War Reporting for Cowards

9 WHO RUNS LIVES

The reporter was on his knees. His beard was matted with dribble and watery snot, and his right hand was cuffed to a radiator. Above him were his captors: two young, smiling men. They could have been Colombian, Algerian, or Arab. They wore denim and lumberjack shirts, which probably smelled of sweat, percolated coffee, and bootleg aftershave. In any other context, their hesitant smiles would have been endearing, fit for a mother’s mantelpiece. One of the men patted the journalist on the head and tousled his knotted hair. For a second, it was possible to imagine some fondness between them. Then the knife appeared. The reporter’s eyes died. His muscles lost grip of his flesh. A rag was stuffed into his mouth and the cuffs were unlocked. The man with the knife frowned with concentration. Now there was steel between the reporter’s ring finger and pinky. There was a muffled howl, and the sound of an empty stomach contracting. The journalist’s finger was detached with surprising ease, but with more blood than expected. The second captor swore as polka dots appeared on his white Nikes. The reporter was again patted, this time more vigorously, as though he were a favorite but misbehaving pet. The butcher held up the lonely digit. He found it amusing. Still laughing, he put it into an envelope. The reporter was hunched and crying.

“Look at ’im,” said a male voice with a Yorkshire accent from the front of the darkened room, where the reporter had been freeze-framed in his agony. It seemed cruel to keep him there, even though he was made of pixels and projected onto a wall. I wished there was a “dramatic reconstruction” disclaimer, or another scene, in which the surviving hostage was being interviewed on Oprah, looking relaxed and happy, with a Venice Beach tan. “Kidnap Ordeal Made Me Stronger,” the screen caption could say. But I feared there was no happy ending. I feared the worst.

The red dot of a laser pen drew a circle around the journalist’s dead stare. “Completely out of it: ’E’s in shock,” said the voice. “Remember what we talked about yesterday: Shock is a state of acute circulatory insufficiency of the blood. In other words, yer ’art can’t pump enough blood, at the right pressure, through yer vital organs. Symptoms: apathy; weakness; rapid ’artbeat. In some cases you stay conscious but lose alertness. But I’ll be surprised if this fella doesn’t pass out. Watch.” The video resumed, and the reporter fell heavily onto the warm, stained carpet. I noticed his thin bare legs, covered in a spray of human sewage.

As I tried to control my breathing, I felt something push hard against the back of my plastic chair. “Skewsme,” said a muffled female voice near my left ear. I turned to see a woman, a fellow delegate in the Surviving Dangerous Countries course, dive for the door of the conference room. Her right hand was clamped over her mouth. The door slammed behind her. We heard stilettos on ceramic. There was another slam, this time softer and with a short echo, as the soon-to-be-embedded journalist bolted into the bathroom. I considered following her.

Switches flicked. The overhead lights in the conference room buzzed and flashed, before capturing twenty worried, sweaty faces in unflattering glare. The voice at the front of the room belonged to David Silver, a former Royal Marine and onetime member of the Special Air Service (SAS). The elite regiment was based a few miles north, at a former RAF base in Hereford. Silver was in his late forties and looked as though he had been made from squares: square jawbone, square shoulders, square skull, and neat, square beard. He was dressed in corporate hikewear: desert boots, ironed Rohan sweater, and a checked, vented shirt, carefully tucked in. He looked like a life-size Legoman. Silver’s minibiography, part of the course’s reading material, said he had spent two years attached to the U.S. Army Rangers and once trained the private army of a billionaire sultan. I wondered if he had been one of the SAS commandos in black hooded jumpsuits who had stormed the Iranian embassy in London on May 5, 1980. The raid came after Khuzistan terrorists, funded by Saddam Hussein, took twenty-six hostages. All but one of the living hostages were rescued—while five of the six captors were shot dead. The commandos, like real-life 007s, had gone straight to a champagne reception with Margaret Thatcher when it was over. The siege at the embassy, meanwhile, later inspired a Hollywood film called Who Dares Wins, after the regiment’s motto.

Silver attempted a square, mechanical grin.

“Any questions?” he asked.

The room fidgeted.

On one side of me was David Sharrock, The Times’s Madrid correspondent, and on the other Richard Mills, a Times photographer from Northern Ireland. Opposite was a Dutch television news crew. The rest of the Surviving Dangerous Countries delegates were junior producers from the BBC and Tonight with Trevor McDonald, plus a Swiss radio journalist. It was an overweight, hungover, and nicotine-addicted room. There was a salty, sweaty taste in the air. I felt nauseous.

Finally someone pointed at the image of the weeping, fingerless reporter and said: “Is that gonna happen to us?”

Silver laughed. It was a barracks laugh, as cold as a wet day in Wales.

“Let’s ’ope not,” he said.

There was more fidgeting. Everyone wanted a cigarette, or a drink, or both. There was a bar only yards away, in the lounge.

“Look,” said Silver. “Let’s not pretend. After September 11, everything changed. Westerners are now seen as targets. Members of the media, especially journalists from America or Britain, are seen as ambassadors of their countries. If you think you’ve got immunity—forget about it. Back in the day, people didn’t deliberately target the media. Even in Vietnam. Or Gulf War One. They do now. Look what happened to that fella from the Wall Street Journal, Danny Pearl.”

I imagined how much worse the video of Pearl’s death must have looked compared with the amateur amputation we had just witnessed. The tape of Pearl’s murder, entitled “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl,” was released on February 21, 2002. It was three minutes and thirty-six seconds long. In it, pictures of dead Muslims and footage of President Bush shaking hands with the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon were displayed alongside a jumpy reel of Pearl’s murder. The worst moment came precisely one minute and fifty-five seconds into the video, when the reporter was shown with his throat sliced open (a technical error by the captors prevented the actual deed being recorded). Afterward, Pearl’s head was detached and held up by the scalp while a list of the captors’ demands, including the release of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, was superimposed on top. The terrorists, who called themselves the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, had previously sent their demands to the Wall Street Journal from the e-mail address kidnapperguy@hotmail.com. The captors’ final e-mail threatened, “If America will not meet our demands, we will kill Daniel. This cycle will continue [until] no American journalist could enter Pakistan.” Pearl’s body was found three months later outside Karachi. At the time of Pearl’s murder, his wife, Marianne, was pregnant with their first child.

