I like to think that by morning my mind hadn’t been made up. I like to think that I was still deciding whether to stumble on ineptly toward Baghdad or give up and return to the JW Marriott Hotel, with its luxury spa and room service menu. But perhaps there was no decision to make. Perhaps I knew exactly what I was going to do, the moment Ben Preston offered to “order me out” of Iraq.
Buck, of course, was of no help. He wouldn’t tell me if Kilo Battery was even heading toward Baghdad or whether we would bypass the capital and go north to Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace. He had other things on his mind. Kilo Battery was running short of MREs, water, and fuel, and the supply lines were under attack. After the first week’s dash, we seemed to have skidded to a muddy halt.
Murphy, meanwhile, was baffled by my dilemma.
“So you don’t have to be here?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“But you get a big-assed bonus for this shit, right?”
“No. Nothing.”
“So you’re not getting paid… and you don’t have to be in Iraq?”
“No, not really.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing here then?” he asked.
I couldn’t think of a good answer.
Then three extraordinary things happened.
First came an unfriendly tap on my blue, Kevlar-plated shoulder. I was squatting in my foxhole, wiping smears of mud from my broken glasses and smoking one of my last Marlboro Lights. Beside me was the shortwave radio. It was saying that the Iraqis were being helped by “volunteers” crossing the border from Syria and Iran. As I turned and looked up, I almost yelped with surprise. Looming above me was Capt. Jim Hotspur, the public affairs officer from the Kuwait Hilton. He looked sunburned and irritated. I wondered what I’d done wrong.
“Ayres?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied, trying to stand up. I fell backward instead.
“I’ve got something for you.”
This couldn’t be good. Had I broken the “ground rules”? Was I going to be disciplined? Would I get court-martialed?
Hotspur reached into his pocket and produced a red booklet.
“Congratulations,” he said, handing it to me. “You’re a Kuwaiti resident.”
I stared at the worn, royal-crested passport in my hands. It seemed as though it had come from another world, another era. I opened it up and saw three pages of Arabic script, which would no doubt cause a lifetime of problems with U.S. immigration officials. The visa, I noticed, had cost me nearly a hundred dollars.
“Thank you,” I said as Hotspur about-faced and marched away in an orange haze. He was carrying a plastic bag full of passports belonging to other embeds. I could hardly believe the captain had found me.
I was free. With my passport I could theoretically get on the next flight out of Kuwait International Airport (not, of course, that there were any flights to London; they’d all been canceled because of the war). The problem, of course, was that I was more than two hundred miles north of the airport, two hundred miles of death and anarchy. I remembered what my grandfather had said about leaving Iraq if it became too dangerous: “What on earth makes you think you’ll be able to do that?”
By now it was 10:00 A.M. The sun was crouching low on the muddy horizon, preparing for another hard day’s work.
I tried to forget about my passport and any question of going home. Instead, I decided to find out what had happened to my tank ambush story. The only way to do this was to call Alana, who could look it up on The Times’s website. We were back in EmCon Delta, but I still flinched when I switched my satellite phone on, half expecting it to trigger another Scud alert. It was 7:00 A.M. in London, and Friday morning’s edition of the paper had already been online for a few hours.
In Los Angeles, the other side of the world, it was 11:00 P.M.
I’d managed to call Alana once a day from Iraq, sometimes more, and by now she was used to the ambient noise of 155mm gunfire in the background. I asked her to look for my article in the World News section. I wondered if the story had been shortened, or if it had even made it into Friday’s newspaper.
“Can’t see anything,” she said.
Behind me, the big guns shouted. Somewhere, more Iraqis died.
“Isn’t there a section on Iraq, or something?” I asked.
I heard the hollow clatter of my office keyboard.
“Yes, I’m looking at the Iraq section now. Can’t… see… anything…”
I sighed, which unsettled the mud, sand, and phlegm that coated my lungs. It ended as a dry heave. I couldn’t believe it: My frontline dispatches had been spiked, again. All that fear and death for nothing.
“That’s it,” I said bitterly. “I’ve had enough. This is pointless.”
“Hold on,” said Alana. “I can see your photograph here.”
“What?”
“Your picture. It’s… it’s on the, wow, it’s on the front page. There’s a long story underneath; something about tanks?”
“You’re kidding!”
“Actually, your story isn’t on the front page…”
“Uh?”
“It is the front page.”
For a brief, exhilarating moment, I realized why people become war reporters: The thrill of writing an I-nearly-died-a-gruesome-death story is unbeatable. It feels like giving a middle finger to anyone who’s ever doubted you, including yourself. I remembered hearing about two journalists who’d gone to Iraq because their girlfriends had dumped them. I couldn’t understand it at the time. Now it made sense. War makes you feel special; it makes you feel better than all the war virgins back home. But here’s the downside: Writing an I-nearly-died-a-gruesome-death story requires you to nearly die a gruesome death. I wondered what my next big story would be: a chemical attack on Kilo Battery? An outbreak of smallpox? Next time, perhaps, I wouldn’t be so lucky. And was it all worth it, for a “fuck you” and a front page?
“What’s the headline?” I asked Alana.
“We were stuck when the Iraqi tanks came,” she read. “Stranded, ninety miles from Baghdad… from Chris Ayres near al-Diwaniyah.”
I thought about my first week at The Times and the “nib” I’d written for Barrow. How did I end up on the front lines of a war?
Then I looked up and saw Buck. He seemed even less happy than usual. His eyes were pinpricks of violence and determination.
“Finish your phone call,” he said. “We need to talk.”
What happened next would change everything.
I got off the phone and walked over to Buck, who was now standing beside the FDC and sucking on a pen. His hunting knife, I noticed, was still strapped to the front of his flak vest, next to his 9mm Beretta. Sleeping rough for nearly two weeks had taken almost no visible toll on Buck—he still looked like a pro athlete—but I could tell the nightly attacks were getting to him. The Marines hadn’t expected so much resistance. The previous day’s retreat, even if it was a bluff, must also have been disheartening. Before the war there’d been talk of a “ten-day sprint” to Baghdad. The mudstorms and the heavy fighting in Basra and Nasiriyah had made that plan look hopelessly optimistic. To me, it now seemed impossible that the Americans could win a quick and relatively bloodless victory in Mesopotamia. The same thought must have occurred to Buck. Forget hearts and minds. This was going to be about blood and entrails.