Hussein dropped me off at the Marina Mall first. He asked for fifteen dinars, which seemed reasonable, so I paid him twenty, largely out of relief at having arrived safely. Once inside, I experienced profound culture shock as I watched a young Kuwaiti woman lift up her veil so she could take a bite out of a Quarter-Pounder. At the Virgin Megastore, meanwhile, was a gigantic banner that read: “If it’s not banned, we’ve got it!” I wondered if the Kuwaiti authorities had read Sir Richard Branson’s autobiography—which contains anecdotes about the Virgin founder’s wife-swapping and the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards running naked from his studio at gunpoint—before giving the Megastore a license. I doubted it.
The English-speaking Kuwaitis I talked to were convinced that, because I was a sahaffi, I knew exactly when the invasion would start. They became visibly irritated when I told them I knew nothing. They hated Saddam Hussein, they said, but the war was bad for business, so they wished the Americans would hurry up and get it over with. I was taken aback by their pragmatism.
Bored, I bought a CD from the Arabic section of the Virgin Megastore and called Hussein to ask him to pick me up. The Souq Sharq, however, turned out to be much the same, only with more fast-food outlets. Hussein’s fare, meanwhile, seemed to increase every time I got in. It cost twenty-five dinars to get to Souq Sharq, even though the journey seemed shorter than the last one.
By the time I got back to the hotel—in time for the daily “turndown” service and the chocolate truffles left on my pillow—I had laid waste to a fifty-dinar note. Before ducking through the X-ray machine at the revolving door, I asked the bellboy if he knew the dinar-dollar exchange rate. “I believe the dinar is worth about $3.30, sir,” he said with a deferential smile and a slight bow. That meant I had spent about $170 on cab fares. Shit. Once again I dreaded the expense account I would have to send to Fletcher. Either taxi fares were extraordinarily high in Kuwait (unlikely, given that a gallon of gas costs about seventy-seven cents), or I had been given the full tourist workover by Salman Hussein. The bellboy noticed my look of anguish. “Is everything okay, sir? Did Hussein look after you?” he asked. I gave a desultory nod and headed inside. Back in my room, I found the entry on taxis in the Lonely Planet guide. “Kuwaiti taxis have no meters,” it said. “Negotiate a fare at the beginning of the trip.”
Days passed. Hussein got richer. I became a regular at the Marriott’s penthouse health spa. I put on weight. On the roof of the hotel, television news networks set up cameras to watch for incoming Scuds. The desert haunted me. At night, storms decorated my hotel room window with sand. On some mornings the only view from my room was an eerie orange glow, flying sand having rendered the sun useless. I wondered how the Marines could fight a war in such conditions. I became a veteran of the alcohol-free hangover. I kept the television tuned to MTV. The headlines, however, were unavoidable: “Saddam destroys another two al-Samoud missiles; UN soldiers guarding the twho-hundred-mile-long ‘demilitarized zone’ between Kuwait and Iraq complain that American Marines keep cutting holes in their fence; the pope calls on Catholics to commemorate Ash Wednesday by fasting and praying for peace; Colin Powell accuses Saddam of ordering the production of more al-Samouds; and in Washington, Iraqi exiles say Western antiwar protestors are ‘ignorant and misinformed.’”
Finally, almost a week after arriving in Kuwait, the notice I had been dreading appeared in the lobby: “All embeds must report for duty at the Hilton Kuwait Resort at 7:00 A.M. on Tuesday, March 11.” On Monday, Glen and I moved to another hotel, the Golden Tulip at Messilah Beach, because our reservations at the Marriott had expired and the hotel was full. The hoteliers of Kuwait would all probably retire after the invasion, I thought. My five-night room bill at the Marriott had come to nearly twenty-five hundred dollars. The Golden Tulip was to the west of the city, with gardens that sloped down to the shores of the Persian Gulf. The hotel was still undergoing reconstruction after the Iraqis razed it in 1990. It even had a bulletin board positioned in front of a half-demolished wall next to the swimming pool showing what the place looked like immediately after the war. “The Iraqis did this,” it read. The hotel’s tennis court, however, had survived, albeit with a few bullet holes in its surface. And so, on our last day of freedom, Glen and I thwacked out a couple of amateur sets to the soundtrack of a call-to-prayer, which echoed out of speakers bolted to the telephone poles.
I needed all the prayer I could get.
“It happens,” said the burly female army instructor, with a sigh. “If you’re in the suit a long time, you’re going to do it. No question.” She used a thick, manly palm to wipe the sweat from her forehead, and made a tough-luck face. I could see saddlebags of sweat under the armpits of her T-shirt. I squirmed on my folding plastic chair, pulled my brown Nike baseball cap lower over my face, and glanced around at my fellow media embeds. We were all wearing the same expression: that of children playing a fun, but forbidden, game, a game that could get us all killed.
It was hot out on the tennis court of the Hilton Kuwait Resort—hotter than California, probably hotter than Venus on a hot day. In fact, the Hilton looked as though it belonged on another planet. Whoever had built the place, with its 134 rooms, four presidential suites, 80 beachside chalets, and 62 private apartments, was a big fan of 1950s space-age modernism. The building was long and flat, and constructed almost entirely out of concrete rectangles and blue-tinted glass. Its size was inhuman; the hotel was more than 90 percent full, but it felt deserted.
We had been led out onto the clay court to learn how to use our gas masks and chemical suits—a relief, given that I’d missed the “NBC” course in London. The instructor’s claim—that “it happens”—was in response to a query from an aging Canadian with a foie gras belly and a beard that sprouted like white moss over both his chins. “Excuse the question, Ma’am,” he’d rasped. “But what happens if we shit in our chemical suits during an attack?” It was clearly a question that the instructor—barely out of her twenties, with a wide, oval face and a boyish bowl of black hair—had thought about at length. “It will degrade your suit’s ability to perform, sir,” she said. “It’s water-resistant, but not water-proof. You shouldn’t urinate inside it, but you’re going to be sweating so much, you won’t have to. As for defecation… well, sir, you never know how your body’s gonna react to being slimed.”
The phrase “being slimed” made me think of Ghostbusters, the film in which Dr. Peter Venkman, played by Bill Murray, gets gunked by a ghost called Slimer. I had to hand it to the military’s euphemism department: It made the thought of being gassed a lot easier to stomach. It certainly beat Wilfred Owen’s description of a gas attack victim in “Dulce et Decorum Est”: “… yelling out and stumbling / And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime… the white eyes writhing in his face.”
The day—March 11—had started at 6:30 A.M., when Glen and I left the Golden Tulip in Hussein’s taxi. Glen initially refused to get in the car, claiming that Hussein had ripped him off consistently on every trip. Eventually, however, a fare was negotiated, the Taurus was loaded with our luggage, and we headed to the Hilton. The traffic outside the hotel was so bad that we decided to get out and walk the last few yards: It seemed like a good idea, until the wheels of my metal dolly got stuck in a patch of gravel, bending the frame. It survived, however, making it beyond the sandbags and concrete antitank barriers to the military checkpoint, where a Kuwaiti soldier went through every item in my rucksack. “Is this yours?” he asked, holding up my electric toothbrush. Behind me, I heard sniggering.