I suddenly felt very cold. Silver was still talking.

“Take out yer booklets,” he said, “and look at the stats: 347 journalists killed worldwide in the past ten years: That’s five times more reporters than were killed in World War II. In 1994 alone, twenty journalists were kidnapped—by militants, criminals, guerrillas, government forces, or whatever—and executed. That’s why we’re ’ere: to help you reduce the risks while still getting yer stories.”

Silver pointed to the reporter still in agony on the screen. It was like a holiday snap from hell. “This poor fella up here, I think, survived,” he said. “Someone must have paid the ransom when they got ’is pinky in the post. But you can imagine the psychological damage. And if yer gonna do this ‘embedded’ thing with the Americans, it’s something worth thinking about. If the Iraqis get hold of you, they won’t be that interested in a ransom. Or yer little finger.”

“Portland Place, please. Langham Hilton.”

This was me, in a London cab, a few days earlier. The date was Saturday, February 15, 2003, and I had just staggered off a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to London Heathrow on my way to meet Fletcher’s “chaps from the SAS.” The chaps, it turned out, ran a school for war reporters from a luxury hotel near Ross-on-Wye, in Herefordshire, and were best known for a five-day course entitled Surviving Dangerous Countries. Fletcher had booked me on it. The syllabus said that on Monday we would learn about “target awareness,” and on Tuesday about “controlling bleeding.” The former would “demonstrate why people become targets” while the latter would “explain the causes and types of bleeding.” The message seemed clear: Journalists stupid enough to embed themselves with the Marines would become walking targets, who bled. I feared the Surviving Dangerous Countries course would convince me to avoid dangerous countries, never mind survive them. At least leaving Los Angeles had been easy: Alana was away on a business trip.

According to office gossip, the SAS course had cost The Times four thousand dollars. There was also a rumor that The Times saved 40 percent on Lloyd’s of London insurance for journalists who took it, with the policy covering claims of up to $1 million. This, however, was not true. I later learned that News International had its own blanket policy that covered all reporters on the battlefield.

Fletcher had placed his war correspondents on a map of the Middle East like a high roller at a roulette table. Anthony Loyd was in northern Iraq with the Kurds; Janine di Giovanni was in Baghdad; and another Times veteran, Stephen Farrell, would be posted near the Iraq-Jordan border. My fellow course delegate David Sharrock, a veteran of the first Gulf War, would follow the British troops into the southern port town of al-Basra. Ayres and Owen, meanwhile, were wild gambles on the one-armed bandit. The odds of a decent story: a million to one.

During the eleven-hour flight from Los Angeles, I had listened to a depressing Nick Cave CD and read the even more depressing Valentine’s Day edition of the Los Angeles Times. It informed me that Hans Blix had declared Iraq’s “al-Samoud 2” missiles to be in breach of UN Resolution 687, because they had a maximum range of 180 kilometers, instead of the allowed 150. I wondered why Saddam didn’t just come clean with his weapons. Perhaps he didn’t think President Bush was serious. I almost wanted to go to Baghdad and tell him myself: He’s serious.

“You ’avin a laugh?” asked the cabbie.

“Sorry?”

“Portland Place? Today?”

“Er, yeah.”

There was a short silence. I wondered what was wrong with Portland Place, but was too jet-lagged to ask. I was dizzy with worry, cosmic radiation, coach-class miniatures, and chemical food. So I looked out the window instead and watched a British army soldier, in jungle fatigues, clomp his boots by an outdoor ashtray. He was clutching what looked like a submachine gun. I couldn’t remember seeing soldiers at Heathrow before. At that moment a column of armored vehicles, complete with caterpillar treads and gun turrets, grunted into the short-term parking area, slowed down, then carried on, toward a roundabout with a model Concorde on top of it. I remembered reading in the Los Angeles Times that this week was Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice, an important Islamic holiday.

“Blimey,” I said to no one.

“I’ll do it, but it’ll cost yer,” said the driver, finally. A thick forefinger reached for the meter. The back of the cab smelled of vomit and diesel. We jerked forward into the camouflaged traffic. All I could see of the cabbie was a red Arsenal scarf, a thinning turf of gray hair, and a tattooed forearm.

It felt good to be back in England.

“What’s the problem with Portland Place?” I asked eventually.

“What? Other than the one million wankers marching through central London, protesting against the war?”

He said “war” as though it was spelled “woe-aghr.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I wish. A million of the buggers. Biggest protest march since the 1840s, according to Five Live. Gridlock, innit.”

He turned up his radio. “Listen,” he said.

“… actress Venessa Redgrave… is one of the marchers,” said the announcer. Redgrave came on. “The world is against this war,” she declared. “No one doubts Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator, but war is the most ghastly way to try to bring change.” I heard chanting and cheers.

“So you support the invasion?” I shouted, leaning in close to the plastic screen that separated driver and passenger.

“What? Nah. Bloody stupid idea. Blair must have been born yesterday. That George Dubya is leading ’im up the garden path, I reckon. I’ve got a nephew in the Royal Marines, though, so you’ve got to support the boys, ’aven’t yer? Poor buggers. This one won’t be over in five bloody days.”

“Right,” I said.

“Mind you,” continued the cabbie, “after what ’appened in New York, with them twin towers, makes you think, dunnit? Last thing we need is old Mohammed sitting in a field in Berkshire, firing rockets at EasyJet.” He pointed to a tank parked on the hard shoulder of the highway, under the Heathrow flight path. “Sometimes I wonder if these army boys know something we don’t.”

He laughed, which seemed to cause problems deep within his lungs. The laugh ended as a violent, eye-watering cough.

“Anyway, where’ve yer come from today?” he asked, when he finally recovered. “Been on ’oliday, ’ave you?”

I told him everything. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t stop myself. At one point I thought I was going to have to use the metal tissue box that had been thoughtfully screwed to the cab’s rear window ledge. In the end we got to Portland Place in fifteen minutes, a world record. The roads were empty. No one, it seemed, had dared face the predicted gridlock in central London.

“That’ll be fifty-four thirty,” said the cabbie as we pulled up to the Hilton. “Thought you was looking at a ton—easy.”

I shuffled backward out of the cab, dragging my luggage in front of me.

