War Reporting for Cowards

8 A TERRIBLE MISTAKE

“Any nervous fliers onboard?” asked the pilot.

I wanted to raise my right arm, but it was being restrained by a nylon belt that was creating a deep red welt in my flesh.

The pilot’s voice was coming from within a pair of heavy black headphones wrapped around my blue crash helmet. I tried to say something, but my chin strap was pulled so tight it had immobilized my jaw. The other passengers, I noticed, faced a similar problem. No one responded.

“Outstanding,” said the pilot. “Because it sure is gonna be reeeal bumpy up there today. Whoayeah! And when we land… yawl might think we’ve crashed. But don’t worry folks, it’s only gonna feel like that.”

Whoops of distorted laughter filled the headphones.

The pilot coughed, then added: “Ah’ll be pretty darn impressed if none of you media folk don’t get reacquainted with your breakfast.”

More distorted whoops.

I tried to remember what I had eaten for breakfast. I had a horrible feeling it involved eggs. Again, I tried to speak.

“Ungh,” was the best I could manage.

I was facing the rear of the aircraft, looking out at the hot tarmac of the runway through an open hatch, my feet planted at shoulder level on the back of the seat in front of me. I could hear nothing, apart from the pilot’s distant, almost mechanical voice—he sounded like a stormtrooper from one of the early Star Wars films—and the industrial drone of the twin T-56 turboprop engines, which had redefined my understanding of loudness. Nausea tickled my stomach.

“Okeydoke folks!” said the pilot, and I felt the battered aircraft, a U.S. Navy C-2A Greyhound, start to jerk forward.

Within the next hour we were due to land on the USS Constellation, a five-thousand-crew aircraft carrier sailing in wide circles one hundred miles off the coast of San Diego. My plan to write about celebrity fluff in Los Angeles had gone badly wrong. The Greyhound would collide with the Constellation’s deck at 150 miles an hour and be yanked to a standstill within two seconds, or 320 feet, by a hook on the tail that snagged an “arresting cable” stretched across the deck. Sometimes, I had been told, the hook would miss and the plane would skid off the other end of the runway, into the Pacific.

That would explain why I was also wearing a life jacket.

I emitted a loud groan, rendered silent by the engines.

The Greyhound gathered speed and the pitch of the turboprops jumped an octave. The hatch slowly closed. Finally, with clatter and a violent wobble, the twenty-eight-ton plane heaved itself off the tarmac. I wasn’t near any of the aircraft’s tiny, porthole-shaped windows, so I stared instead at the exposed ducts and wires inside the cargo bay, making an internal promise never to complain again about Virgin Atlantic’s economy class. The headphones gave a cough of radio static.

“Okay kids,” said the pilot. “Looks like it’s gonna be another real nice, sunny Californian day. But it ain’t gonna be so nice and sunny where we’re going. Hope yawl brought some warm sweaters…”

I wondered if I would be okay in a T-shirt: It was all I had packed.

The aircraft banked, groaned, and corrected itself.

The pilot continued: “Sit back, relax, and I’ll check back with yawl when we make our dee-scent. Remember folks, this ain’t like flying American. We’ll be landing on a moving runway, in a gusty crosswind. If you feel an impact followed by a bounce, it means we missed the SOB and we’ll have to try again. But don’t worry folks: We got THREE tries before the gas runs out.”

I closed my eyes and inhaled jet fuel vapor: my favorite smell.

I wished I was lying by the pool.

Life in California hadn’t gone exactly to plan. Alana and I arrived at our new home in late August, having bumped and rattled three thousand miles across the country in The Times’s jeep, at first heading southwest through Virginia to Atlanta, then directly west via Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Eventually, after two weeks of roadside cheeseburgers, thirty-dollar motel rooms, and 55 mile-per-hour speed limits, we made a scorched dash through the Mojave Desert, passing razor-wired Department of Defense missile ranges and proving grounds, before dropping down into the neon-lit pinball machine of metropolitan Los Angeles. By that time, my copy of Exile on Main Street had almost melted into the jeep’s CD player.

I had barely watched or listened to the news as we drove crosscountry. If I had, I would have known that the CIA was accusing China, France, and Syria of selling chemicals, probably intended for long-range missile fuel, to the Iraqis. I would also have known that in response to this accusation, Saddam Hussein had suggested talks with a suave, seventy-four-year-old Swede, Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector. The UN had turned down the request, asking instead that Blix be allowed to send his inspection team back into the country. The news headlines would also have informed me that President Bush had dared the UN to confront the “grave and gathering” threat of Iraq, or step aside, and let the U.S. Marines take care of business. In other words, I would have known that war was inevitable.

But Iraq was the last thing on my mind as we motored west. As far as I was concerned, we were fleeing the terror of anthrax and ground zero, and heading back in time to the rich and safe country I had visited on my business trips to Silicon Valley. In fact, I felt slightly guilty for leaving New York: as though I should have stuck it out and showed solidarity with the Big Apple. I was, after all, running away. No other city on earth, perhaps, could evoke such a reaction—not even London. We learn from an early age that New York is the Best City In The World, and that to be a New Yorker is something noble and proud. Alana, no more of a New Yorker than I was, felt particularly bad. Leaving was tantamount to desertion.

