“Great,” I said, stretching my sore joints. “When are we leaving?”
“Now,” he said. “We’ve got a delivery to make. MREs and what-not.” He climbed into the Humvee and started the engine. It sounded like it needed an emergency oil transfusion. I started hauling my luggage back into the vehicle, then yanked open a rear door and folded myself into the narrow seat. Two Marines grunted in after me. I hoped this journey would be less traumatic than the last one. It wasn’t. Minutes later we were gliding in neutral again as the Humvee’s engine took more time out. I closed my eyes, stopped breathing, and waited for the inevitable.
The engine restarted. We hadn’t been ambushed.
This time we kept moving for a while, passing formations of tanks, Humvees, troop carriers, and grounded Marine helicopters. The equipment was lifeless, as though someone had unplugged the American war machine. I wondered if they’d simply run out of fuel. “Looks like we’re takin’ a pause,” said the driver. “Before we get to Baghdad.” Was this part of the Pentagon’s war plan?
Our destination turned out to be a roadside trench in which the Marines had built a camouflaged village of wooden porta-cabins and net awnings. As the Humvee grumbled through the entrance, I saw dozens of men stripped to the waist and taking sponge baths, washing their underwear, or just sunbathing on the hoods of their vehicles. Others were sitting at fold-down tables, playing card games, and listening to the BBC World Service. It was as though the Branson vacation area had opened a holiday camp in hell. One entrepreneurial Marine, meanwhile, had set up his own outdoor barbershop. He sang jazz standards as he worked the electric clippers. He offered two styles—bald or nearly bald—as he stood knee-deep in clumps of hair that hadn’t seen shampoo since Kuwait. He could have been an extra from M*A*S*H.
I got out of the Humvee and headed toward what looked like the camp headquarters. The trailer seemed almost luxurious, making me realize how close to the front I’d been. There were embeds everywhere, wandering around with notebooks, wounded laptops, and satellite phones. For once I felt almost safe. I stared hard at one journalist, who was obviously talking to his news editor in America. There was something familiar about him. Then it dawned on me: It wasn’t the reporter, but his phone, that I recognized. He was talking on a bloody Thuraya! I dropped my bags in a makeshift courtyard and jogged over to him.
“Wasn’t your phone confiscated?” I asked him after he hung up.
The embed was older, possibly in his sixties. He was the first person I’d seen since Kuwait City without a chemical suit. Instead, he wore khaki hiking trousers and a white shirt, decorated with a pin from Vietnam.
“No,” he said, taken aback. “Why?”
“They told me the Thurayas have been banned. Something about the French selling the codes to the Iraqis…”
“That sounds unlikely,” he laughed. “I had one of these in Afghanistan. They’re incredible, aren’t they? Just like a cell phone.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The implication was just too awful. Had Buck lied to me? Was this all a horrible joke?
“Did they take your phone?” asked the embed.
“What?” I said, still thinking about Buck. I wanted to throw up.
“Your phone. Did they take it?”
“They took the battery,” I said.
The embed gave me an experienced look.
“If I were you,” he advised. “I’d get a new battery and forget about it. We’re all using them here. No one mentioned a ban.”
He raised a conspiratorial eyebrow.
It was then I remembered: In my laptop bag, I had a bagful of Thuraya accessories. Perhaps there was a battery in there somewhere. I ran over to my luggage, got down on my knees, and began pulling out freezer bags full of cables, power adapters, and torn instruction booklets. Seconds later, I triumphantly held up a spare, dead battery.
Now all I needed to do was find somewhere to charge it up. So I rapped on the door of the headquarters trailer and squeezed inside. It was full of embeds typing on computers plugged into wall sockets. A few officers were standing around, eating MREs and swapping competitive banter.
“You know what General Patton said about going to war without the French, dontcha?” one of them was saying. His face was the color of a burst blood vessel. The other Marines shrugged innocently.
“He said it’s like going deer hunting without an accordion!” came the punch line.
There was riotous laughter. Palms slapped walls. Boots stomped.
“Am I okay to use my phone?” I interjected, holding up the Thuraya.
“Knock yourself out,” said the joker.
Minutes later I was talking to Fletcher. It felt like a year since I’d spoken to the foreign desk. It had, in fact, been twenty-four hours.
I tried not to think about Buck.
“Nice front page yesterday,” said Fletcher. “We need more from you today.”
I felt myself click back into professional mode. Then I remembered: I hadn’t told him about my decision to leave the front lines. I suddenly realized the almighty mess I was in. This was going to be awkward.
“Martin,” I began. “The Marines have, er, confiscated my phone.”
This seemed like the best way to approach the subject.
There was a short silence as my voice was relayed to London via space.
Fletcher: “So what are you using now?”
Yes, this was definitely going to be awkward.
“My, er, phone,” I explained. “Because… I’m using it without permission. I found a spare battery. But I’m not going to have it for long.”
“A spare battery?”
I felt as though I’d just swallowed a chili pepper.
“They took my battery. The phones have been banned, so they took my battery, which means I can’t use my phone. But now I have a spare battery. And the ban seems to have been, er, lifted. So I’m… er, yeah.”
“Can you file something today?” said Fletcher, eager to move on.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “That’s fine. Absolutely fine. Yes.”
“Gd. We need something on the supply lines being attacked: ‘Marines Get Bogged Down in Marshlands,’ that kind of thing.”
“Okay. Will do.”
“Send over seven hundred words,” said Fletcher. “It’s for the front again.”
The front page?
“Okay,” I said.
I still hadn’t told him about my decision.
“Oh, er, Martin?” I said, casually.
“Yes?”
“I’m heading back toward Kuwait. There’s no point in me staying on the front lines if I can’t use my phone.”
There was a baffled ten-dollar-per-minute silence.
“File your seven hundred words,” said Fletcher. “Let’s talk about it later.”
The phone call was over.
I welcomed the distraction of having to write a story: The situation with Buck, Fletcher, and the satellite phone was starting to get overwhelming. I asked the officers in the trailer if they knew who was in charge of the supply line. They told me to go outside and find Lt. Col. Keil Gentry. It didn’t take long. Gentry was a boyish, fair-haired Marine, probably in his late thirties, who could have been a British Spitfire pilot in another war. I introduced myself and asked if food and water rations were getting through from Kuwait, or whether the invasion was becoming “bogged down,” as Fletcher had suggested on the phone. “Well, we need everything: beans, bullets, and Band-Aids,” he said with a martini bar grin. I asked him if the supply convoys were being attacked. “Everyone’s been taking a few potshots,” he said. “The big threat is these ‘irregular’ forces.” He grinned again. After a day of bullshit, Gentry’s honesty was reassuring. He told me that part of the supply problem was the speed of the Marines’ advance into Iraq, which was faster than General Patton’s six-hundred-mile sprint through Europe after the Normandy landings. And, of course, there was the issue of storms, particularly the one on the night of the Iraqi tank ambush. But the insurgents were the biggest worry. “We planned for it, we trained for it, but we really hoped it wouldn’t happen,” Gentry said. “We thought this would be a liberation. We thought the Iraqis would be throwing flowers at us. But it’s been a lot more hostile than that.”