“Cheers,” I said, as I stood on the pavement and passed him four crisp notes through the window. “Here’s sixty-five.”

The cabdriver’s face was plump and mottled, but dad-ish. He bent down to make eye contact through the passenger window.

“Take care of yourself, son, wontcha?” he said with a nod.

“I’ll try,” I replied.

The taxi gave a diesel snarl and began to pull a U-turn across Portland Place. There was an oily clack as its doors locked automatically. I saw the driver’s lips move. “Silly bugger,” I could have sworn he said.

In the bleached hotel room, with its panoramic view of plumbing and masonry, I washed off the sweat of a night in economy class, slumped onto the double bed, and attempted to calm myself by reading an issue of Car magazine. Unable to concentrate, I prodded the television awake. It showed me a column of well-dressed antiwar protesters marching through London, hoisting signs that read NO WAR FOR OIL, MAKE TEA NOT WAR, and just NO. They didn’t look like the usual hippie peaceniks. There was barely a pair of Dr. Martens footwear or a woolen beanie to be seen. They looked like Times readers, in fact. The television also showed demonstrations in New York, Berlin, Paris, and Athens, with a total of 5 million protesters worldwide. Then it cut to Tony Blair, who was giving a defiant speech in Glasgow to the Labour Party. “There will be no march for the victims of Saddam,” he declared, “no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule; no righteous anger over the torture chambers which, if he is left in power, will be left in being.” I didn’t know who I found more convincing: the peace marchers or the prime minister. The truth, however, was that I was too selfishly preoccupied with being sent to Iraq to worry about the justification for the invasion. My instinct was to support it. If I was going to be gassed by Saddam in the desert, I at least wanted it to be for a good cause. But I admit it: Part of me was happy that someone was trying to stop it from happening.

“What d’you make of the protesters?” I asked Glen later that evening over a salad at Vingt Quatre, a posh diner on Fullham Road

“My mum was one of them,” he said.

“Your mother marched?”

“For selfish reasons, probably. Doesn’t want her son to go to war.”

“You’re going to an aircraft base.”

“Still technically war,” he said, pointing his fork at me. “And Scud missiles, as you know Chris, can land anywhere.”

“I’m sure my mum would’ve done the same. If she knew I was going.”

Glen glanced up from his overpriced plate of lettuce. Behind him, I could see Chelsea blondes with their banker boyfriends.

“You haven’t told her?” he asked.

“Nah. Waiting for a good time.”

We munched in silence for a few seconds, then Glen said: “It doesn’t feel quite right, does it? The war, I mean.”

“Part of me thinks it’s justified,” I said with a frown. “And part of me thinks it’s one of stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard.”

“At least in ’91 we had Stormin’ Norman,” said Glen, “and the Saudis on our side. But he’s a complete bastard, Saddam. Makes you feel quite bellicose, really. Especially when you see what he did to the Kurds…”

Our concentration returned to the food. I remembered reading about the shells of mustard gas that fell on the Kurdish city of Halabja on March 16, 1988. The gas apparently smelled like fertilizer, or rotten garlic. Those who breathed too deeply ended up going blind, while their skin bubbled and blistered. Survivors arguably got a worse deal than those killed by immediate asphyxiation: They suffered brain damage, leukemia, infertility, and disfigurement.

Then I said: “He’s going to use chemical weapons, isn’t he?”

“Without a doubt,” said Glen.

I pushed my plate away. It smelled like garlic.

The SAS course turned out to be a bit of a blow to morale. I had no idea there were so many things that could kill you, injure you, maim you, or otherwise ruin your day on a battlefield: heavy artillery, light artillery, tanks, machine guns, handguns, submachine guns, land mines that explode upward, land mines that explode downward, land mines that jump out of their craters and explode in front of your balls, and, of course, snipers. I had completely forgotten about snipers. But apparently we’d be hearing a lot from them in Baghdad, if we ever got there. And we hadn’t even started on chemical or biological weapons. It was a wonder, I thought, that soldiers even bothered to turn up for wars. There didn’t seem to be much point.

We were shown footage of dead people, nearly dead people, beheaded people, alive people who were soon to be dead people, and gruesomely injured people. We were advised to carry a Ziploc bag in our backpacks, for severed fingers or toes. I wondered if we should also carry freezer-size bags, for larger appendages. A good deal of time was spent learning how to tie and loosen tourniquets, to stop the faucet of blood from limbless joints. I practiced applying a tourniquet to myself, but nearly passed out when my leg went numb. The appendage I was most worried about losing, however, was my head. But tourniquets don’t work on the neck.

The climax of the course was “field training.” It involved our flabby press battalion, commanded by a clearly bored David Silver, taking a pleasant walk through the frosted countryside, eating Mars bars, and fumbling with maps. When we got back to the hotel, I took Silver aside and asked if he thought it was a good idea to be embedded. “Wouldn’t be too keen on it meeself,” he said. “Seems to me, if Saddam’s got chemicals, ’e’s gonna use ’em, int’ee? But to be honest, I can’t see the Yanks lettin’ your lot anywhere near the action. No offense, but you’ll just slow ’em down. And if you do end up with a frontline unit, I can’t imagine the Americans will be very ’appy about it.” There were three ways, I concluded, to look at Silver’s analysis: as good news, because it meant I would probably be kept away from the fighting; bad news, because if I was allowed near the fighting, the Marines would resent me for slowing them down; or very bad news, because the prospect of chemical warfare in Iraq was too scary even for Silver. And Silver had been in the bloody SAS.

No one on the Surviving Dangerous Countries course seemed to believe that embeds would face any serious danger. Surely, I thought, The Times, the BBC, and Granada Television couldn’t all have misjudged the situation. If embeds really did end up at the front, I thought, the British and American public would be lucky if they recognized a single correspondent—all of them would be under the age of thirty and, if I was anything to go by, cowering in foxholes.

