“Good stuff,” said Barrow.
The line went dead.
I felt so utterly dejected I almost didn’t hear the Iraqi mortar when it exploded less than two hundred yards outside the camp.
“Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!” bellowed Hustler. We looked at each other, both thinking the same thing: the Bedouin.
As he masked up, Hustler shook his head in frustration.
Still upset with Barrow, I flung my cracked, mud-smeared glasses into the sand and pulled out my own mask.
I wondered if this story would get spiked, too.
War makes you feel special. It makes you feel better than your office-bound colleagues, gossiping over the watercooler or wiping mayonnaise from their mouths as they hunch in their veal-fattening pens. War gives your life narrative structure. The banal becomes the dramatic. When you’re at war, you don’t worry about American Express bills. War spares you the washing up. Life at the brink of death makes all other life seem trivial. You’re a hero when you’re on the front lines. Here’s another thing about war: As much as you hate the fear and the MREs and the mutilated corpses and the incoming mortars and the freezing nights in the Humvee, you know you’ll be a more popular and interesting person when, or if, you return.
Because war is all about death, and everyone wants to know what death is like.
These, as far as I can tell, are the upsides of war. But I suspect war doesn’t make you any better. All life, ultimately, exists on the brink of death; war just makes it obvious. Besides, no matter how close to death you come, you never get any closer to understanding it. “Death is easy,” as one veteran combat correspondent once said to me. “Life is hard.” War, I fear, makes it impossible to go back home. And then you have to go to war again, to make sure you’re still special.
So this was what I did on the weekend of March 21. On Friday night I lay in a shallow foxhole wearing a chemical suit, with my fingers plugged in my ears as the Iraqis threw mortar rounds at us and we killed them in return. We killed a lot faster than they could throw, and soon the mortars stopped.
On Saturday morning I squatted in Kilo Battery’s FDC, or fire direction center, writing a story about Bedouin nomads on my laptop, which I had wrapped with plastic sheeting to stop the sand from getting between the keys. The FDC was constructed of two Humvees parked back-to-back with a heavy tarp canopy in between. Under the canvas was a bulletin board, a table with a map flattened out on it, and a steel-cased computer. The computer, I was told, could analyze weather, wind, map coordinates, and other variables—including the color of the Iraqis’ underwear, probably—and then decide how much gunpowder should be put inside the shells and the angle the howitzers should be pointed at. All of this ensured, using mathematical rules that the Mesopotamians themselves had probably invented, that Kilo Battery produced the maximum possible number of body parts per round.
The big guns might have looked primitive, but they were deceptively ambitious in their destruction, and more accurate, I suspected, than any billion-dollar air force gadget. From my dusty corner of the FDC, I heard new targets being called in over the radio by forward observers, who were somewhere out in the kill zone ahead of us. I was grateful I wasn’t embedded with them. Seconds after each new coordinate was processed, the pompous bolero of the howitzers resumed.
I wondered how many we’d killed. Hundreds? Thousands?
On Saturday afternoon we filled up with fuel. This was more complicated than it sounds. It involved skidding down into a dried riverbed, where four jumbo-size tanker trucks had been parked behind a cover of yellowing palms—the only vegetation I’d seen so far. The tankers were guarded by a semicircle of unsmiling Marines, pointing .50-cals out into the murk. One by one, Kilo Battery’s vehicles filled up with diesel, then wobbled and grunted out of the mud forecourt. Behind us, other units were lined up in a perfectly choreographed ballet of military logistics.
With full tanks, we rejoined Highway 8, this time using the four-lane paved surface. The road was littered with rubber. Then I realized the rubber was, in fact, black leather. As we began to pass makeshift pens with barefoot prisoners inside, I understood what had happened. The eight thousand or so soldiers of the 51st Mechanized Division had surrendered—by taking off their boots. And now there was a cobbler’s nightmare of scuffed leather and snapped laces flung all over the asphalt. The Iraqis who hadn’t been captured stood on the roadside and cheered at the military convoy as it thundered past. I wondered if they were genuinely happy to see us or if they just wanted our rations. It was hard, however, not to feel stirred by the welcome. Perhaps the Iraqis, mainly Shiites in this part of the country, wanted to be liberated after all. The cheering and waving continued for miles, until I felt a stinging pressure behind my eyes. I looked at Hustler. He was smiling like he’d just won the lottery and smoking a victory cigarette. “Boy, this sure makes you feel good,” he said. “Now I know we’re doing the right thing.”
I was growing to like Hustler. I respected the way he’d handled the Bedouin, and the fact that he’d turned down my offer to call his wife on my satellite phone. “If I call the missus, it’ll just make it worse,” he said. “She’ll hear one of the howitzers go off and think I’m about to fuckin’ die.” Murphy in contrast had jumped at the chance to use the phone. “No shit, I’m in Iraq,” I heard him boast to his girlfriend, a college student in Nevada. “There are dead guys everywhere.”
We spent Saturday night in a camp outside Basra. Surrounding us was enough military hardware to invade China, never mind Iraq. For the first time since crossing the border, I felt safe. I felt so safe, in fact, that I contemplated putting up my Xtreme 19 Two-Man Adventure Pod. I thought the better of it, however, and decided instead to sleep on the ground beside the Humvee. I hoped there were no tarantulas in Iraq. Before I passed out, I called Alana, then my mum. It was the first time I could talk without a background soundtrack of artillery fire and incoming alerts.
“Are you safe?” asked my mother. “A man from the Iraqi information department says he’s going to cut everyone’s heads off…”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Don’t listen to the Iraqis. They don’t have a chance. This will all be over pretty quickly, I’m sure.”
After seeing the welcome party on Highway 8, I almost believed it.
“Can’t you come back?” asked my mother.
“Leaving would be more dangerous than staying,” I said.
I wished I’d been making this up. But it was true. There was simply no way of going south. Even if there was, it would be career suicide. As far as I knew, I’d managed to get only one story published, in one edition of the paper. And besides, I didn’t have my passport, so I wouldn’t have been able to leave Kuwait anyway. I was stuck with Capt. Buck Rogers and his men until the end of the war.
Or at least until I could come up with a better plan.
The next morning the 1st Marine Division went on a Sunday drive. Iraq was supposed to be the worst camping trip of my life, but it felt more like the worst road trip—a crawl to the seaside on a sweltering August vacation day, on an empty stomach, with the locals taking potshots at you from the hard shoulder. We set off at dawn in a steel fist of a convoy that stretched further than I could see in either direction. This, I was told, was known as a “thunder run.” We headed north, up Highway 8, in the direction of Baghdad. We were well covered: On either side of the freeway were formations of U.S. Army missile launchers, raised into the firing position. Then we saw the army’s bridge-building division, comprised of hundreds of amphibious trucks, each one carrying gigantic folding metal structures. In spite of the firepower, I flinched every time an overpass loomed. Each one had a sinister brick sentry box on top with narrow slits for windows—perfect for lobbing out grenades.