The guilt was overwhelmed, however, by worry. How would I fare in my new job? And what would Martin Fletcher, The Times’s foreign news editor, think of me? I had, in effect, been thrust upon him by Robert Thomson, for reasons I had yet to fathom.

Since writing my first nib for Barrow, I had covered nothing but business for The Times, largely because I found it comfortable, safe, and civilized. No matter how violent or bloody the world became, everything in finance could be expressed in easily quantifiable terms: A beheading in Pakistan became a three-point dip in the Karachi stock exchange; a coup d’état in Colombia, a devaluation in coffee bean futures. The language of business achieved the same result as military jargon: emotional distance and, by extension, anxiety reduction. When Warren Buffett, the “sage of Omaha,” gave a speech after September 11, he described a possible nuclear terror attack on New York City as a “trillion-dollar event.” By putting a dollar figure on it, Buffett made it less scary; Armageddon became an insurance claim.

To me, the swells and riptides of the money markets were a logical expression of the illogical human condition, like abstract art. And I preferred the bold colors and straight lines of the suprematist to the random strokes of the real. Of all the newswires at The Times, my favorite was the Bloomberg: It showed the chaos of the world through a prism of numbers, ratios, and equations. When working late shifts in London, I used to stare at the data feeding into the Bloomberg from news bureaus across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and feel steadied, calmed.

There was no doubt about it: Business journalists cruised the information superhighway in the back of a stretched, leather-upholstered Jag. In Los Angeles, I would be huffing down the hard shoulder on a rusty bicycle. There would be no more comfort or safety in abstract numbers. I would be permanently “off diary,” as my old City tutor Linda Christmas used to say. I would also have an eight-hour time difference to deal with. For the first time in my five years at The Times, I would be leaving behind Patience, Barrow, and the comfy armchair of the business desk. But how difficult could the West Coast be? Hollywood was, in a way, just a different kind of stock market, with Variety box office figures instead of share prices, celebrity marriages instead of mergers. And the parties, at least, would be a bit livelier. Perhaps I could also try out Cole’s lunch tutorial at The Ivy or Morton’s, the infamous celebrity troughs on Robertson Boulevard. Not that I knew anyone, apart from Alana, to lunch with.

Fletcher, meanwhile, had other things to process in his billion-gigabyte brain. Most urgent: how to cover a war in the Gulf, if or when it started. Fletcher was already aware that the Pentagon was talking about “embedding” reporters with military units during a possible preemptive strike against Iraq. He was skeptical, however, of claims that journalists, including foreigners, would be placed directly with troops on the battlefield for the first time since World War II. The military had demonstrated such trust in the press only once before, when Ernie Pyle and thirty or so other “conflict correspondents” landed in Normandy on June 7, 1944. Even in Vietnam, war reporters were not permanently assigned to frontline units.

None of The Times’s “real” war correspondents, Fletcher reasoned, would believe the Pentagon’s claims or run the risk of becoming glorified PRs for the United States Marines. He also assumed, based on the behavior of the military during the first Gulf War, that even if war correspondents were embedded, they would be stuck with units deliberately kept far away from the fighting. There would be nothing worse, in Fletcher’s mind, than having Saddam throw mustard gas at the front lines while Anthony Loyd was writing about Porta-John logistics from the rear.

The Pentagon’s behavior in 1991, of course, was a reaction to Vietnam. In that war reporters were given a high level of access to battlefield operations, largely because of the precedent set by World War II. But journalists used it against the U.S. military, portraying the war as “a quagmire” with no realistic victory or exit plan. The main culprit was CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite—or “Uncle Walter” as he was known—who wrapped up a report about the Tet Offensive in 1968 with an editorial stating that the Americans were “mired in a stalemate.” Improvements in technology, meanwhile, made it easier for television news crews to bring horrific images of war back home. After Vietnam, therefore, military commanders tended to regard journalists as hippie sympathizers, cowards, and traitors. As a result, reporters were kept as far away as possible from later conflicts in Grenada and Panama. The gung-ho coverage of 1991, however, which saw Cronkite replaced with the likes of NBC’s Arthur Kent (aka “the Scud stud”), changed all that. News networks treated the expulsion of the Iraqis from Kuwait City like a cross between a video game and a football match, complete with hyperbolic commentators, 3D graphics, and player statistics. The tone was partly a result of awe at the advances in U.S. weaponry: John Simpson, for example, filed an infamous report for the BBC saying that a Tomahawk missile had just streaked past his hotel window and “turned left at the traffic lights.”

Fletcher didn’t know it, but by 2002 the U.S. military had forgiven the media for Vietnam. Fletcher’s solution to the embedding dilemma, therefore, was to put young, inexperienced reporters in the American scheme, just in case they were needed. It would, he thought, serve as a gentle introduction to the world of war reporting: a bit like doing it as an intern. As I sat behind the wheel of the jeep, whistling along to Mick Jagger and congratulating myself on getting the hell out of Manhattan, I had no idea that Fletcher was thinking about embedding me.

If I had, I might have headed straight back to New York.

