My heart changed tempo.
There was more to come: ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd had been killed in Basra; a cameraman for Australia’s ABC network had died after a car bomb exploded in northern Iraq; an American soldier had been arrested for throwing a grenade into a hooch in Kuwait; two British pilots were presumed dead after being downed by a “friendly” Patriot missile; ten Marines had been slaughtered in a fake surrender in the marshlands; and the Iraqi information minister was claiming that the Americans’ advance up Highway 8 was all part of an elaborate trap. “We have made them enter the quagmire and they will not be able to get out,” he declared. What the shortwave radio didn’t tell me was that the army’s 3rd Infantry Division—in which Oliver Poole was embedded—was already less than a day’s march from Baghdad.
After the onslaught of bad news, the BBC announcer changed tone. “And now,” she crooned, “we go live to Hollywood.” It was then I remembered: Tonight—still Sunday, March 23, in California—was the seventy-fifth annual Academy Awards. Somewhere, in an alternative universe, I would be eighty-five hundred miles away, in a bow tie and black tuxedo, sipping champagne in the pressroom of the Kodak Theater. After the show, perhaps, I would take Alana to the Vanity Fair post-Oscars party at Morton’s Steakhouse. Perhaps I would meet Kate Winslet, Brad Pitt, or Julia Roberts.
But there was no alternative universe.
I was stuck in some godawful swamp in a faraway country on the front lines of an invasion, shivering, lonely, and waiting to die.
I was awakened at 6:30 A.M. by a voice in my head.
“We live in fictitious times,” it said. “We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man who’s sending us to war for fictitious reasons.” For a while I thought I was still dreaming. I wanted to sit upright, but there was no blood in my limbs. I released a low groan of pain. “My back,” I said. “Oh no. My back…” Somehow, I managed to shift the dead weight of my legs. Then I realized that my shortwave radio was still switched on and the headphones were still jammed into my ears.
“We are against this war, Mr. Bush,” said the voice, which I now recognized as belonging to the filmmaker Michael Moore. “Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you.” I could hear booing and whistling in the background as an orchestra started to play cheesy show business music. I released another groan.
For a moment I wanted Moore to be out there with Kilo Battery. I wanted him to make his antiwar speech in the marshlands, to the Marines. I wanted him to see what Saddam had done to the Ma’dan. I wanted him to know what it feels like to wake up in a Humvee, surrounded by people who want to kill you, and listen to a tuxedoed film-maker in California tell you that it’s all based on a lie.
It was then I realized the true genius of the embedding scheme: It had turned me into a Marine. I was thinking like a fighter, not a reporter. And yet I wasn’t a fighter. I was an idiot in a blue flak jacket. The Marines didn’t even want me there. Being an embed, it seemed, was the loneliest job on earth.
Buck, Murphy, and Hustler were already awake.
“Did you hear the World Service?” I asked, stretching my legs.
“If you listen to the BBC World Service,” declared Buck, “we lost this goddamn war four days ago. It’s depressing.”
“Want some coffee?” asked Hustler.
I didn’t respond. I thought I must have misheard him.
“Coffee?” he said again.
Then I smelled it: hot, chocolaty coffee, like an olfactory orgasm.
“God yes,” I said, walking around the Humvee.
Behind the rear wheel, Hustler had lit a camping stove and was boiling water. In it, he’d poured MRE cappuccino powder. I winced at the thought of what it would taste like: I was used to ten-dollar tins of gourmet espresso.
“Welcome to Starbucks,” said Hustler, grinning.
He handed me a steaming metal mug. I slurped the hot liquid warily. It was the best cup of coffee I’d tasted in my life.
“First sergeant,” I announced. “If you were a girl, I’d marry you.”
“Fuck off,” he replied.
I didn’t blame Hustler for not wanting to marry me. I hadn’t washed or changed my underwear for four days. I was living like an animal. My morning routine involved digging a hole for my morning evacuation, washing my face with a dollop of foam hand sanitizer, then shaving in the Humvee’s rearview mirror using cold bottled water. (By now the Marines had been told to get rid of their mustaches, because they interfered with the gas masks.) Then I’d try to eat breakfast, usually a sachet of peanut butter or raspberry jam. More often than not, it would make me retch.
Today, however, Hustler’s coffee, along with the relief of surviving the night, had cheered me up. By the time I climbed back into the Humvee, I was humming “Borderline” again. Then I realized it: I was actually proud of myself for lasting this long. I was proud of myself for not backing out of the embedding scheme at the Kuwait Hilton. I was even proud of my stinking, four-day-old underwear. What’s more, the stress of the invasion seemed to be using up all my excess adrenaline, so that during my fleeting moments of safety, I felt in better physical form than I had in years. Perhaps Dr. Ruth had been right all along. I remembered what she’d told me about “fight-or-flight” anxiety at her clinic in New York, before September 11. “It’s called ‘acute stress response,’” she said. “Young men used to need that on the battlefield.” I almost wanted to call Dr. Ruth and tell her that my adrenaline had finally come in useful. At last, it was doing its job. That was when I realized it: Part of me was actually enjoying this.
It didn’t take long for the part of me enjoying the war to come to its senses. It took until sundown, in fact, when the fighting resumed. The attacks weren’t the organized, tank-led assaults we’d expected from the Republican Guard. Instead they were opportunistic potshots from Iraqi “irregulars,” who appeared out of the mud and vanished just as quickly. Even tracking their mortars by radar was pointless; by the time we fired back, the insurgents had moved. They were clearly smarter than their recently slaughtered comrades in the 51st Mechanized Division.
The 1st Marine Division was much further north now, toward the city of al-Diwaniyah, and the convoy had split up into tactical units. Kilo Battery had spent the day, as usual, looking for a safe place to park the howitzers, eventually finding a suitably grim stretch of marshland in the late afternoon.
The Marines went through their usual routine of surveying the site twice, using a plumb line and an arc, to make sure the guns would fire in the right direction. No sooner were they done, however, than a herd of camels began strolling haughtily through the camp. Buck groaned. “I’m sure the goddamn Iraqis are dressing up as camels now,” he muttered. Then came the inevitable Bedouin shepherd, ushering his animals with a bent wooden stick. He wore a look on his face that said, “Who? Me?” Buck thumped his palm against his forehead. “Lance corporal,” he said to Murphy, “will you get the Arabic phrase book, find the word for ‘Danger,’ and write it on some big pieces of cardboard from the MRE boxes. I wanna put up signs.”