And so we continued, thrashing south through the darkness.
Toward the border. Toward the lights.
EPILOGUE
So this is what I found out yesterday: Saddam Hussein has a Thuraya satellite phone. That’s right. The exact same model as mine, before Hotspur confiscated it. You can’t always believe wartime rumors, of course. But it makes sense. The Pentagon wasn’t worried about the embed in his blue flak jacket giving away the Marines’ position: It wanted to clear the battlefield of background noise, so that when Saddam switched his phone on—BOOM! I’m just grateful I didn’t think of a way to hold on to my Thuraya at the front. Being mistaken for Saddam Hussein would have been an unlucky end to an unlucky career in war journalism.
The day after I left Iraq, the Americans started winning the war. On Tuesday a captured army supply clerk was rescued from a hospital in Nasiriyah by an elite unit of navy Seals and army Rangers. She was Pvt. Jessica Lynch, a nineteen-year-old from Palestine, West Virginia. Even Bush-haters found themselves punching the air with gung-ho satisfaction. Somewhere in Washington, a Pentagon public affairs officer must be laughing himself to sleep at night. The headline in The Times, as in every other newspaper, was “Saving Private Jessica.” Yes, the luck of the Americans is changing in Mesopotamia. Even the Iraqi information minister is now regarded as an international joke. They’re calling him Comical Ali.
Victory is expected any day now. But I worry about the insurgents, the shepherds by day and warriors by night. I doubt they’ll recognize any conventional defeat on the battlefield. For now, however, the Americans have taken Saddam International Airport, and there are star-spangled tanks in the suburbs of the capital. On newsstands across London, Oliver Poole’s photo byline stares out from the front page of the Daily Telegraph. “The first newspaper reporter to reach Baghdad,” it says in a heavy, bold type. Glen was right: Poole is fearless.
The war, however, isn’t getting any safer for the war reporters. Statistically, journalists are ten times more likely to die than coalition soldiers. The latest victim is Michael Kelly, editor-at-large of Atlantic Monthly. The circumstances of Kelly’s death seem horribly familiar: the Humvee under enemy fire, swerving and crashing into a ditch. Both Kelly and the driver drowned.
For others, the war is proving to be perilous in different, less lethal, ways. Geraldo Rivera, the Fox News reporter, was escorted out of Iraq after sketching a map of his position in the sand. Then there’s Peter Arnett, Pulitzer Prize winner and CNN hero during the first Gulf War. He was fired by NBC News and National Geographic Explorer for giving an interview to Iraqi state television: He told the Iraqis that the American war plan had failed.
But enough of all this. You probably want to know how I got back to London; how my final, shameful deed of the war was completed. Here’s the funny thing: The Sea Knight didn’t get me back to Kuwait. Soon after the RPG attack, we landed to refuel. I had no idea where we were. In total darkness, I was led out of the helicopter by a Marine with a lens on a stalk where his eyeballs should have been. I stood there, blind and choking on the vapor of aviation fuel, while the tanks were filled. Around us were more Marines, pointing their M-16s out into the unknown. If a shell hit us now, I thought, our bodies would land on the moon.
We climbed back on board, flew for another twenty minutes, then landed again. We were still in Iraq. I might still be there now if it weren’t for my fellow passenger, the major, who offered me a ride on a cargo plane. We touched down in the northern Kuwaiti desert at 6:00 A.M. After waiting all day at the tiny, dusty airfield, I talked my way onto a supply convoy going to Al Jaber, the air force base where Glen was embedded. I imagined a night of hot coffee and war stories. But when I called Glen’s cell phone I found out that he’d left Kuwait weeks ago. Now he was back in London, preparing for his next trip: central command in Qatar.
After Iraq, Al Jaber felt like Disneyland. There was hot food, Fox News, a supermarket, tents with “cot beds,” and, best of all, a pressroom with leather seats and English newspapers. Getting off the base, however, proved almost impossible. After an exhausting, anguished night of canceled convoys into Kuwait City, I decided to call my old friend Salman Hussein, the taxi driver. It took me a while to convince him to come: He doubted that the Americans would let him anywhere near a high-security base. Eventually, at 11:00 A.M. on Tuesday morning—April Fools’ Day—Hussein arrived in his white Taurus. It took me another hour to persuade an air force public affairs officer to give me a lift to the pickup spot. Meanwhile, Hussein’s misgivings were confirmed when the guards wouldn’t let him past the front gate checkpoint. I ended up staring at Hussein’s taxi down an empty hundred-yard stretch of tarmac, with the public affairs officer protesting that we didn’t have permission to go any farther. Finally, after more bureaucratic squabbling, a deal was done. By the time Hussein pulled up beside me, I wanted to give him a hug. Instead, I gave him a hundred dollars. He smiled, nodded, and said thank you very much. Then he told me the fare to Kuwait City was two hundred dollars.
My reunion with the staff of the JW Marriott Hotel wasn’t a happy one. In fact, they didn’t seem at all pleased to see me. Perhaps it was the smelclass="underline" I hadn’t washed for fifteen days. Arabs in white dishdashas gave me disapproving looks as I clomped over the marble foyer, each step creating an Aladdin’s puff of dried mud. To be fair, I didn’t look much like a guest at a five-star hotel. I was still wearing my chemical suit and gas mask, for a start. My glasses were broken and smeared with mud. My remaining hair had turned into a single matted dreadlock. Nevertheless, I booked myself into a corner suite and immediately ordered up the Wagyu-Kobe beef, the dozen gulf prawns with lobster tail, and three cappuccinos. I had some catching up to do. The mirror in my room confirmed the worst: I hadn’t lost an ounce of weight. Not that I cared. I ran myself a bath of almost intolerable heat and lay there for two hours. Then I tried to wash my bags and belongings, with limited success. By the time I was done, the bathroom looked like a slaughterhouse, with orange-brown slime splattered all over the walls.
I stayed at the hotel for a couple of nights, making fifty-dollar phone calls to Northumberland and California and writing stories from the business center. Fletcher, who took my decision to leave Iraq surprisingly well, tried to convince me to go back into Iraq with the British. “The trouble is, Chris, after the tank ambush story, everyone thinks you’re a war correspondent,” he complained. I was having none of it. I flew back to London, via Dubai, on Thursday. I visited the office for an hour to give back my flak jacket, helmet, and change from the five thousand dollars.
That was yesterday. Now I’m sitting at Prêt-a-Manger in Leicester Square, wiping mayonnaise from my mouth after an English breakfast sandwich. This was my fantasy back when I was in the marshlands.
I already feel changed by war. My anxiety, for example, is gone. Dr. Ruth would be proud. Life seems shorter, more urgent. Here in London, where chemical drills don’t ruin your morning coffee, I feel invincible. I’ve stopped looking both ways when I cross the street. I took a cab yesterday and didn’t fasten my seat belt. Why not? I’ve lost my war virginity. And now that I know what war is like, I’ve stopped worrying about death. I no longer dread the dirty bomb on the Underground; the nuke in Times Square; the anthrax in the post. Battlefield fear has put all other fear into perspective. Perhaps that’s what my generation needs: urgent, mortal terror. I sang in the shower this morning because the water was hot and because no one was trying to kill me. It was a pure, uncomplicated happiness. I can only hope this lasts.