell, someone forgot to tell the staff of the JW Marriott Hotel in Kuwait City. On the evening of Wednesday, March 5, I was lying, or rather floating, on a king-size mattress that felt as though it had been stuffed with the hair of a thousand virgins. To my left, on the mahogany bedside table, was a bowl piled with fruit so fresh it had probably been picked that morning. To my right was a pot of Earl Grey, wisps of fragrant steam twirling from its spout. And on the forty-two-inch television in front of me was Britney Spears, censored so that only her face was showing. “My loneliness is killing me,” she confided. “Hit me baby, one more time.”
I had just emerged from the “rainfall” shower room and was wrapped in one of the hotel’s white, Egyptian cotton dressing gowns. It had a JW logo on the right breast, underneath which was the Marriott slogan: “The biggest smile in Kuwait.” As I lay on the bed, I studied the heavy, gold-embossed room service menu. I was facing a dilemma: Should I go for the dozen Gulf prawns with lobster tail, crab, and caviar; or a twelve-ounce filet of Wagyu-Kobe beef, flown in (first class, I presumed) from Japan. I considered ordering both before remembering that Martin Fletcher had to sign off on all my Iraq-related expenses. There was a good chance, however, that I would be dead or hospitalized before Fletcher got the bill. So what the hell.
My first full day of war reporting had gone better than expected. It started at 10:00 A.M. with a breakfast buffet in Café Royal, one of the four restaurants in the five-star Marriott’s glittering, million-dollar lobby. I hadn’t brought any smart clothing to Kuwait, so I turned up to the restaurant in hiking trousers (with zips below the knees to turn them into shorts), Gore-Tex boots, and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt. The front desk staff—elegant, Persian-looking women in black Chanel with gold jewelry—performed a synchronized eye-roll as I walked past them.
At the buffet, I piled my plate with imported Scottish salmon, Greek olives, Italian ham, and Swiss cheese. Kuwait’s domestic farming industry, it seemed, didn’t play a big part in local cuisine: Hardly surprising, given that most of the country’s 11,072 square miles of land is covered with hot gravel. After emptying my plate, I went back for more, serving myself some bacon and eggs with mushrooms, tomatoes, and toast. I nearly embarked on a third mission to the steam table, but stopped myself: I could hardly return from the war fatter than when I left California.
The café’s clientele, I noticed, was an uneasy mixture of war correspondents, Pakistani waiters, and Arabs in billowing dishdasha robes. The locals kept their platinum Nokias on the tables—Chelsea-style—and conducted conversations with their hands, offering brief glimpses of diamond-encrusted Breitlings and Rolexes. Every so often they looked warily at their Western visitors. It must be strange, I thought, to have 150,000 foreign soldiers in your New Jersey–sized country, along with another 500-strong invading force of media representatives.
The 315-room Marriott had become the unofficial headquarters for embedded journalists from the wealthier media outlets. On separate tables opposite me sat Oliver North, villain of the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, who had become a reporter for Fox News, and Geraldo Rivera, his mustachioed television network colleague. (Rivera was still smarting from a 2001 story in which he claimed to be at the scene of a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan—he was, it was later alleged, about fifty miles away. He blamed it on a misunderstanding. Rivera’s stint as an embed in Iraq would be equally volatile.) Upstairs, meanwhile, was a public television lounge, where American and British journalists consumed gallons of tea, nibbled Walker’s shortbread, and swapped jokes about the French. “Why do the French have tree-lined boulevards?” a cameraman had asked me the previous day, shortly after I checked in. I offered a shrug. “Because the Germans like to march in the shade,” came the punch line.
I ended up sitting alone in Café Royal, under a window, sipping a lowfat cappuccino and reading the English-language (and self-censored) Kuwait Times, which made the Wall Street Journal read like Playboy. Above my head was a mural-sized portrait of a smiling Arab with a Blackadder-style mustache and goatee. He was wearing a classic white gutra headdress, with a skullcap underneath and a snakelike coil of purple rope on top. I assumed this was the Kuwaiti emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, who fled to Saudi Arabia when the Iraqis invaded at 2:00 A.M. on August 2, 1990. The al-Sabah dynasty, I remembered reading, had been in charge of Kuwait for more than 250 years. I also recalled that the emir’s favorite way to end political problems was to dissolve parliament.
I felt fine, apart from an almost hallucinatory bout of eleven-hour jet lag and a swollen, throbbing right arm, which had been shot full of vaccines—including the first injection of the three-stage anthrax inoculation—at the News International medical center in London. As feared, the anthrax needle had looked like a hydraulic pump—and felt like a ballpoint pen as it punctured my skin. The experience was made more traumatic by the thick wad of forms I had signed before the jab, which declared that I wouldn’t sue if I came down with anything resembling Gulf War syndrome. I had no intention of visiting an American military hospital in Kuwait to get the other two anthrax shots before the war. As for the smallpox vaccine, I had decided to avoid it entirely after reading online that patients could experience “an accidental spreading of the vaccinia virus caused by touching the vaccination site.” By the time I got to the part about it “usually occurring on the genitals or face, where it can damage sight,” I had made my mind up. Being sent to war was bad enough, without having to deal with a smallpox-infected penis. Or, for that matter, blindness.