All I could think about, however, was the Iraqis crashing over the border in 1990 and claiming this alien world as their own—before looting the place and trashing it when they couldn’t get their way. Saddam’s forces set more than six hundred oil wells ablaze as they retreated, an environmental catastrophe that took nine months to contain. The scale of Saddam’s ambition was astonishing.
I wondered if Saddam would lob a few Scuds at the Kuwait Towers when the coalition forces invaded. I imaged 4.5 million gallons of purified drinking water drowning the city, like an airborne tsunami.
“This is mental,” I said to Glen.
He grinned and nodded in agreement. We were both thinking the same thing: that in spite of the fear, the bowel pain, and the crappy pay, there is sometimes no better job on earth than being a foreign correspondent. There I was, with five thousand dollars in cash, a satellite phone, and a dozen canisters of nerve gas antidote in my bag, speeding into a deserted foreign city on the brink of Armageddon. At that giddy, fleeting moment, I told myself that it was worth it. And that if I died as a result of this stupid, ill-thought-out embedding scheme, at least I had lived in my twenty-seven years.
The feeling didn’t last.
When we reached the hotel, there was good news: A notice on a bulletin board in the lobby informed us that our initiation as embeds had been delayed indefinitely, and we no longer had to report for duty at seven the next morning. Perhaps, I thought, President Bush was losing his nerve. Perhaps, without Turkey on side, an invasion would be impossible. Or maybe it was just the weather: Time was pressing on, and the spring storm season was approaching, as was the summer heat.
That night Glen and I had dinner at the Marriott’s Terrace Grill. A local family was throwing a birthday party, and a karaoke system had been set up at the back of the dining room. We sat at a dazzling white tablecloth and nibbled on celery and raw carrots as a teenage girl in a black cloak and hijab head scarf performed an atonal rendition of a Kylie Minogue song. Eventually a Pakistani waiter appeared, and we both ordered beers. It felt appropriate to celebrate. The waiter returned a few minutes later with a silver tray, on top of which were two bottles of Budweiser, dripping with icy condensation. He poured them carefully into the crystal glasses on our table. “Cheers,” I said, raising my drink, before taking a long, thirsty gulp. I grimaced. Something was wrong. I looked at the bottle. “The beer’s off,” I declared.
“No, it’s not,” said Glen from behind his enormous menu. “It’s nonalcoholic. Beer’s illegal in Kuwait. Thought you knew.”
“What?” I spat, looking at the bottle with disgust. I felt like a child at a fairground who’d just dropped his stick of cotton candy.
“Don’t worry,” said Glen. “This stuff still gives you a hangover. So at least you can feel like Hemingway in the morning.”
It was only when I saw the Marriott in daylight, after my epic two-course breakfast in Café Royal, that I realized Kuwait was preparing seriously for war. The building was protected by a wall of concrete and brown sandbags as well as a platoon of Kuwaiti soldiers, who had installed an airport-style X-ray machine in front of the revolving door. They smiled sarcastically—the way teenagers with semiautomatic weapons do—as I walked past. My plan was to visit two of Kuwait’s American-style shopping centers: the Marina Mall and the Souq Sharq, on the Kuwaiti seafront. I would head back to the hotel for a swim and a massage that afternoon.
“Taxi?” asked the middle-aged Pakistani bellboy.
It was windy, and I could barely see the other side of the street through a stinging cloud of dust being blown in from the desert.
I gave a bilingual nod. Moments later a white Ford Taurus—straight out of the American suburbs—crept up beside me. The driver, a distinguished-looking Kuwaiti with a heavy mustache and two-tone hair, grinned and nodded at me through the passenger window. I found it a bit unnerving.
“Hussein will look after you,” said the bellboy with a singsong accent.
“Hussein?” I said, sliding warily onto the worn leather of the backseat. I feared this was some kind of awful practical joke. The door clonked shut behind me and the Taurus began to inch forward on its big, wobbly American suspension. Hussein, I noticed, was staring at me in his rearview mirror. I wanted to beg him not to kidnap me. I wondered if the bellboy was in on the plot. I patted my pockets for the five-thousand-dollar envelope, before remembering I’d left it at the hotel.
“Hi,” I ventured. “I’m a journalist. I’m a journalist for the London Times, a British newspaper. I’m here to cover the war.”
The taxi driver grinned and nodded. We edged out of the hotel’s valet parking area and onto the busy two-lane highway. Every other vehicle was a U.S. military Humvee, with a machine gunner poking out of the roof. I could feel the slow drumbeat of a headache inside my frontal lobe. Glen was right: The bloody nonalcoholic beer had given me a hangover. And quite a nasty one, too.
“Sahaffi?” asked Hussein.
I had no idea what he meant.
“Yeah, very happy,” I said, hoping that would be the end of it.
“La tapar, ana Sahaffi!” he continued as he started to laugh riotously. I wished I’d learned Arabic before leaving Los Angeles. (I later learned that sahaffi means “journalist”; “La tapar, ana sahaffi” means “Don’t shoot, I’m a journalist.” It’s extremely ill advised to travel without learning such basic phrases.)
“My name’s Chris,” I said, slightly irritably, in an effort to steer the conversation back into English. “Nice to meet you.”
The driver turned to look me in the eye. Then he grinned and produced a business card from under his armrest. At the top was a blue logo in English, which read, “Al Kuds Taxi Service, 24-hours.” Underneath I saw confirmation that the bellboy wasn’t joking. “Salman Hussein—Chauffeur.”
As I looked out the taxi’s window, Kuwait’s lottery-style oil wealth was obvious: The skyscrapers, hotels, and minimalls all looked as though they’d been FedEx’ed overnight from Texas, then dumped in the sand. It was also clear from the patchy infrastructure: It seemed as though the Kuwaitis hadn’t had time to join up the hastily constructed buildings. Pavement stopped and started at random, making way for the occasional open sewer. A lunchtime stroll would probably get quite unpleasant without a pair of rubber boots. The city’s dilapidated souqs, meanwhile, looked older than the Old Testament but were stacked full of the latest in Silicon Valley gadgetry, from Xboxes to forty-two-inch plasma screens. In spite of the wealth, however, scars of the Iraqi invasion were still visible: Every so often the Taurus cruised past the blackened foundation of an office building that was mottled with bullet holes and shell craters.