The online edition of the New York Times, which I checked every morning from my hotel room, told a different story about the embeds. “In many ways, this is going to be historic,” the paper quoted a U.S. Defense Department spokesman as saying. He added that more than 500 reporters, 100 of them from international organizations, including the Arabic-language Al Jazeera cable channel and Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency, had signed up. Even Men’s Health had an embed, as did People magazine and Rolling Stone, still known for its hippie, pot-smoking sympathies during Vietnam. I wondered what on earth Men’s Health would write about; war was the antithesis of men’s health. The embedding scheme was the biggest media mobilization of all time, The Times said, requiring a massive logistical operation of its own. The Defense Department spokesman explained that embeds would not be allowed to carry weapons and would not have to pay for their units’ transport, food, or accommodations. “There’s no cost for the six feet of ground they’ll lay on and the rations, although they may not like them,” he said. Six feet of ground? Wouldn’t we get a bunk bed?

The only full-time war correspondents in the SAS course were the Dutch crew. The chief reporter, Gottfried, was a heavy, saturnine figure with a carcinogenic suntan and worry lines as deep as the Grand Canyon, hardened by the fumes from his forty-a-day Marlboro habit. He reeked of death and tobacco. Gottfried had witnessed some of the most depraved acts of humankind, in all the world’s major terror-tourist destinations, including Kosovo, Rwanda, Liberia, Chechnya, and the Sudan. He looked as though he hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since 1974.

“So what’s it like?” I asked him over a pint of warm Boddingtons in the hotel bar one evening. “Going to war, I mean.”

He looked at me with black eyes. I expected to hear tales of adventure, heroism, bad rations, and the honesty of soldiers.

“I lost my wife,” he said, emptying his glass with a single wrist movement. “And my children. I lost my children, too.”

“They died?”

“She left me. My wife left me, and she took the kids. I was gone for six months of the year covering the wars. She couldn’t wait any longer. I don’t blame her. Why wait for Gottfried? Gottfried talks only of hell.”

I began to feel immense pity for the giant Dutchman, whose elaborate television hairdo seemed at odds with his face. For a moment I thought Gottfried might cry. But his tear ducts had dried up long ago.

“It’s a great job, of course,” he told me. “But a dangerous one. And a lonely one, also. You have a wife at home?”

A great job? Being Bono was a great job. Being Gottfried? Surely not.

“Girlfriend,” I replied.

Gottfried laughed. It was a harrowing sound; gentle, like weeping.

“My advice to you, Christoffel: Get rid of your beautiful woman now, before it starts. It won’t work. It never does.”

We are all born fearless. Perhaps we lose it as we get older and realize the value, and the responsibility, of love. When I was a choirboy at St. Mary’s Church in Wooler, forced every Sunday into a white vestment and frilly ruff collar, I was sure I wanted to be a man of action. The vicar once asked me, in front of the entire church, what I wanted to do when I grew up. The answer was obvious, because I had just seen Who Dares Wins on Betamax. “I’m going to be in the SAS,” I replied quite seriously. The carrot-haired boy, with his milky, freckled face and scaffolded teeth, couldn’t understand why the congregation laughed so hard, for so long.

I was never particularly brave. As a toddler my mother stayed at home to look after me. She would bake bread and read me stories about Snoopy and Willo the Wisp. When I was old enough to go to school, my father was there to keep an eye on me: He was, after all, the head teacher, who walked down the corridors on his hands. My mother eventually got a teaching job at the same school, meaning I was near both parents, twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps it was this idyllic childhood that stopped me toughening up. But there were downsides. The head teacher’s son is never a popular kid, and by the time acne and adolescence had ruined me at the age of thirteen, I was sullen and silent company. I emerged from the worst of it three or four years later, with a terrible haircut and even worse taste in music. I was determined to move to London in search of some kind of compensatory fame and wealth. It was only when I finally left Wooler, however, that I realized how lucky I had been: Sometimes, I wondered if my parents were the only happily married couple left in England.

I told my Mum about Iraq the day I left London for the Surviving Dangerous Countries course. Passengers standing next to me at Paddington station heard the following one-sided conversation:

“Mum, I’m being sent to, er, Kuwait for a while.”

“KUWAIT. It’s very safe.”

“I’m going to be, write about… I’m going to spend some time at a military base. It’s very safe. Really, very safe.”

“It’s for the wa—”

“I know I’m not a war correspondent.”

“Like Walter Cronkite, yes.”

“I know I’m not the type.”

“Because no one wants to read about celebrities at the moment.”

“Well, y’know Mum, war correspondents have to start their careers somewhere.”

“Yes, it’s near Iraq.”

“Yes, I know he used chemical weapons on the Kurds.”

“I’m in England. Doing a course with the SAS.”

“I am taking this seriously.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to my father.”

The conversation reminded me of an ethical problem I had once studied in philosophy class at Hull. It concerned a young Frenchman who, during World War II, was forced to choose between joining the Allied forces in England or staying at home and looking after his sick mother. The man desperately wanted to fight the Nazis, but felt an overwhelming guilt at abandoning his beloved mum, who begged him to stay. The dilemma, posed by Jean-Paul Sartre, had no solution. According to Sartre, it simply proved the anguish of man, and the absence of God. “Everything is permissible if God does not exist,” wrote Sartre, “and as a result man is forlorn.” He was a cheerful soul, old Sartre. On the positive side, he argued that man was free. The freedom part made it worse, though. It reminded me that I didn’t have to go to Iraq. I was, as Sartre said, in anguish. Come to think of it, I also felt pretty damn forlorn.

There was no way, of course, that I could tell my parents about what I feared the embedding scheme might involve. So I told them what we both wanted to hear: I would go to Kuwait, live at a military base, and perhaps go on “day trips” into Iraq, after it had been safely invaded by the Americans. But then I did something really unforgivable: I asked my father’s opinion on whether I should go. “Yes, son, I think you should go,” he said hesitantly. “The Times wouldn’t put you in any danger. And it sounds like a great honor. You must be doing well, son. Best of luck.” My father’s bogus approval made me feel better, for a while. But I knew he would have given me different advice if he’d known the Pentagon’s real plan for the embeds. I also knew that if I died in Iraq, my poor old man would never forgive himself.

At Heathrow, after the course, I called Alana. It was early in Los Angeles, but I knew she would be up, jet-lagged from her business trip.

“How was it?” she asked, trying to sound enthusiastic.

“Oh, y’know, pretty useful. I think.”

“Geez, I can’t believe you did all that,” she said.

I paused for a second.

“All what?”

“Oh, I had a look online. Your friend Oliver wrote about going on one of these military courses. Must have been grueling…”

“Poole?”