Los Angeles, when we finally arrived, was everything I had hoped for, and everything Alana had dreaded. Skyscrapers melted into single-story strip malls; business suits were swapped for shorts; polished Ferragamos for flip-flops. In place of Manhattan’s diners, with their sticky menus and home-fried potatoes, there were soy latte stands, oxygen tents, and tofu steakhouses. Walking—Alana’s favorite exercise—was a social taboo. And the drivers were terrible: producers’ wives applying lip gloss at the wheels of stadium-sized SUVs; octogenarian Ferrari owners; uninsured immigrants; and drunk actors snorting coke at the red lights. No one indicated; unless, of course, they indicated in the wrong direction, before pulling a U-turn across seven lanes of traffic. “Ohmigod!” the producers’ wives squealed as their three-ton Chevrolets mounted sedans and bounced over two-seaters. Then there were the Mexicans: the illegal, ubiquitous proletariat, tending to wilted palms, unparked Porsches, and untouched appetizers. And all of it set against the blue monotony of sky, the glare of the billboards, and the rim of smog lining the horizon like scum on an unwashed sink.

I loved Los Anegles. Perhaps it was just because Los Angeles wasn’t New York. Or perhaps it was because of the weather: a crisp seventy-two degrees, as reliable as the London drizzle or the West Village gale. Before I left New York, Glen asked where I was going to live: “Beach or canyon?” I soon realized it was a theoretical choice: I couldn’t afford either. I could live thirty blocks from the ocean in Santa Monica, or in a hilltop home overlooking the San Fernando Valley—within lead-poisoning range of the 101 freeway. Instead, I opted for a West Hollywood apartment, much the same as the one I’d left behind in the West Village. Our new home, at 1131 Alta Loma Road, was less stylish than 666 Greenwich Street, what with its gold fixtures, beige carpets, eighties kitchen appliances, and pink-tiled “wet bar.” But it did have a communal swimming pool, tennis court, and, perhaps best of all, a hot tub.

After signing a lease on the apartment, I went through the standard foreign correspondent’s checklist of Things To Do. I got squared away with a landline, cell phone, desk, computer, printer, high-speed Internet connection, Los Angeles Times subscription (for lift and view), and espresso machine (for the horribly early deadlines). By September, I was ready for work. There was only one thing left on the list: meet the competition. So, with a deep breath, I dialed the number of Oliver Poole, Los Angeles correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

Like most English correspondents abroad, including myself, Poole was a “bureau chief.” That meant he was the head of a bureau of one, with a budget of his salary (plus the occasional lunch and travel expenses), working from an office halfway between his kitchen and bedroom. Being a bureau chief is psychologically important, however, largely because it sounds good to Americans, with their vast teams of reporters, fact-checkers, copy editors, commissioning chiefs, and subeditors. It also makes us feel like professionals. Whenever English foreign correspondents get together in hotel bars, they laugh about the “one-man bureau,” just as they chuckle about lift and view. No one, however, finds it particularly funny.

After talking briefly to Poole, we arranged to meet the following Friday at Chateau Marmont, the celebrity dormitory in Hollywood where John Belushi died of an overdose, James Dean auditioned for Rebel without a Cause, and Jim Morrison once fell out of a window (there are very few locations in Hollywood where Jim Morrison didn’t fall out of a window). I knew from previous visits to the Chateau that the waiters considered themselves the A-list in waiting. A cold burger, or a warm Chardonnay, could take hours to emerge on a large silver platter, accompanied by an even larger tab. Regardless, it seemed like a good venue.

On the phone, Poole made conversation at a relentless pace, in a broken Etonian tenor hoarsened by early deadlines and cigarettes. “One can get dreadfully paranoid in Los Angeles,” he advised, making surprise use of the royal pronoun. “It’s the distance: six thousand bloody miles to London and an eight-hour time shift. The desk forgets you exist if you don’t call twice a day.” I imagined Poole to be of cavalry height, with dark, Olympian curls, seawater eyes, and an all-linen wardrobe. He would arrive at the Chateau in a shabby, antique Bentley, with an actress girlfriend from Martha’s Vineyard: She would be making some body-money in Hollywood before doing Hedda Gabler at the Globe. Glen had already told me that Poole, three years my senior, had been educated at Eton and then Oxford before taking a job on the South China Morning Post. After that came the Telegraph. According to Glen, Poole’s friends at Eton had included Crown Prince “Dippy” Dipendra of Nepal, who died in a mysterious gun massacre, along with most of his family, amid a dispute over his bride. Poole even had a title—the “Honorable” Oliver Poole—because he was the heir to Lord Poole, the London corporate financier and former Downing Street adviser. I had also heard a rumor that Poole owned a yacht, moored at Marina del Rey (the rumor was actually true, although the yacht was small and Poole owned it with a friend).

I tried hard not to feel intimidated.

When Friday came, I arrived early at the Chateau, accompanied by Alana and some friends I had made while covering my first celebrity fluff story: the Beverly Hills shoplifting trial of Winona Ryder. (The story had gone well, apart from me arriving late on the first day and body-slamming Winona in the corridor, breaking a strictly enforced rule that no journalist could come within ten feet of her. To make matters worse, I had reached out to steady myself and nearly grabbed her right breast.) All of us at the Chateau were either reporters or paparazzi. We sat on sofas and armchairs in the high-ceilinged drawing room, watching the breeze ripple through the tall curtains. Every thirty to forty minutes a walking headshot in a waiter’s uniform would peer into the candle-lit room, then disappear. I made a heroic effort to get drunk; not easy, given the time between refills. There was no sign of Poole anywhere.

