“GAS! GAS! GAS!” shouted Buck.
I heard the crump of a nearby explosion.
I always feared I would scream like a girl. In fact, it turned out more like a baritone shout, starting out on-key and then veering off into an atonal vibrato. I performed the scream in a crouched fetal position, with my arms wrapped over my helmet, behind the rear wheel of a seven-ton ammunition truck. In hindsight, of course, a gunpowder truck wasn’t the cleverest place to cower. But it was the only protection I had, out there in the nothingness, amid the smoke and the flames
It wasn’t the Seersucker that made me scream. For one thing, it was too far away (it whooshed over our heads and landed six hundred yards outside Camp Commando, headquarters of Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force). And I was too busy putting my gas mask on to realize what was happening. Instead, the scream came later, at about 8:00 P.M. At the time, I was walking in almost total darkness from Buck’s Humvee to the firing line, where six howitzers were pointing upward at the horizon. It was Hustler’s idea: He’d suggested it would be a good idea to interview Kilo Battery’s gunners.
Everything seemed fine; safe, almost.
Then came a flash of light so brilliantly white it bleached my eyeballs, followed by an overwhelming stench of cordite and a pressure wave that right-hooked me in the face, almost knocking me over. All this was accompanied by an explosion so loud I thought it was the last thing I would ever hear. When I closed my eyes, I could see only a flood of white light. When I opened them again, the light was beginning to fade, like a lamp burn in celluloid. For a second I wondered if I was dead, or blinded. Then the light bubbled and dimmed and I began to make out the dark outlines of the vehicles. No one was screaming, or running. Then, to the east, Echo Battery’s guns went off, and I realized what had happened. We had opened fire.
The gun went off again. Stupidly, I’d continued to look at it, and I found myself blinded for the second time. I began to wonder if I’d done some permanent damage to my eyes. My ears, meanwhile, weren’t just ringing, they were shrieking. I felt like Keith Richards after a two-nighter at Earl’s Court.
My panic attack lasted perhaps five minutes. When I finally brought myself under control and got back to the Humvee, I began to feel relief that we hadn’t been hit. That was when Iraq’s 51st Mechanized Division started returning fire. “Snowstorm! Snowstorm! Snowstorm!” bellowed the radio. Buck threw himself out of the Humvee and shouted “GAS! GAS! GAS!” I got my mask on in record time, cracking the right lens of my glasses underfoot in the process. “I thought the Iraqis were going to bloody surrender!” I shouted to no one through the valve near my mouth. “And where’s the air force?” I hadn’t spotted a single aircraft overhead. This didn’t feel like a high-tech war. We were firing cannons, for God’s sake. I thought this was supposed to be like a video game. Fortunately, the Iraqis were fighting an even lower-tech war and shooting hopelessly long, their shells landing hundreds of yards to the south, in the giant parking lot of the desert. The better news was that no chemical weapons had been detected. Speckled Ali, apparently, was still in excellent health.
By the time the all-clear was called, the howitzers were still busy dealing out death from a distance. I was told by a Marine that a bullet from an M-16 weighs barely more than a tenth of an ounce. A shell from a howitzer weighs 13.5 pounds. The round, known as DPICM, or “dual purpose, improved conventional munitions,” contains eighty-eight grenades, which soar over the heads of the enemy, separate, and then explode—piercing armor, dismantling body parts, and slicing through the pulp and gristle left behind. The howitzers turn the battlefield into a butcher’s shop floor. And now, for miles up and down the DMZ, I could see the white flashes of the big guns going off. All four batteries were pumping out rounds at the same time: twenty-four guns firing a total of eighteen rounds, each one with eighty-eight bomblets, every thirty seconds.
Somewhere over the border, death was hard at work.
“Hey Chris,” said Hustler at about 10:00 P.M., as the guns kept spitting out their fury. “How would you like to fire one of the howitzers?”
“What?”
“Maybe we can arrange for you to shoot one of the big guns. That would make a pretty cool story, wouldn’t it?”
“Er, yeah, maybe,” I stammered. I imagined being personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers.
“But, y’know, there might be an ethical problem with that,” I said.
“Damn right there’d be an ethical problem,” interrupted Buck, who was studying a map under a red night-light. “Both your asses would end up in Guantánamo Bay. Ain’t no embeds firing no goddamn howitzers.”
Hustler gave me an “I tried” shrug.
Then Buck said, “Oh, Chris, I forgot to tell you, we’re in EmCon Delta now. You can use your phone and file a story. I think the enemy knows we’re here. If they don’t, they’re either dead or about to be dead.”
The thought of writing a story seemed very strange. After all, I hadn’t spoken to the office since leaving Camp Grizzly.
I switched on my satellite phone, waved the antenna around to lock on to the satellite, and dialed the foreign desk.
“Foreign new-ews?” said Barrow’s familiar voice.
“Martin,” I said.
“Chris!” he said, almost choking with surprise. He sounded genuinely pleased that I was still alive. The familiarity of Barrow’s voice suddenly made me well up. I got a horrible feeling I was going to burst into tears.
I tried to pull myself together.
“This is awful,” I said. “This is really, really awful.”
By now, I’d forgotten that the howitzers were going off in the background.
“Bloody hell, Chris,” he said. “What are those, er, loud noises?”
“Guns,” I replied. “Our guns, mainly. And some incoming. But mainly us.”
“Blimey,” said Barrow. “Are you in a position to file us something? Just give me something off the top of your head?”
For the first time in my career, I blanked out. I couldn’t think of anything. I was the world’s worst war correspondent.
“Come on, Chris,” said Barrow. “You’ve dictated stories a million times before. Just concentrate. You’re going to be fine.”
But I wasn’t fine. I was very much not fine.
And I had nothing to say.
The guns fired for six hours straight. I sat in the Humvee for most of it, wishing I’d been able to dictate a more coherent news story to Barrow. Still, given that I was the only Times journalist with the frontline forces, I reassured myself that a news story with my name on it would appear on the front page. Not, of course, that it seemed worth it. What kind of nutjob would do this for a living?
Inside the Humvee, the disembodied voice of the radio informed us that the infantry had already blasted its way through the bulldozer-torn hole in the DMZ and into southern Iraq. “We have contact, we have contact,” the voice kept repeating. I looked out of the Humvee’s window, but it was still suffocatingly dark outside. The only suggestion of the violence over the border was the distant echo of gunpowder and metal hitting metal. For the first time since leaving Los Angeles, I thought about Oliver Poole, my rival on the Daily Telegraph. I thanked the God I didn’t believe in that I hadn’t been given Poole’s place with the infantry. I imagined him crossing the DMZ on foot, with only a flak jacket and notebook to protect him. The poor bastard. I wondered if he was as terrified as me. (He wasn’t. “I did feel remarkably unapprehensive,” he wrote of the first night of the war. “I was confident in the ability of the soldiers I was with to protect me, and I had no doubt that somehow I would emerge unscathed, with a string of distinguished newspaper reports to my credit.”)