“Y’know, Oliver. From the Telegraph. The good-looking one. We met him once in Chateau Marmont, I think.”

“I know exactly who he is,” I said a bit too quickly, through a clenched jaw. “What kind of things did he do?”

“Oh, the same stuff you did, probably. The five-mile tactical march with the fifty-pound rucksack; being shot at with live rounds; applying facial camouflage; chemical decontamination; jumping from helic—”

“It wasn’t the same course,” I interrupted. “He did the Pentagon course. He did it at Fort Dix, New Jersey.”

“I know, Chris. But it’s the same thing, right? Did they teach you how to self-inject the nerve gas antidote?”

“No.”

“What about how to ‘dead-reckon’?”

“Look. It’s not the same—”

“Did you create a field latrine with a shovel, wooden planks, and baby wipes?”

What the hell was a field latrine?

“No,” I croaked. “Look—”

“Tourniquets?”

“YES! We did tourniquets.” In my relief, I almost told her about the near-fainting incident, but caught myself in time.

“Cool,” said Alana. “Missed you.”

“Yeah, missed you, too.”

“It’s hard to imagine you putting on a gas mask. Oliver said he had to get it over his head and seal it in nine seconds.”

It was then, in a moment of exquisite torment, that I realized the most important thing about the Surviving Dangerous Countries course: We hadn’t learned a single thing about chemical or biological weapons. My blood turned to iced panic. “Hang on, Alana,” I mumbled as I fought my hand luggage, pulling out the glossy brochure with my schedule on it. I found the section entitled “Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical.” This, I learned, was a separate course, to be held the following week in London. “Of particular importance to those embedding with the American miltiary,” it said. By next week, however, I would be in Los Angeles, making final preparations for Iraq. I couldn’t believe it: I had taken the wrong bloody course.

“Is everything okay?” I heard Alana say.

10 THE LIST

There were thunderstorms over Greenland. The Boeing 747, like a great basking shark, tumbled and twitched as its pilots sweated over glowing instruments. Through my rain-splashed window, I stared at the wing as it bounced in a downdraft. We banked starboard and lost altitude quickly. Transatlantic flight remains one of humankind’s most unnatural acts: 524 people, breathing a ton of pressurized air, falling ten thousand feet at 567 miles per hour as they travel backward in time. No wonder the kids of the seventies, the war virgins, are so strung out on Zoloft and Xanax: Our lives are built on technology, and stalked by fear of technology failing.

So how did I feel as I sat in the cheapest seat of the American Airlines jumbo, downing miniatures with my back to the stench and gargle of the chemical toilet? I was pretty worried about the gas mask situation, that was for sure. And I felt terrible about conning my father into giving me approval to go to war. Strangely, however, the thunderstorms weren’t bothering me. My flight on the navy Greyhound had shown me the real meaning of turbulence: This was nothing. Perhaps, I thought, I wouldn’t be scared of anything if I survived Iraq. Perhaps, after being denied comfort and technology, and forced to sleep rough in the desert, I’d be cured forever of anxiety. Or perhaps I’d come back like one of the “mental cases” in the World War I poem by Wilfred Owen: “… purgatorial shadows / Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish / Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked…”

Shortly after becoming an official embed, I got a call from Nick Wapshott in New York. “Congratulations, young Ayres,” he crooned. “Marching off to war, eh? You’ll come back a changed man. Everyone always does.” As long as I came back breathing—and with no absent, much-loved limbs—I didn’t really care. My fragile mental health had already survived September 11 and a biological attack on my office. Now it was Saddam’s turn to try and unhinge me.

In the taxi ride home from the airport, I marveled at the hot breeze, the blue slab of sky, and the spiky desert foliage. Once again California was teasing: showing off what I would miss if I went to war. It had been snowing in Ross-on-Wye, with a Welsh prima donna gale blustering in from the west. As for the weather in Iraq—it was hardly worth thinking about. I imagined the Gulf forecast: A fog of war expected from the south; high pressure in Baghdad; chance of a poisoned cloud, blowing in from the north; invaders and embeds advised to stay indoors.

I clambered out of the taxi at 1131 Alta Loma Road and offered a nod of recognition to the Mexican doormen—the foreign legion sentries who guard every West Hollywood apartment complex. If the Mexicans ever decide they want California back, the Americans are in trouble: The Latinos pretty much run the place already. They have a head start, unlike the Americans in Iraq. I once read that there wasn’t a single U.S. spy in Baghdad. Why would anyone risk it? Not even James Bond could smirk his way through one of Saddam’s tongue-pulling sessions.

After dragging my bags through the canyon of SUVs in the garage, I passed the swimming pool and tennis court and took the steps up to my apartment. I shook my head. What the hell was I doing? Why was I giving this up for Iraq? I considered my options for the month of March: swimming pool, or death. I was still grasping at the hope, however, that the invasion wouldn’t happen. I had heard on the news that the Turks were getting ornery and refusing to allow President Bush to off-load military equipment at the port of Iskenderun. If the Americans couldn’t advance into Iraq from the north, that would leave Kuwait as the only friendly country from which they could attack. And surely, no military commander in his right mind would invade a country the size of France from one direction. Finally, at 4.23 P.M., I clattered through the front door of my apartment, heaving my bags behind me.

Alana wasn’t home. I inspected the fridge for alcohol: It was empty. I debated whether to take a quick shower or check my e-mails. I decided on the latter. My computer gave an indignant bleep and began clacking and whirring as it powered up. At that moment the front door was flung open and Alana appeared, her hair ironed and shiny from an expensive primping in Beverly Hills. She was carrying groceries, a dozen bags of supermarket ballast from Trader Joe’s.

For a second we looked at each other in silence.

Then Alana said: “I bought orange juice! And coffee!”

Her face was a study in relief: that her ridiculous boyfriend, with his ridiculous job, had come back home; and that her week of solitary confinement in Los Angeles was finally over. Alana couldn’t stop smiling.

“Hi,” I replied, feeling slightly awkward after our separation. I was pleased to see her, too. But it was a complicated pleasure, because Alana made everything so much harder; so much more dramatic. War is the opposite of love, after all. And Alana was a reminder that I was trading one for the other.

