By early afternoon we had followed the Shatt al-Arab waterway toward the town of al-Qurnah. With bleached desert on one side and sparkling blue water on the other, it almost felt as though we were in California. The asphalt of Highway 8, however, was virtually unmarked. Road signs, in Arabic and English, were few and far between. And I hadn’t seen a single gas station.
I kept my shortwave radio switched on and listened to furious Arabs being interviewed by the BBC. They predicted apocalpyse and defeat for the Western infidels. There seemed to be no reports about the Marines’ steady progress northward. I did learn, however, that Basra International Airport had been secured and that the Marines were encountering “pockets of resistance” near al-Nasiriyah, capital of Iraq’s date-growing region. I remembered reading in my Lonely Planet guide-book that Nasiriyah is only a few miles from Ur—Prophet Abraham’s alleged birthplace—which was excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. The royal tombs of Ur had survived for forty-five hundred years. I wondered if they would make it through 2003.
As we chugged forward, rarely getting over 10 miles an hour, I tried to eat an MRE, but I’d left my appetite behind somewhere in the Kuwaiti desert. Every few miles we’d see Iraqi civilians standing on the side of the road with young children on their shoulders. They would wave, make peace signs, and point at their mouths. Sometimes a Marine would throw them a yellow bag of humanitarian rations. At one point we passed a Marine who had constructed a roadside lavatory out of an upturned ammunition crate. He sat on it, ignoring the passing traffic, reading a book. The cover looked like Hemingway. Surrounding him was a junkyard of Western consumer culture: crushed Marlboro packs, dented Coca-Cola cans, torn Skittles wrappers, and hundreds of empty bottles of al-Qassim water. I later read that the coalition troops in the Middle East were going through 45 million fifty-ounce water bottles every month.
“The second we take Baghdad,” muttered Murphy, “someone’s gonna get a fat-assed contract to clean this shit up.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Buck. “That’s probably our job.”
At about 4:00 P.M. we left Highway 8 and crossed the Euphrates on a temporary iron bridge. Murphy, who had taken another doxycycline tablet at the camp in Basra, was starting to look a bit perkier, although his face was still streaked with sweat and mud. On the north side of the river, Iraq changed for the worse. We found ourselves in a ghoulish landscape of desiccated mud banks. The place looked as though it had been hit by a nuclear bomb. Dying reeds slumped in pools of brown water. Then, through a gritty fog, came men who looked like apparitions: skeletons in torn robes, with bare feet, and festering blisters on their legs and faces. They held up bony infants as diseased mutts snapped at their feet. We drove on, throwing out rations as we passed. As the sun ducked under the horizon, I wondered if we’d descended into purgatory. Was this really what had become of the Babylonians: the people who invented the number zero; who split the day into twenty-four hours, and the hours into sixty minutes?
“Welcome to the marshlands,” said Buck. “The most fucked-up place on earth.”
I kept thinking we would stop, but we never did. We just lumbered onward, down a recently bulldozed surface of dried mud. To the right of us, over a berm, Saddam appeared to be building a new freeway. Either that, or it was one of the Iraqi president’s drainage plants, installed after 1991 to destroy one of the world’s largest freshwater ecosystems and make half a million Marsh Arabs homeless. Saddam apparently saw the Shiite marsh-dwellers as a political threat. I wondered what the mudflats would have looked like back in the 1950s, when the Ma’dan still crossed the marshes in wooden canoes, raised water buffalo, and made cathedral-like mudhifs, or huts, out of dried reeds. It was almost too depressing to think about.
As we pushed on, we were overtaken by white Nissan pickup trucks. One of the drivers, I noticed, was wearing a black dishdasha and a New York Yankees baseball cap. The vehicles streaked past like grounded comets, leaving behind trails of stinging orange dust. One of them almost clipped our Humvee.
“Who the fuck are those dudes?” asked Murphy, coughing.
“Special forces,” said Buck with a sneer. I wondered if any of them were SAS, the next generation of David Silvers.
“They need special fuckin’ driving lessons,” concluded Murphy.
For the first time since Kuwait, we all laughed.
The convoy continued. By now it was almost completely dark outside, so Buck handed Murphy a pair of night-vision goggles. When he put them on, Murphy looked as though he had a telescope strapped to his forehead. I recalled what the colonel had told the Marines in Kuwait: “Your average Iraqi, when he sees a Marine with night-vision goggles and an M-16 rolling past his house in an armored Humvee, is gonna think he’s having a close encounter of the third kind.”
We drove with our lights off, as did everyone else. From the back of the Humvee, without the benefit of night vision, it felt suicidal. Our progress came in short, jerky bursts, with Murphy stamping on the brakes, making us crunch violently to a halt inches from the luggage rack of the Humvee in front.
I’d been at war for almost seventy-two hours now, and the nights were turning out to be a lot worse than the days. I kept wondering what was lurking behind the berm to our right. I’d once read that some of the Ma’dan were descended from the Zenj—a race of cannibal slaves who revolted under the leadership of Ali the Abominable in the year 869, until they were driven back into the marshes by the Babylonians. The image of the slave warriors made me shiver. I wished I had no imagination. I pulled my North Face jacket over my shoulders and tried to fall asleep. My limbs, however, were aching too much. And, as always, the reports over the Humvee’s radio were getting more horrifying as the night progressed. At 10:00 P.M. the first medevac requests were called in: A seven-ton had overturned; a Humvee had crashed; a tank had fallen into the Euphrates. These hellish dispatches were all delivered by the same disembodied bass monotone—like a voice from the underworld coming out of the darkness.
Five hours later, at 3:00 A.M., we finally stopped. We had been driving for twenty hours. I fell out of the Humvee and dry-heaved. I looked up to see a corporal from the vehicle behind us. “Christ, I’m saddle sore,” he said.
Murphy, exhausted, pulled off his goggles, threw down his sleeping bag in a ditch, and collapsed on top of it. He passed out with his arms over his head. The Irishman, I realized, had pulled off an astonishing feat of physical endurance. Buck, as usual, made his bed on the Humvee’s hood; Hustler curled up on the roof. By now it was savagely cold. Each gust of wind whistled through the Humvee’s panel cracks. I wished my chemical suit was lined with wool, not charcoal. I lay in an inverted U-shape across the rear seats, my back arched over the gunner’s footplate in between. The armor of my flak jacket, useful for once, helped support my shoulders. My head, meanwhile, drooped backward, as though I were in the recovery position. I started to shiver uncontrollably, probably because I hadn’t eaten since Kuwait. I couldn’t sleep. Wouldn’t this be the perfect time for the Republican Guard to attack?
We were in EmCon Bravo, so calling Alana was out of the question. If I powered up my satellite phone now, a Klaxon would probably go off in Baghdad. Instead, I flicked on my shortwave radio and plugged in the earbud headphones. This was a mistake. The World Service informed me that the Republican Guard had captured five American soldiers, including a woman, and killed eight more. The report said the Americans had been ambushed near al-Nasiriyah. Wasn’t that where we were? Two of the American prisoners had already been interviewed on Iraqi television, in contravention of the Geneva Convention. They said they were from the 507th Maintenance Company. I tried not to imagine the horror of being caught alive.