At 8:00 P.M., I checked my watch. Poole was an hour late. I wondered if I was in the right place. Then my cell phone started vibrating.

“It’s Oliver,” said a glum voice. “They won’t let me in.”

It was no surprise that Oliver had failed to get past the Chateau’s clipboard-wielding hostess, positioned strategically in the Ferrari gridlock of the driveway. In fact, Alana and I had snuck in through the back garden. It was also reassuring, however: Poole clearly hadn’t arrived in a vintage Bentley. Or with a famous actress girlfriend. “Don’t worry. Sneak round the back,” I advised him. “There’s an unlocked gate that leads into the garden. Meet you there in two minutes.”

I strolled outside, pausing to see if I could trace the outline of Tom Cruise under the heat lamps, then headed for the gate. As I opened it, a young, bespectacled Englishman wearing ripped Levi’s, a zip-up fleece, and desert boots scurried out of the darkness. The fringe of his ruffled schoolboy’s haircut had curled into an accidental quiff, and around his neck was a handmade chain, the provenance of which appeared to be a Goa street market. The effect was nearly, but not quite, cool. Poole looked like a cross between James Dean and Harry Potter.

“Oliver?”

“Chris. Hi,” he said, offering an inky palm.

“Hey. Where did you park?” I asked.

“Didn’t,” he said, speed-walking through the garden. Poole seemed to operate on fast-forward. “Got the bus. Took ages.”

I tried to calculate how long it would take to get from Santa Monica to West Hollywood on Los Angeles public transport. I concluded that Poole must have left his house at about 4:00 P.M. the previous day.

“Don’t you have a car?”

“Bloody crashed it. Telegraph won’t buy me a new one. Need a beer.”

“Cheers to that,” I said.

“Let’s get pissed then. Celebrate your arrival.”

Formalities over, we sat down with the others.

An hour later, a waiter emerged.

It was an enjoyable evening. Of the two of us, Poole seemed the more down-to-earth, ordering “spag bol” from the Chateau’s bar menu and eating it off his lap while I prodded at an organic tofu salad. It was an odd role reversal, given that I was the one who had gone to a state-run school and “redbrick” university. We shared cigarettes and gossip about reporters we both knew in London. By midnight we had relocated to The Standard, another Sunset Strip hotel. We sat outside, by the soothing glow of the pool, overlooking the infinite, glittering sprawl of Los Angeles. My rival, I concluded, was clearly a talented and energetic, almost hyperactive reporter. But he didn’t appear to be the career-destroying scoop-machine I had feared. And we were very different people, bound to suggest different ideas to our foreign desks. The competition in Hollywood, I reassured myself, was nothing to worry about.

I should, of course, have known better.

“Martin?”

This was me, a few weeks later, on a morning call to Fletcher.

“Yes, what?” The “what” was playful, probably delivered with a handsome, inscrutable smile. I often suspected, however, that there was some genuine annoyance beneath Fletcher’s charm.

“When am I going to get something in the paper?”

“You got something in yesterday.”

“It was a nib.”

“It was a LEAD nib. And besides, long doesn’t mean good.”

“I know… but, still… when I worked for Patien—”

“It’s the war! It’s taking up lots and lots of space. Readers don’t want to read celebrity fluff at the moment. They want to know when Bush will invade; or what kind of gas Saddam puts in his mortar shells.”

“What if I did something war-related? From, er, Hollywood.”

“That would be excellent. The Telegraph did a lovely piece on soldiers’ sperm the other day. What are you offering?”

Soldiers’ sperm? Shit. Bloody Poole.

“Chris?”

“Yes. I’ll come up with something. Promise.”

“Gd.”

The Greyhound banked again, and this time I dry-heaved. I really shouldn’t have ordered the Full American from the hotel’s breakfast menu. I closed my eyes and wondered why I was on a navy plane, about to experience a 150-mile-an-hour impact with the deck of an American supercarrier. Then I remembered: Since arriving in Los Angeles, I had got almost nothing in The Times. Highlights included a piece about a Slovenian swimming the length of the Mississippi (three paragraphs), and an inaccurate prediction that an Irishman would become the new LAPD chief (four paragraphs). The foreign desk had, as Glen predicted, ignored me. I spent my mornings cruising pointlessly around Beverly Hills, wondering whether I had made a terrible mistake. Alana, meanwhile, had got a management job at a magazine and was doing well. She still despised Los Angeles, however. And we had no friends.

I got the idea to visit a navy aircraft carrier after watching a story about the USS Constellation on KCAL-9, a local news channel. Connie, as the ship is known, was the first American aircraft carrier to attack North Vietnam and was likely to become one of the first vessels deployed to “Gulf War II.” When I called the navy’s West Coast headquarters on Coronado Island, near San Diego, I expected to be quickly fobbed off. As it turned out, the opposite happened.

“Hi, I’m calling from the London Times,” I said.

“How y’doin’ today, sir?” said a friendly female voice.

“Er, great. Thanks.”

“Outstanding, sir!”