The details of what happened next have been lost. My memory, with its reporter’s talent for minutiae, fails me. Only the pathos remains. We must have embraced; kissed, almost certainly. I know that the shopping bags, with their warm loaves, damp leaves, and pungent vegetables, were ignored: abandoned on the floor, leaking and rustling beside my desk. Eventually I must have sat down in front of the computer. It was then that I saw the e-mail from Glen, highlighted in a bold font. “Here we go…” was the ominous subject line. It had been sent at 1812 GMT, when I was somewhere over Greenland. I double-clicked. What followed was bad news, the worst news. The e-mail had been forwarded from the Pentagon. “Instructions for Embedded Media” it began. “All embedded media representatives must report to the Coalition Press Center, located at the Hilton Kuwait Resort, at 7:00 A.M., Zulu Time, on March 5.”

It was happening.

This gave me all of ten days to prepare for war. Given that I had no Kuwaiti visa, no flak jacket, no helmet, and no supplies—and no inoculations—I would have to turn around and head straight back to London, and from there on to Kuwait. I was looking at eighty-three hundred miles, or twenty hours, of hard economy. I cursed again at missing the gas mask course. Then I thought of Oliver Poole, who was probably already on the Iraqi border. I pictured him, in desert fatigues and chemical-proof spacesuit, shadow-boxing and jogging on the spot. The infantry probably loved him.

“Oh no,” I said as my blood turned sour. “I have to go back.”

“What?” said Alana, quietly.

“The war. It’s really happening. March 5. I have go back. I have to get to Kuwait. The bloody war. I can’t believe it.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“No,” said Alana again.

It took a lot to make Alana cry. This, however, was more than enough. She sat among the unpacked grocery bags, her thwarted attempt at a normal life, shivering and sobbing as tears spoiled her makeup and hair. “What am I going to do with all these groceries?” she asked, and for a moment she looked like a little girl left alone on her birthday by a cruel stepfather. I thought of Gottfried and his failed marriage. “She couldn’t wait any longer, Christoffel,” I heard him say. “I don’t blame her. Why wait for Gottfried? Gottfried talks only of hell.”

I’m ashamed to say that part of me felt annoyed at Alana—it was me that was being sent to war, not her. And she didn’t seem to understand the strange contradiction that could make her boyfriend both a neat-freak hypochondriac and a war reporter. Then again, I didn’t understand it, either.

I realized, of course, that I was being selfish. I didn’t have to go to the Gulf. I didn’t have to leave my girlfriend alone in a city she hated (and to which I had selfishly dragged her). I didn’t have to bullshit my own father, potentially destroying him with guilt if I died on the battlefield. I didn’t have to do any of this. But I was scared; scared of losing my new career as a foreign correspondent; scared of someone else taking my place and doing well; and scared of squandering an opportunity that many reporters worked their whole lives to get. It was essentially a form of cowardice that was pushing me to Iraq. I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre’s dilemma with the Frenchman and his sick mother. Perhaps there was no right or wrong in this situation. Man is free to do what he wants; there is no God; as a result, man is forlorn.

At some point I joined Alana on the floor. I was probably crying, too. “What kind of a job is this?” I think I asked. War reporting is supposed to be macho. But there was nothing macho in this. Nothing macho at all.

Later, the self-pity over with, I noticed the file attached to the Pentagon’s e-mail. It was a list of things to buy for Marine embeds.

This was how it started:

It went on for two pages. Some items were obvious (“Undershirt, 1”), others worrying (“Boots, Mark Left Boot With Blood Type/Social Security Number, 1 pair”). Many items were simply baffling. What, for example, was a “MOPP Suit,” and why did we need gloves in the desert? I also didn’t like the sound of the “M291 Chemical Decon. Kit in M-40 Carrier,” or, for that matter, the “M-40 Series Field Protective Mask W/Filter.” The second section of the list, entitled “Items In Backpack,” was worse than the first: What the hell was an “Entrenching Tool W/Carrier”? And why did I need a “Bivvy Sack,” “Camelback,” and “Canteens W/Covers and NBC Caps”? What were NBC caps? Were they for cameramen? For a second I wondered if the Pentagon had mistakenly sent me the foreign language version of the list. Then another thought struck me: Where would I buy all this stuff in West Hollywood?

It was then I noticed the most terrifying item in the entire document. It was number four from the top, under the “Items To Be Worn” section. I looked again, but there was no mistake. “Underwear, 1 pair,” it said. Yes—I was being sent to war, in one of the hottest countries on earth, for weeks if not months, and I was expected to take one pair of underwear with me. For a moment I felt pity for the unlucky garment that would be chosen to accompany me to Iraq. By the time we reached Baghdad, I concluded, it would be a biological weapon in its own right.

By Monday afternoon I had booked a ticket to Kuwait via London. I would leave Los Angeles on Saturday, March 1. The foreign desk, feeling sorry for me, had let me fly “premium economy” on Virgin Atlantic. I had also made an appointment with the visa department of the Kuwait embassy, for 9:00 A.M. the following Monday. “What’s the purpose of your visit to our country?” the official had asked through a nearly impenetrable Arab accent. I almost said “preemptive invasion,” but thought better of being a smartass. No one, I suspect, likes a smartass in a Gulf emirate. “Business,” I declared instead. Fletcher, meanwhile, arranged for me to get an armful of inoculations at the News International medical center, which was opposite The Times. He also said I could pick up a flak jacket, Kevlar helmet, and Arab-made Thuraya satellite phone when I came into the office. The only thing I had to do before leaving Los Angeles was buy the items on the Pentagon’s list—and pack them. But where could I buy a MOPP suit? I decided to start with a camping shop. Unfortunately, I knew of only one: The North Face, which, if I remembered correctly, was on Rodeo Drive.

I climbed into the jeep and headed west.

My war, it seemed, would start in Beverly Hills.

I stood in front of a full-length mirror wearing a canary yellow, down-stuffed Gore-Tex jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. Behind me was a twenty-foot-high indoor waterfall made entirely from glass, with a North Face logo etched onto it. The rest of the shop had been contrived to look like the inside of a cave: Intrepid Beverly Hills shoppers were greeted with a wall of fake volcanic rock beyond the front door. It wasn’t so much a shop as a Hollywood film set, a miniature retail Disneyland. Outside, on the street, there were more props: Range Rovers and Hummers; Tahoes and Expeditions. These days we experience the outdoors through our consumer purchases. Apart from me, of course. Apart from the idiot embed, drafting himself into the Marines.

