“Okay, Chris,” he said. “You ain’t gonna like this one bit, but I have orders. I have no choice. You understand that?”
I stared at the captain’s lean, muscular face and wondered what could possibly call for such a melodramatic opening.
“Ye-es,” I said slowly. “I understand.”
“What kind of satellite phone do you have?” asked Buck.
The phone was still in my hand. I looked at it.
“It’s a Thuraya,” I said.
“I’m going to have to take it,” said Buck. “I have orders to confiscate all Thuraya phones being used by media representatives.”
My jaw slackened in a visual cliché of surprise.
“What?” I said in a slightly alarming falsetto. “What do you mean?” I continued, making an effort to lower my pitch.
My main concern, of course, should have been my ability to send stories. But it wasn’t. I was more worried about not being able to tell anyone I was alive. My family, who were being kept up-to-date by Alana, would think I was dead. (I hadn’t called my mother directly, for the same reason Hustler hadn’t called his wife: The soundtrack of death in the background would have been too much.) Even The Times would probably think I was dead. There were no other journalists in my unit, so I could hardly borrow anyone else’s phone. I couldn’t believe this was happening.
“I need your phone,” reiterated Buck.
“Are you serious?” I asked. “Why?”
I could tell the question irritated Buck. Warriors don’t ask for orders to be explained. He turned to the Marine behind him.
“Staff sergeant,” he said. “Did the order for the phone ban give a reason?”
“It says the French sold the codes of the phones to the Iraqis, sir,” came the reply. “It means the enemy can trace the signals, sir.”
“There you have it,” said Buck. “The goddamn French. I’m not being an asshole, Chris. It’s an order. I don’t have a choice.”
The French sold the codes to the Iraqis?
“Thuraya isn’t even a French company,” I blurted. “It’s based in Abu Dhabi, for God’s sake. There’s got to be a better reason.”
“Nothing I can do,” said Buck, now walking away.
I knew it was pointless arguing. Buck was right: It was out of his hands.
“What about the other embeds’ phones?” I shouted to Buck, who was now thirty feet away. “Are they being confiscated, too?”
He pretended to not hear.
“It’s only Thurayas,” the staff sergeant explained. “Iridium phones are fine.”
He held out an apologetic palm.
I bit my upper lip with frustration and handed him the Thuraya. He ripped out the battery and gave me the empty handset back.
Perhaps the Marines were right. Perhaps the phones had been compromised. I certainly wasn’t going to risk getting myself, or anyone else, killed. But to blame it on the French? I knew that the Thuraya handsets had a built-in GPS feature, allowing phone calls to be pinpointed accurately; but wasn’t that why we had daily EmCon Bravo radio blackouts? Besides, Thuraya’s investors were all from supposedly friendly Middle Eastern countries, including the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, where the Pentagon’s central command was based. But there was nothing I could do. I felt helpless. Without a satellite phone, I was of no use to anyone.
I was dead weight.
So this is it. This is the moment, ninety miles from Baghdad, that will stay with me forever. This is what I think about when I find myself awake at 5:00 A.M., shouting at the red glow of the bedside clock (“Kill the fucking light!”), and wondering if I did the right thing, out there in the mud and the sand. As I tug at the damp and twisted sheets, I feel ashamed for letting myself down—and Fletcher, and Barrow, and the Marines. And I want to go back to the marshlands, to prove that I’m not a coward. By sunrise, however, the moment has always passed. And I don’t go anywhere.
After handing over the phone battery, I went to my foxhole to brood. What should I do? I had my passport; I had my front-page story; I even had permission to leave from The Times’s deputy editor. Was this the end of my war? Surely, I told myself, I could get around the Thuraya ban. Maybe I could go to Kuwait City, buy a new handset, and hitch a lift back into the war zone. Or perhaps I could try to leave Kilo Battery, find a fellow embed with an Iridium phone, and ask to borrow it. What about David Willis from the BBC? I shook my head. I remembered that he also had a Thuraya, and an unreliable one at that; he’d spent most of his time at Camp Grizzly borrowing an ancient device belonging to Scott Nelson of the Boston Globe. I remembered Scott’s phone being the size of a small photocopier, with two floor-mounted antennas for locking on to the Iridium satellite. Besides, I’d be lucky if anyone would let me make a ten-dollar-a-minute call, while draining their battery, more than once. And how would I physically get to David Willis, or any of the other Marine Corps embeds? I’d probably have to embed myself with the bloody infantry, or go unilateral.
“Piss on that,” I said out loud to no one.
I realized, of course, that the Thuraya ban was an extraordinary excuse: a get-out-of-Iraq-free card. “Sir, the dog ate my satellite phone.” But no one in London would believe that. They’d all know I’d lost my nerve. This was worse than Nick Wapshott being stuck on the QE2 on September 11. This was voluntary.
I climbed out of my foxhole, took off my helmet and flak jacket, and trudged over to Buck, who was now standing by the gun line. By now I’d abandoned my hiking boots and was wearing a pair of Nike running shoes. After Thursday night’s conversation with Ben Preston, I’d stopped feeling like a Marine.
I couldn’t believe what I was about to do.
“Captain,” I said, taking a quick, shallow breath.
He gave me an expectant look, as though he knew what was coming.
The moment felt freeze-framed. This was it. I tried not to think about the consequences of what would follow.
Then I said: “Can you get me out of here?”
Buck looked at me for a while. Perhaps he was relieved. Perhaps he was disappointed. Perhaps he didn’t care.
“Okay,” he said carefully. “I can probably get you back to Kuwait down the supply line. But I don’t want anyone thinkin’ I had anything to do with this. I don’t want anyone thinkin’ I wanted rid of you.”
“They won’t,” I said. “I’ll make that clear.”
Buck stared over my shoulder and said nothing. Then he nodded.
“Let me talk to HQ,” he said.
What had I done? Leaving the front lines of Iraq after nine days seemed like failure by any measure. I thought of all the reporters who’d lasted months, or years, in arguably worse places: Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, even Baghdad under the 1991 bombing campaign. Janine di Giovanni, a veteran of all these terrible datelines, once told me that her career was a result of “an abnormal lack of fear.” Perhaps I suffered from an abnormal excess of fear. Even Oliver Poole, my fellow member of the Hollywood foreign press, was able to butch it out in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division. Historically, my nine-day career as a war correspondent became even more meaningless. Ernie Pyle reported from the battlefronts of World War II, on and off, for nearly five years, until his death. And Winston Churchill, at the age of twenty-two, lasted six weeks in Afghanistan’s Swat Valley with Sir Bindon Blood and his troops.