“I was wondering if, perhaps, I would be able to visit the Constellation?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes, I believe you will be able to visit, sir. Be here at 0700 hours.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

It turned out I had called at the right time: A group of reporters was set to visit the Constellation early the next morning. Someone had dropped out at the last minute, allowing me to take his place. I drove to San Diego that afternoon, stayed overnight, and got to Coronado Island at 0800, just in time to hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” being played over the PA system. I assumed the reporters would be transported to the Constellation by boat or helicopter. Instead, I was directed to a parking lot next to a taxiway, on which a dirty C-2A Greyhound was idling its engines. I wondered how it could be possible for a twenty-eight-ton transport plane to land on the 320-foot deck of a warship. Then I noticed the metal hook near the aircraft’s tail. I groaned. Glancing around me, I noticed about twenty other dyspeptic journalists, news photographers, and television camera operators gathered on the runway. They all looked as though they were regretting their breakfasts. The look became more pronounced as we were each handed headphones, earplugs, goggles, a life jacket, and crash helmet. Then we were shoved onboard and strapped tightly into our plastic seats.

Now the Greyhound’s engines were shifting pitch. My earwax blistered as we started to lose altitude. Static fizzed and popped through my headset. A distorted scream cut through it: “Brace for landing!”

I was strapped in so tight, I couldn’t brace anything. So I grimaced instead, and screwed up my eyes. If I survived the landing, I said to myself, I would never feel nervous on a commercial flight again.

“Get ready!”

I wondered what would happen if a British Airways pilot acted like this while preparing to touch down at Heathrow.

The turboprops made a thousand-decibel groan and the Greyhound seemed to shake the screws loose from its frame. We swung violently from side to side as we fell out of the sky. I strained to look out the windows, but couldn’t see anything. Our speed increased and I broke out into a sweat.

This must be what it feels like to cra—

Before I could finish the thought, gravity drop-kicked me in my chest, crushing my shoulders into the seat. The force of the deceleration, meanwhile, lifted my buttocks as far as the limited give in the nylon harness would allow. I thought, for a moment, that I would perform a fatal backward somersault into the cockpit’s instrument panel. Then came a terrible mechanical clatter, followed by giddy, weightless release, and a gravity kick from the other direction, into my back. My neck slumped forward and I tasted tongue and blood. I felt the Greyhound fall, then swing upward violently. The engines were hysterical; kamikaze almost. The plane wobbled, corrected itself, then banked. The arresting cable, it seemed, hadn’t arrested us. And now we were low on fuel, in a rainstorm, with two more chances to land.

“Oops,” said the pilot.

I wondered how I would release my seat belt if we ended up in the ocean.

Then the plane started to fall again.

We landed about fifteen minutes later, on the third and final attempt. When the Greyhound’s hatch opened, we might as well have been on another planet. Pressurized steam from the ship’s engines rose through cracks in the deck, as though the scene was being directed by a pop video director for MTV. The noise of the 1,069-foot-long, eighty-thousand-ton warship chopping up the ocean as seventy warplanes idled their jet engines on deck rendered all other human activity silent. All I could hear was the blood inside my ears. And the voice inside my head asking me what the hell I was doing.

And so began a two-day navy junket—and my first experience of the American military. We spent our time onboard talking to the crew, watching F/A-18 Hornets leap off the deck like flying reptiles, and eating stodgy food in the officers’ mess. We also spent a lot of time sitting around and doing nothing. “Hurry up and wait,” I learned, is the military’s motto. I asked the sailors about Iraq. Some said they blamed Saddam Hussein for September 11 and anthrax. “After all the pain and suffering he has given us,” a mechanic told me from a room several hundred feet below Connie’s deck, “we’re going to go over there and take care of business.”

Surely not, I thought.

A week later, back at home in West Hollywood, Fletcher called. The time was 6:30 A.M., much earlier than usual.

“Ayres, do you want to go to war?” he asked.

Still half asleep, I struggled to understand the question.

“Yes! Love to!” I blurted.

“Gd. Enjoyed your piece on the Constellation, by the way. You might as well go to the Gulf; there won’t be much of a market for L.A. when the war starts. No one wants to read about celebrities anymore.”

“Absolutely,” I said, feeling dizzy.

“The Americans seem to have some kind of scheme. It’s called ‘embedding.’ Make sure you get on it, Ayres.”

“Okay.”

“Gd.”

He hung up.

Oh no.

This was my plan: If I had to spend the war with the American military, I would do it in the safest place possible: belowdecks, on the USS Constellation. As The Times’s designated “embed coordinator,” I called the Pentagon and asked for as many slots as they could give us, citing my experience of reporting from aircraft carriers. “It would be great if we could get some places on, say, the Constellation,” I said, “or a logistics unit.” I nearly added: “But not, y’know, if it’s too much trouble.” I secretly hoped that a London newspaper, albeit an influential one, would be considered unimportant and therefore given boring positions at the rear. A few weeks later I received an e-mail from the Pentagon. “Thank you for your interest in embedding,” it said. “Your embed allocation will be faxed to your section editor soon.”

