It had been another miserable day. After a week spent in a Humvee with three Marines, I was desperate to talk to a civillian, or at least another embed. I tried calling David Willis, the BBC reporter I’d met at Camp Grizzly, but I couldn’t get through. From what I’d heard on the World Service, he was still stuck in Nasiriyah, which, like Basra, was proving harder to secure than expected. I also tried Glen, who I assumed was still embedded at Al Jaber air force base, but his line was dead, too. Instead, I stumbled over to the FDC and charged up my laptop by plugging it into Kilo Battery’s diesel generator. Even fully charged, my beleaguered Sony had only an hour of battery power. My satellite phone wasn’t much better. Convinced that we weren’t going anywhere in the storm, I took advantage of the power connection and wrote six hundred words on the technicals, then filed it to Barrow via Copymaster. I internally congratulated myself on becoming a slightly less incompetent war correspondent.
I would tell you about the rest of the morning, but you already know: the foxhole; the sunscreen leak; the explosions; and finally the leaflet telling Buck “how to deal with a dead media representative.” It ended, of course, with the order to move positions. It must have come straight from General Mattis—he was determined to prove that we were an “all-weather fighting force.” I hoped he was right. I jumped into the Humvee’s backseat while dialing London on my satellite phone. This would probably be my last chance to call Barrow before we went back into another radio blackout. As I listened to the phone ring, I restarted my laptop. The battery indicator, for some reason, was flashing red. I wondered if my Sony was about to raise the white flag.
“Foreign new-ews?”
“Hi, Martin,” I said. “Do you want something on the weather? We can’t see a bloody thing. Are you watching Sky?”
There was a pause.
“Crickey, yeah,” said Barrow. I pictured him looking up at the television in the newsroom. “Can you file us a few words?”
“We’re going back into EmCon Bravo,” I said, sounding like a professional. “Shall I dictate you something now?”
“That would be great,” said Barrow, taken aback.
I leaned out the window and spat out a gobful of orange slime.
“It was like fighting a war in the depths of hell,” I began. “Howling winds blew up mud from the marsh banks of central Iraq…”
15
…THIRTY MIKES LATER
By the time I’d finished dictating the story, my face was a mask of orange mud. The stuff was running out of my nose and down the back of my throat, forcing me to cough and spit every few seconds. It was in my eyes. I could even feel it dripping out of my ears. I tried wearing the painter’s mask I’d been given for the oil fires, but it didn’t do any good. I never imagined I could be so involved in the weather. The visibility in our tangerine world had shrunk to just a few feet. Buck’s GPS device had stopped working. Murphy’s night-vision goggles were useless. And somewhere out there, the Iraqis were waiting for us. They were probably as at home in the mud as I would be in the bar of the Beverly Hills Four Seasons. The Marines cursed in disbelief. “When this shit clears, I keep thinkin’ we’re gonna be surrounded by the motherfuckers,” said an exasperated Buck, again playing with his silver crucifix.
Eventually he ordered Murphy to stop. “We’re all gonna die in a goddamn crash if we don’t pull over,” he said. “Kill the engine.”
The Humvee shuddered to a halt and its big V-8 died with a mechanical belch. The southern jet stream seemed to be blowing right through the vehicle, making it wobble. We were on another bulldozed dirt track, having turned west off Highway 8. To our right was a berm. I wondered if there was an infantry unit on the other side or whether we were alone. To our left was a billowing curtain of fog.
“Dammit,” said Buck from the passenger seat. “We’ve lost the convoy.”
I got out of the Humvee, still finalizing my story with Barrow on the phone, and looked behind us. I could see only a couple of other Humvees through the murk. We were stranded. I cursed General Mattis. Some of the Marines were doing the same. Moving positions in this weather was surely insanity.
“Is everything all right?” I heard Barrow say from twenty-six hundred miles away.
“Not really, Martin,” I replied. “We’ve just stopped on an unprotected stretch of marshland. I think we’ve lost our unit.”
I was amazed that the satellite phone was still working.
Buck, I noticed, was now sweating and thumping the GPS device.
“Hang in there, Chris,” said Barrow. “And look on the upside.”
“What’s the upside?”
“It’s nice and sunny here in Wapping.”
“Cheers,” I said.
Barrow gave a strangled chuckle. He was trying to cheer me up.
“I hope we get through this,” I said shakily. I felt a convulsion somewhere deep inside my stomach. It was the second time in seven days that I’d nearly choked up on the phone to Barrow. This had to stop.
“You will,” said Barrow. “You’ll be all right.”
I heard thunder, or an explosion of some kind. The weather, it seemed, was determined to kill someone today.
If wondered if Fletcher or Barrow really knew what it was like out here.
“Okay, let’s talk tomorrow,” I said. “Is my stuff getting in the paper?”
“Yeah,” said Barrow. “It’s all running. Speak later, okay?”
It’s running? That didn’t sound very reassuring.
“Okay,” I said, and hung up.
In fact, my stories were running. Fletcher and Barrow were only just beginning to realize the importance of the embedding scheme. At this point of the invasion, I was the only Times reporter anywhere near the front lines. It was laughable—and terrifying. Even our Baghdad correspondent, Janine di Giovanni, had been ordered out of the city by Robert Thomson, The Times’s editor. “Reporters are pulling out their hair with boredom in Kurdistan,” di Giovanni wrote at the time. “There’s a real war in the western desert on the Jordanian-Iraq border, but no one can get to it; and on the border of Kuwait most of the press corps are miserably camping out in their cars, unable to get into the desert.”
These so-called “unilaterals” had been shaken by the death of ITN’s Terry Lloyd, who had charged into Basra without the support of American troops. According to one account, he’d suffered a shoulder wound from friendly fire and had then been hit again by a U.S. helicopter as he was being taken to a hospital in an Iraqi minibus. Now his body was lying in one of the city’s teeming hospitals.
In fact, most British reporting from Iraq was being done by relatively unknown war correspondents. Take the BBC: John Simpson was stuck in the north while Fergan Keane was reporting from a hotel roof in Jordan. The BBC was instead relying on David Willis and his embedded colleague Gavin Hewitt. As for the frontline coverage of The Times and Daily Telegraph, it was all coming from their two respective Hollywood correspondents—one of whom was handling the challenge with more grace than the other. I later saw a photograph of Oliver Poole as an embed. Shirtless beneath an unzipped army flak vest, he was casually smoking a cigarette in front of a blackened mural of Saddam Hussein. To his right, an Iraqi truck was on fire. Poole’s Goa necklace, I noticed, was still intact. He looked good; dashing almost. The Telegraph, meanwhile, had come up with a name for the phenomenon of war reporting veterans stuck at checkpoints miles from the action: “Nick Wapshott Syndrome.”