“Yo—that’s bad-ass,” said a tall black man who was flicking through a nearby rack with gold-flecked fingers. I looked down at the $399 price tag on the jacket. “Yes, it’s very nice,” I concluded. “But I’m not quite sure it suits my purposes.” I furtively pulled the Pentagon’s list out of my back pocket: “Gore-Tex jacket, 1” it said. In brackets it advised: “Muted Desert Colors.” I glanced up at the giant, fluorescent-yellow Michelin man in the mirror. He didn’t look very muted. If yellow is the color of sand, I wondered, does that make yellow a desert color? Then I felt a slap on my back. It was my fellow shopper. “Ain’t no purpose if you ain’t lookin’ good,” he advised. “With that jacket, you’ll be beatin’ off the ladies with a stick.”

He had a point. In Iraq, however, I feared the stick would belong to the Marines, and that the jacket, not to mention me, would be on the wrong end of it. I took the coat off and put it back on the rack. Beverly Hills, I feared, wasn’t the ideal place to prepare for war. After all, the last time the 90210 zip code had seen any fighting was in 1847, when the Mexicans were cornered by the Americans at the Cahuenga Capitulation. There hadn’t been much need for combat supplies since. Lamborghini parts and luxury dog spas, yes; gas masks and MOPP suits, no.

My trip to The North Face wasn’t entirely wasted, however. I managed to find an arctic sleeping bag, some hiking trousers, and a vented khaki shirt. I even bought a jacket, opting for a black Gore-Tex shell with a zip-in windproof fleece instead of the puffy yellow one that made me look like Ali G. Of the seventy-three items on the Pentagon’s list, I had crossed off four. Whatever a MOPP suit was, The North Face didn’t have one. “A what suit?” asked the butch female sales assistant. “You want something for mopping?” I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. For some reason I was too embarrassed to tell her about the whole embedding thing. This being Beverly Hills, I feared I might get an antiwar or anti-Bush lecture. And I wasn’t in the mood. “I’ll just pay for these,” I said, dumping an armful of aggressively branded merchandise on the counter. Before I signed the credit card receipt, I asked if she knew of any other camping gear suppliers. She told me to try Xtreme 19 on Sunset Boulevard.

I felt apprehensive as walked back to the jeep: Xtreme 19 sounded a lot more serious than The North Face, and I didn’t want to be exposed as a camping fraud. In fact, I was a camping virgin: I had never slept rough, or toasted a marshmallow over an open fire, in my entire life. What’s more, I had never wanted to. I like carpets, central heating, and goose-down covers. Screw the outdoors.

As the jeep bumped into the Xtreme 19 parking lot, I practiced my game face. As a reporter, I was used to faking knowledge on any number of subjects. Surely, I thought, I could do it with camping. I went to pieces, however, when I saw the kayaks and backpacks in the window display. They gave me a flashback to the Cub Scouts, which my mother had forced me to join when I was a boy. I had hated Sir Robert Baden-Powell’s organization with a passion from the second I was manhandled into a stupid brown-and-green uniform, complete with its yellow neckerchief fastened with a red “woggle.” Even as a ten-year-old, in 1985, I knew a woggle could never be cool. I wanted to look like David Hasselhoff. Why couldn’t they give me a black leather jacket, a Pontiac Firebird, and a pair of aviator shades? Every Friday my fellow Cub Scouts seemed to have amassed a new set of sew-on buttons, in reward for their knot-tying skills, cycling proficiency, or ability to jump over logs. I personally couldn’t see the point. The Cub Scout leaders took an immediate dislike to the puny ginger kid who kept asking if he could opt out of pledging his duty to God, because he was an atheist. He distracted the other children, they said, and affected Scout morale. That was because I wanted to be at home, doing something constructive, like eating ice cream or watching The Muppet Show. Eventually my mother gave up. Her son, it seemed, was not interested in the great British outdoors, the discipline and camaraderie of a pseudo-paramilitary organization, or, for that matter, the Cub Scout Law. In her darker moments my mum must have wondered if her son was destined to become a loser. I doubt she ever thought there was much risk of him joining the U.S. Marines.

The door to Xtreme 19 swung open with a strangled buzz. In front of me was an alien landscape of camping equipment, mountain bikes, and cardboard cutout rocks. Outdoorsy people browsed the merchandise. Exotic birdsong played over the PA system. The place stank of athlete’s foot, crotch powder, and butane gas. This is more like it, I thought, looking around. The male and female staff members were indistinguishable: both were wearing Gore-Tex boots, baggy sweaters, and lip balm. I felt a sudden and almost overwhelming urge to drive to the nearest fashionable bar, order a martini, and light a cigarette. I fought it and took a deep breath. Having learned my lesson from The North Face, I decided to come clean with the shop assistant. I would tell him all about Iraq, hand over the list, and let him do the rest.

“How y’doin?” said a friendly male voice. “Need help?”

I took a long look at the Xtreme 19 employee who was about to make the biggest sales commission of his career. Brock was my height, with a knoll of earthy brown, neglected hair, which kept his forehead in heavy shade. At the end of his folded arms were farmer’s hands, raw with rock grazes and bramble pricks. Dirt was crusted under his broken fingernails. Judging by his flush of postadolescent acne, Brock was in his early twenties and a sophomore at Cal-State, or UCLA. He spoke with a stoner’s drawl, but was in good condition under his shapeless hikewear: He clearly spent more time scaling mountains than smoking weed in his dorm.

“I have a shopping list,” I said.

“Big trip comin’ up,” he replied with a nod, but no question mark.

“Yeah, a big one. A very big one.”

“Cool.”

I wondered if outdoorsy people could sense their own kind. I wondered if Brock already knew I was a camping amateur.

He took the list and stared at it for what felt like an hour.

Finally he coughed and said: “Dude, what the hell are y’gonna do with all this? Invade Mexico?” He looked up.

“Iraq,” I said. “Not Mexico.”

Brock made a whistling noise, like a World War II shell. He was now staring at me through the dense overgrowth of his hair. This English guy can’t be in the Marines, he was thinking. He’s way to much of a pussy.