As the Christmas holidays approached, I tried to forget about war. I was in denial. The invasion would never happen, I reassured myself. I didn’t want to believe Alana’s theories that President Bush wanted revenge on behalf of his father; or that he had his eye on Iraq’s oil reserves. From a coward’s perspective, however, Saddam’s regime was troubling. As recently as 1997, UN weapons inspectors had found Iraqi briefcases containing Clostridium perfringens, the bacteria that causes “gas gangrene,” a disgusting and lethal infection that covers the skin with huge blood blisters while turning it a bronze color. Why would Saddam develop such bioweapons—when most other countries were destroying them—if not to use them? Perhaps Saddam thought he could get away with an attack as long he outsourced it, and blamed it on Osama bin Laden. But why not go further? Why not supersize the attack and buy a couple of old Soviet nukes from the alleged stockpile of eighty thousand warheads poorly guarded by the Russians? Saddam could simply FedEx them to the White House. After all, any instability in the world, as long as it wasn’t blamed on Saddam, could give Iraq the opportunity to reinvade one of its wealthy neighbors, such as Kuwait or Iran.

It was a cliché, but the terror-thon of 2001 had changed everything: If Congress could be shut down with a spoonful of bootleg anthrax, and Wall Street closed for nearly a week by two hijacked airliners, what kind of attack could Saddam bankroll with his oil billions? It was a bowel-loosening thought. And it was clear that sanctions against Saddam weren’t working. They were simply allowing Iraq to get sympathy from the Arab world (according to some unverifiable figures, 2 million Iraqis died from the economic sanctions, half of them children) while simultaneously earning him billions from the UN’s flawed oil-for-food program. It seemed to me that President Bush had three options: lift the sanctions, and make Saddam the world’s first psychopathic trillionaire; keep the sanctions, along with the alleged seven-figure child fatalities and the hatred of the Arab world; or invade. It was certainly a crappy set of options, and hard to work out which was more terrifying than the other. An invasion was by no means the obvious answer, given that it was almost insanely ambitious and had no precedent for success (apart from, some would argue, Afghanistan). And if Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist terror troupe were pissed off before September 11, what would they do after an Arab country’s sovereignty was violated? War footage, some of it from the embeds, would serve as a free, global al-Qaeda recruitment campaign: Look how the Americans are plundering the Holy Land! Join us in jihad! The legitimacy of the 1991 coalition against Saddam, meanwhile, would be hard, if not impossible, to reproduce. A war would be a lonely, bloody venture.

I flew back to Wooler for Christmas while Alana flew back to her family in Ohio. The headlines, meanwhile, informed me that a new team of UN weapons inspectors had entered Iraq, and that Turkey had moved fifteen thousand soldiers to the Iraqi border. The Turks, clearly, knew exactly what was about to happen. It was hard to enjoy my Christmas pudding or wear the silly paper hat I found in my Christmas cracker with much conviction. Never before had I felt that my life was in the hands of political leaders. I would rather have had my life in the hands of a ten-year-old child. Every night, from the womb of my parents’ living room, I would watch miserable-looking BBC journalists report from the sandstorms of Kuwait.

“Oh Christopher, I’m so glad you’re in California and not somewhere horrible like Iraq,” said my mother on more than one occasion. My father at one point chipped in: “You’d have to have a screw loose to go there, wouldn’t you son? Best sticking to Hollywood, eh? A bit more fun than Iraq.”

I got back to Los Angeles in January, just in time for a heat wave. It was as though California was taunting me: showing off the outdoor cafés, open-topped Porsches, and palm tree–lined boulevards I would miss if I was sent to war in the Middle East. I had told Alana all about the embedding scheme, but she refused to believe that The Times would send her boyfriend to a battle zone. “But you’re not a war correspondent,” she huffed. “So why would they send you?” I told her that war reporters had to start their careers somewhere. “But you’re not the type who would become a war correspondent,” she said. “It’s just so stupid.” I agreed: It was stupid. But I also knew it was true. Alana, of course, was immersed in denial: She didn’t want to be left alone, for the length of an entire war, in a city she hated. To make matters worse, Alana was bitterly against an invasion. She even drove to San Francisco to take part in a protest march. “Regime change begins at home,” said her placard.

By February, I was dreading the fax from the Pentagon or the phone call I would get from Fletcher. When it finally came, I was sitting outside the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Sunset Strip, sipping a nonfat cappuccino. As my cell phone chirruped and vibrated, causing the metal table to rattle, I looked jealously at the aspiring actors, models, and rock stars surrounding me. For the first time since arriving in Hollywood, I desperately wanted to be one of them. None of them, after all, would ever be asked to join the front lines to keep their jobs.

“Chrisayres,” I said in my most fearless, professional voice.

“It’s here,” said Glen. “The fax.”

I was glad it wasn’t Fletcher. But this was terrible news: Part of me had still hoped the Pentagon would overlook The Times entirely. I had fantasized that no one in London would notice until it was too late.

“Please say it’s an aircraft carrier,” I said.

“Uh-uh,” said Glen. “No such luck. And it’s TWO places.”

“What?”

“I’ve got one place; you’ve got the other.”

At least, I thought, this meant I would get a traveling companion.

“Come on, Glen,” I croaked. “Tell me what units they’re with…”

“You’re not going to like this,” he said.

“Oh no.”

“Indeed,” said Glen. “Well, the first is with the air force.”

