Before dawn the next morning—March 4—I took a taxi from my hotel to Heathrow Airport, picking up Glen at his flat in Notting Hill on the way. Glen, who also had to report for duty at the Hilton Kuwait Resort, sauntered out of his front door carrying two compact, lightweight bags. He was wearing blue jeans, an open-collared shirt, and a cream linen jacket. With his oak tan, angular features, and Hugh Grant hair (still intact, six years after City University), he looked like the classic intrepid English foreign correspondent. I wondered if I had gone too far by following the Pentagon’s list to the letter. Perhaps, I thought, I should have made more of an effort to look cool. In the airport we watched CNN footage of an Iraqi bulldozer crushing three more al-Samoud missiles, bringing the total number destroyed to nineteen. The UN, the television shouted, had asked for one hundred missiles to be put out of action. “Despite whatever limited head-fakes Iraq has engaged in, they continue to fundamentally not disarm,” I heard a White House spokesman comment. I wondered if Saddam had already fled.
I spent the first part of the Kuwait Airways flight staring at the electronic map on the miniature television screen in front of me. It showed our flight path to the Persian Gulf, which involved taking a huge detour around Iraq, which was still being patrolled by American and British fighter jets enforcing the “no fly zone.” I wondered if there was a chance of being shot down by a stray missile. I tried to ignore my stomach, which was doing a good impression of a tumble dryer filled with acid. Then the in-flight meal arrived: It was curry, served with peanuts.
Glen and I finished our meals in silence. Neither of us could quite grasp the consequences of what we were doing.
“Brought anything good to read?” asked Glen eventually.
“Oh, lots,” I said, reaching for my hand luggage. “I’ve stuck to the war theme, to put me in the right frame of mind. I have The Quiet American; Norman Schwarzkopf’s autobiography; Bravo Two Zero; and Endgame, written by that former chief UN weapons inspector bloke. Oh, and I’ve also got the Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. There’s no Rough Guide to Iraq, apparently.”
“Christ,” said Glen. “I brought P. G. Wodehouse. I thought Jeeves might keep my spirits up when the war starts.”
“Jeeves?” I asked.
“It’s good for the soul,” Glen replied testily.
I reconsidered my reading list. Perhaps it was a bit on the heavy side. Graham Greene’s Quiet American was depressing the hell out of me. It was, after all, about a war-weary, opium-addicted, and borderline suicidal Times correspondent in Indochina who kept putting himself in mortal danger only to get a single paragraph, if that, printed in the newspaper. I had reached the part where the hero’s girlfriend (his first marriage had failed) was leaving him for a rich American.
Unable to face another miserable chapter, I pulled out my copy of the Lonely Planet guide and thumbed my way to the eighteen-page section on Kuwait. I started reading a paragraph entitled “Dangers & Annoyances.”
I stopped after coming across a phrase I didn’t understand.
“What’s ‘wadi-bashing’?” I asked.
“Off-roading,” said Glen. “You’re going to be bashing a lot of wadis with the Marines, I imagine. Why do you ask?”
I winced, then read the paragraph out loud: “Because of the difficulty in detecting land mines, wadi-bashing is a very dangerous sport in Kuwait and you ought to think long and hard before indulging… people who keep track of these things emphasis that stuff still blows up every month…”
Glen laughed, then shrugged.
I remembered the SAS class on land mine injuries: Most of it had involved learning how to perform battlefield amputations. That was when I’d nearly passed out trying to secure a tourniquet on my own leg.
Suddenly I became aware of something behind me. I turned to see a fellow passenger looking over my shoulder. He was in his thirties with a Midwestern belly, and a sleeping blindfold pulled up over his forehead, giving him an unflattering quiff of thick, dirty brown hair. He was blinking wearily.
“Are you guys embedded?” he asked through a yawn that smelled of curry.
“Yeah,” we said in unison.
“Me, too,” he replied. “Jake Hansen, cameraman, ABC News.” He offered a sweaty hand over the back of the seat. Glen and I took it in turns to shake it. Neither of us were really in the mood to socialize.
“Hey guys,” said Jake, excitedly. “Have you seen this?” he passed over what looked like a mascara pen with its lid on.
“What is it?” I asked, studying it. Then I gave it to Glen.
“It’s a lipstick cam,” said Jake, proudly. “Look: it’s tiny.” He snatched it from Glen, then held it up to his forehead, over his blindfold. “We stick it to the top of a Marine’s helmet, like this, and watch ’em shoot,” he said. “How cool is that? The folks at home get a front row seat on the front lines!”
It was, indeed, an incredible piece of technology.
“Are you sure the Marines are going to let you do that?” I asked. “And how d’you know you’ll be going to the front?”
“Are you kidding?” said Jake. He whipped a sheet of paper from his laptop case. “Did you read this?” he asked, showing me the title. It read: “Public Affairs Guidance On Embedding Media During Possible Future Operations.” I shook my head. With a chewed fingernail, Jake pointed to an underlined section. Then he read: “Commanders will ensure the media are provided with every opportunity to observe actual combat operations. The personal safety of correspondents is not a reason to exclude them from combat areas.” He paused for dramatic effect. Then he smiled.
“It’s going to be hardcore,” he said.
We climbed off the plane in a daze and got stuck immediately in a line for immigration. The airport officials looked deeply unhappy about the white people swaggering into their country—Kuwait, after all, doesn’t issue tourist visas, and only 37 percent of its population are actual citizens. The rest, mostly from the Indian subcontinent and Asia, are there on work visas. Kuwait used to be home to thousands of Palestinians, but they sided with the Iraqis in 1990 and haven’t been seen since. After an hour, and a brief interrogation, we were allowed into the country. It didn’t take long for my rucksack and flak jacket to appear on the baggage carousel—the Kuwait Airways jet had been almost empty, after all. My metal dolly was awkward to assemble, but worked nonetheless. I was delighted it had survived the journey so far. As we left the wing-shaped terminal, I noticed scores of Kuwaiti families heading in the other direction. It seemed like the sensible thing to do. We stopped briefly to get ripped off at an airport Bureau de Change. Then we made our way to the taxi lineup.
Ten minutes later we were approaching the city at ninety-five miles an hour on a California-style desert highway, complete with floodlit billboards displaying Western brand names and Arabic slogans. The taxi driver’s passing technique was to almost nudge the bumper of the car in front while leaning on the horn, flicking his headlights onto highbeam, and swerving out toward the central reservation. As he did this, a riot of Middle Eastern percussion and a crazy, strangled wind instrument blared out of the AM radio. I cracked open my window and felt the dragon’s breath of the desert on my face. Then I saw it: the country’s most famous landmark, the Kuwait Towers, poking out of the horizon. The towers are three enormous, upturned spikes, two of which bulge in the middle, as though liquid has been injected into them and got stuck halfway. They were designed by a Swedish architectural firm in the late 1970s, but could easily have come from the brush of Salvador Dalí. The bulges, the cabdriver told us in mangled English, hold the city’s 4.5-million-gallon supply of drinking water.