“I’m a reporter,” I explained. “London Times. I’m being embedded.”

“All right,” said Brock, nodding slowly; somewhere, his logic gears were grinding and smoking.

“London Times?” he asked.

“Based here,” I clarified. “I write about, er, Hollywood. And stuff, y’know?”

“And they’re sending you to… Iraq?”

“Yeah. They are.”

Brock nodded again. Under that mound of hair, I could have sworn there was a raised eyebrow. He seemed paralyzed. Then he said: “I mean, no offense: You don’t look the type. Doesn’t the London Times have, like, war correspondents? Don’t they need you to cover the Oscars or something?”

“Yes, we do have war correspondents,” I said through a sigh. “But it’s going to be a big story, so they need a lot of people covering it. War reporters have to start their careers somewhere, y’know.”

I felt as though I were talking to Alana, or my mother.

Brock nodded again. He was beginning to irritate me. “Cool,” he said again. “Not that, y’know, I think killing Iraqis so that rich guys can drive big-assed SUVs is, like, a good idea. But whatever, man. Let’s get started.” Then Brock froze again. “Whoah,” he said, looking down at the Pentagon’s list.

I waited for the inevitable.

“Dude, what the hell is a MOPP suit?”

It was a long afternoon. After initially assuming that I had some background knowledge, Brock gave up and started to openly patronize me. I was grateful. A canteen, I learned, is something you drink water out of—apparently they don’t have Coke machines up in the mountains, or in war zones. A camelback, meanwhile, is a kind of canteen: It looks like a hot water bottle that you strap to your back and drink from with a plastic tube. After studying the Pentagon’s list, Brock recommended a backpack with seven thousand cubic inches of storage space, with a separate compartment for my North Face sleeping bag and straps to attach my inflatable mattress and ground cover. When Brock took it off the wall display, it was almost as tall as me. Then he handed me a bivvy sack, which turned out to be a waterproof Gore-Tex cover for my sleeping back. “By the looks of this list, you’re gonna be sleeping in shit every damn night,” said Brock. By the time we were finished, the shop’s staff had locked the front door and started shutting off the lights. I looked outside; the parking lot was almost empty.

In the end it took three staff members to help me carry my purchases to the cash register. I had hiking boots, hiking boot laces, spare hiking boot laces, hiking socks, hiking foot powder, thermal underwear, a portable shaving mirror, shortwave radio (to pick up BBC World Service), sewing kit, and three different kinds of floppy sun hats, all of which looked ridiculous. I even had a two-man tent, picked out by Brock, and a combat-proof case for my laptop computer. At one point I flirted with the idea of buying a mountain bike and a kayak. The only things Brock couldn’t help me with were the MOPP suit or any of the other technical-sounding equipment on the Pentagon’s embed list. I concluded I could probably survive without “NBC caps” or an “M291 Chemical Decon. Kit In M-40 Carrier.” The MOPP suit, however, was number two on the list of “Things To Be Worn.” It had to be important.

Perhaps I could get one in London, I thought.

“That’ll be, let’s see, $5,132.16, please,” said Brock. I gave him my Barclaycard, which was immediately declined. I tried American Express: It worked, but only after I had spoken to a fraud officer in Memphis. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ayres,” he said, “but your purchases at North Face and Xtreme 19 appear to have triggered our ‘unusual spending behavior’ fraud detection system. Have you ever bought goods from an outdoor store before, Mr. Ayres?” I told him that I hadn’t, as Brock and his colleagues looked each other with laughter in their eyes.

Finally, at 7:41 P.M., I left the empty, shuttered shop. It was a relief to taste the toxic smog of the Los Angeles traffic.

“Be careful, man,” said Brock as he gave me an ironic salute.

It struck me as absurd advice. How could I be careful in a war zone? The only way to be careful was to not go. Perhaps that’s what Brock meant. The cabdriver in London, I remembered, had ended our conversation on a similar note. “Take care of yourself, son, wontcha?” he had said.

“I’ll try,” I said to Brock as I loaded my bags into the jeep.

“Hey,” said Brock from the doorway. I turned to look at him. “Is it really going to happen?” he asked. “The war, I mean?”

I paused. Then I said: “Brock, if it’s got to the stage where someone like me is buying a tent from someone like you, I think we can assume it’s going to happen. To be honest, I don’t think there’s any doubt at all.”

“Right,” said Brock. He looked depressed.

“Cheerio,” I said, slamming the jeep’s tailgate. For the first time, I realized, I actually believed it: I was going to war.

It wasn’t until Friday night, hours before my flight back to London, that I decided to practice erecting the tent. I thought it might avoid some embarrassment later on, in front of the Marines. So with a six-pack of Heineken beside me, I ripped open the box containing my Two-Man Xtreme 19 Mountain Adventure Pod. For the next hour I fumbled with metal rods and waterproof canvas, swearing periodically. Eventually, feeling so pumped up with male hormones I could have beaten a drum, I had constructed a small, space-age dome in my living room. It was then, however, that I realized the problem. Brock had sold me a tent in the same canary yellow color as The North Face jacket I had tried on in Beverly Hills. Admittedly it wasn’t all yellow: It had a two-tone color scheme, with dark, military green on the lower half. The yellow half, however, was bright enough to cause temporary blindness. I stood up and scratched my head. It was then I noticed another problem: The tent had a fluorescent red cross on its roof, so that it could be identified from the air by mountain rescue teams. “Brock, you fuckwit,” I muttered. I looked at Alana. She seemed on the verge of laughter, or tears, I wasn’t sure which. “Didn’t you know it was this color?” she asked. I took another look at the luminous battlefield liability in front of me. If I put it up anywhere near the Marines, I thought, I would get court-martialed or shot; if, that is, I didn’t get hit by an incoming Scud first. I imagined a huge yellow blob appearing on an Iraqi radar screen and a Republican Guard intelligence officer pointing excitedly. But it was too late now. Xtreme 19 had closed an hour ago, and I had to fly to London the next day. “The tent is coming with me,” I declared. “I’m not sleeping on the floor.”

I looked again at Alana.

“Darling,” she said, softly. “It’s yellow, and it’s got a bull’s-eye on top.”

“I don’t care,” I replied. “I’m packing it.”