That wasn’t so bad, I thought. The air force, after all, would never put a base anywhere near the front lines. And the embedded position would be at the base. It would be both glamorous and acceptably safe.

“And the other?” I asked, feeling slightly more cheerful.

“The Marines. Front lines. On the ground.”

I wondered if the Coffee Bean had a bathroom.

Then I said: “Jesus Christ.”

“Yes, you’ll probably be needing him,” replied Glen. “If, of course, that’s where Fletcher decides to put you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He hasn’t made his mind up yet,” said Glen.

Glen, of course, knew as well as I did where Fletcher would put me. I worked for Fletcher’s department; Glen worked for home news. There was no way Fletcher was going to put someone from a rival department with the Marines. We both knew instantly, therefore, what my choices were: accept the embedded place with the Marines, protect my career at The Times, and put my life on the line; or turn down the Marines, protect my life, and put my career on the line. There was, of course, another consideration: If I turned down the Marines, I was effectively putting Glen’s life at risk. If, that is, he was stupid enough to go, or not brave enough to turn it down. There wasn’t much of a chance, however, that I would be brave enough to turn it down, either. Ambition and testosterone, it seemed, could overcome fear.

“Hang on,” interrupted Glen before I had any more time to contemplate this existential dilemma. “I can see Fletcher picking up the phone. He’s bound to be calling you. Let me know how it goes.”

He hung up. Within seconds my phone was vibrating again. The caller ID read “unobtainable.” It had to be Fletcher.

“Chrisayres,” I said.

“Good news!” said the clipped, posh baritone from six thousand miles away. I could feel my jaw tighten: Good news to Fletcher could only be bad news to me. “We’ve been given two of these ‘embedded’ positions with the Americans,” he said, sounding genuinely delighted. “One’s with the Al Jaber Air Base in Kuwait and the other… erm, hold on a second, Chris.” I could hear a scuffling sound, then a garbled murmuring as Fletcher answered an urgent question from one of the night editors. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what death would feel like.

“Chr-is?” It was Fletcher again.

“Yes?”

“So congratulations. You’re with the Marines: frontline stuff. Well done! Should be very interesting.”

“Yes. Interesting. Very,” I said.

“We also got a place on an Air Force base in Kuwait, but I imagine that’ll be quite dull,” added Fletcher, as though he was comparing the routes for a pleasant afternoon hike. I pictured pilots, hundreds of miles from the fighting, enjoying hot coffee, bagels, and cigarettes back at the Kuwait base. “There’s a chap called Glen Owen going from home news. He seems pretty happy with that. I assume that’s okay with you?” A vivid image of Glen, also enjoying hot coffee, bagels, and cigarettes, flashed into my mind. I wished, for a moment, that I was Glen.

“Chris? Are you still there?

I wasn’t sure if I was really there. Surely this couldn’t be happening to me. Surely I couldn’t seriously be going to war.

“Won’t this be quite, er, dangerous?” I ventured, following it with what was meant to be a chuckle. It came out as a squeak.

There was a baffled silence.

“No! Go! Enjoy!” came the surprised reply. “It’ll be a character-forming experience for you, Ayres.”

Then came the aftershock. For a second, Sunset Strip went hyper-real: sound played backward and the cars bled into the sunshine. Breathe. Breathe. I saw Dr. Ruth, with her broken leg. “It’s fight or flight, Christopher,” she said. “Animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system.” Then normality clicked back into place. When I stopped hyperventilating, Fletcher was still chatting calmly. He was talking about some kind of course.

“So you’ve done the course, haven’t you?”

I jolted to attention.

“What course?”

“The Pentagon course. Military training. How to put on a gas mask. How to avoid beheading. That kind of thing…”

“Er, no.”

“Oh. Right. Your mate Oliver Poole’s done it. Wrote a lovely piece about it in the Telegraph this morning. Very interesting.”

“Poole?”

“Yes, Poole. He’s going in with the American infantry. Good job you got the Marines. Anyway, not to worry. We have our own course here. It’s with some chaps from the SAS. You’ll need to fly back to England. Get on the Internet now and book your ticket. We’ll see you next week.”

With that, Fletcher hung up.

The worst conversation of my life over, I gulped back my cappuccino, got up from my seat, and began to walk home on unsteady legs. My breathing was quick and shallow, as though someone were sitting on my chest. As much as I was terrified, I also felt slightly elated: heroic, in fact, for agreeing to go to Iraq. I had joined the elite and noble club of John Simpson, Ernie Pyle, and Walter Cronkite. Colleagues would be jealous; girls’ hearts would beat faster. And perhaps Fletcher was right: Perhaps it would be a character-forming experience. There was something almost fatherly about Fletcher, and I couldn’t imagine him deliberately sending me off to a hideous chemical death. Besides, if Oliver Poole could go to war, so could I.

“Poole is embedded,” I told Glen later.

“I know—saw his name included on the Pentagon e-mails. It’s quite amusing, isn’t it? Hollywood Reporters Go to War. Actually, I’ve heard that Poole’s fearless. He can’t wait to see some action.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, seriously. He probably caught the bloodlust at Eton, from Prince Dippy of Nepal. Or from his grandfather: He was a colonel to Field Marshal Montgomery, y’know. Helped plan D-day.”

I groaned.

“Oh no,” I said weakly. “Poole’s one of those war types.”

“There’s a tradition of it at the Telegraph,” continued Glen. “Their man in Afghanistan was particularly impressive. He covered that battle with the Pathan tribesmen in the Swat Valley.”

“The what valley?”

“Took him a month to get there. Spent a good week of the journey on a train from Bangalore, in insufferable heat.”

No wonder Poole didn’t have a car: Telegraph reporters were probably taught to trek through the desert, in their underwear.

“Of course, all of this was quite a while ago,” said Glen.

“When?”

“1897, actually,” said Glen.

“What? What was his name again?”

“Winston Churchill. He went on to be quite famous, apparently. The Telegraph paid him only five quid for his effort—the tight bastards. At least that’s what it says in the Roy Jenkins biography.”

Over the next few days, more daunting factoids about Poole’s family connections kept being relayed to Los Angeles, including the revelation that his stepfather was the former Tory politician Lord Fowler, whose ex-wife was none other than Linda Christmas, my terrifying former City tutor. I half expected Glen to call back with the news that Poole was, in fact, related to George W. Bush. And Tony Blair. And the Iraqi royal family. The situation was turning into what Barrow had once called “the black curse of Ayres.” Why couldn’t the Telegraph have posted someone shallow and celebrity-obsessed to Los Angeles? Why Poole, for God’s sake? The best I could hope for was that the Marines would dump me in the rear, so I could blame my lack of heroism on bad luck. Still, comparisons between the two Hollywood correspondents would be inevitable. The media gossips in London would love it. I almost expected Poole to return from Baghdad with full military decorations for bravery.

Now that the worst-case scenario with the embedded scheme had actually transpired, however, I also felt strangely relieved. At least going to war might end my guilt over everything from my grandfather’s treatment by the Nazis to the fact that I had deserted New York. I wanted, in a strange way, to lose my war virginity properly. Not, of course, that I had any idea of what was in store for me. I knew nothing about the military. My only experience of it had been standing on the deck of the USS Constellation. My inability to visualize it made it worse. War films were my only references, and gore-soaked scenes from Saving Private Ryan, Three Kings, and Apocalypse Now flickered in my imagination like a private horror show. I saw Humvees and tank trenches, grenades and M-16s. And I remembered the quote of Private Joker, the war correspondent in Full Metal Jacket: “A day without blood is like a day without sunshine.” I had no idea how I would break the news to Alana. I knew, however, that until the moment I boarded a plane with a ticket to Kuwait, she wouldn’t believe it was happening. My parents were another matter. Perhaps I shouldn’t tell them at all.

I was still reeling from the double hit of euphoria and terror when I got home. I sat down heavily at my desk, chewed on the end of a ballpoint, and shook my head in sheer disbelief. I flicked on the television and listened to a CNN report about British intelligence on Iraq being copied from the thesis of a California student. Then I noticed a fresh sheet, shiny like cheap toilet paper, lying on top of my fax machine. It was dated February 10, 17:21, GMT. At the top of it was the News International Pension Plan logo. Below, it had: Nomination of Beneficiaries Form. Underneath that was my name and British national insurance number.

With dread, I skimmed what followed:

To: News International Pension Trustees Limited

I understand the Trustee has complete discretion as to the application

of the lump sum benefit payable on my death within

the terms of the Trust, but I wish the following to be considered

as possible recipients:

At the bottom of the page were four columns, each one for the name and address of a recipient along with their date of birth and relationship to me. The final column was for the percentage share of my life insurance policy they would receive if I was shot, blown up, beheaded, or gassed by the Iraqis. I stared at it for a second, shook my head again, then logged on to my computer so that I could e-mail Glen. I noticed a new message from the Pentagon in my inbox. It had arrived with two bulky Word file attachments. I double-clicked on them. The first document was entitled “smallpox vaccine”; the second, “anthrax vaccine series.” They both had the same heading: “Release, Indemnification, and Hold Harmless Agreement; and Agreement Not to Sue.”

I looked at the text of the e-mail. It read:

The Department of Defense has agreed to administer anthrax and smallpox vaccines to your media employees who will be participating in the DoD’s embedding programme. These vaccines carry risks along with benefits. We emphasize the importance of warning your employees who agree to be vaccinated to remain cognisant of any change in their health following vaccination and if there is, immediately seek medical assistance.

I closed the e-mail.

Three words came into my head: Gulf War syndrome. I had stupidly assumed that death could come only on the Iraqi battlefield. Perhaps I wouldn’t even survive the inoculations. My nervous system was delicate enough, without pumping it full of 57 varieties of poison. To inoculate against a disease, you first have to be given the disease. Anthrax, my old adversary from New York, would finally be introduced to my bloodstream, along with smallpox, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, diphtheria, and hepatitis. I imagined the size of the needle: four inches in circumference with a canister the size of an oil barrel, filled with green liquid.

Churchill, apparently, used to call his wartime depression “the black dog.” And as I sat there, numbed with the fear hormone, I could have sworn I heard it bark. Oh, how the black dog bayed and howled. I felt suffocated; helpless. I could have said no to all this. I had brought it all on myself.