War Reporting for Cowards

11 LAST STARBUCKS BEFORE BAGHDAD

If war is hell, someone forgot to tell the staff of the JW Marriott Hotel in Kuwait City. On the evening of Wednesday, March 5, I was lying, or rather floating, on a king-size mattress that felt as though it had been stuffed with the hair of a thousand virgins. To my left, on the mahogany bedside table, was a bowl piled with fruit so fresh it had probably been picked that morning. To my right was a pot of Earl Grey, wisps of fragrant steam twirling from its spout. And on the forty-two-inch television in front of me was Britney Spears, censored so that only her face was showing. “My loneliness is killing me,” she confided. “Hit me baby, one more time.”

I had just emerged from the “rainfall” shower room and was wrapped in one of the hotel’s white, Egyptian cotton dressing gowns. It had a JW logo on the right breast, underneath which was the Marriott slogan: “The biggest smile in Kuwait.” As I lay on the bed, I studied the heavy, gold-embossed room service menu. I was facing a dilemma: Should I go for the dozen Gulf prawns with lobster tail, crab, and caviar; or a twelve-ounce filet of Wagyu-Kobe beef, flown in (first class, I presumed) from Japan. I considered ordering both before remembering that Martin Fletcher had to sign off on all my Iraq-related expenses. There was a good chance, however, that I would be dead or hospitalized before Fletcher got the bill. So what the hell.

My first full day of war reporting had gone better than expected. It started at 10:00 A.M. with a breakfast buffet in Café Royal, one of the four restaurants in the five-star Marriott’s glittering, million-dollar lobby. I hadn’t brought any smart clothing to Kuwait, so I turned up to the restaurant in hiking trousers (with zips below the knees to turn them into shorts), Gore-Tex boots, and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt. The front desk staff—elegant, Persian-looking women in black Chanel with gold jewelry—performed a synchronized eye-roll as I walked past them.

At the buffet, I piled my plate with imported Scottish salmon, Greek olives, Italian ham, and Swiss cheese. Kuwait’s domestic farming industry, it seemed, didn’t play a big part in local cuisine: Hardly surprising, given that most of the country’s 11,072 square miles of land is covered with hot gravel. After emptying my plate, I went back for more, serving myself some bacon and eggs with mushrooms, tomatoes, and toast. I nearly embarked on a third mission to the steam table, but stopped myself: I could hardly return from the war fatter than when I left California.

The café’s clientele, I noticed, was an uneasy mixture of war correspondents, Pakistani waiters, and Arabs in billowing dishdasha robes. The locals kept their platinum Nokias on the tables—Chelsea-style—and conducted conversations with their hands, offering brief glimpses of diamond-encrusted Breitlings and Rolexes. Every so often they looked warily at their Western visitors. It must be strange, I thought, to have 150,000 foreign soldiers in your New Jersey–sized country, along with another 500-strong invading force of media representatives.

The 315-room Marriott had become the unofficial headquarters for embedded journalists from the wealthier media outlets. On separate tables opposite me sat Oliver North, villain of the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, who had become a reporter for Fox News, and Geraldo Rivera, his mustachioed television network colleague. (Rivera was still smarting from a 2001 story in which he claimed to be at the scene of a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan—he was, it was later alleged, about fifty miles away. He blamed it on a misunderstanding. Rivera’s stint as an embed in Iraq would be equally volatile.) Upstairs, meanwhile, was a public television lounge, where American and British journalists consumed gallons of tea, nibbled Walker’s shortbread, and swapped jokes about the French. “Why do the French have tree-lined boulevards?” a cameraman had asked me the previous day, shortly after I checked in. I offered a shrug. “Because the Germans like to march in the shade,” came the punch line.

I ended up sitting alone in Café Royal, under a window, sipping a lowfat cappuccino and reading the English-language (and self-censored) Kuwait Times, which made the Wall Street Journal read like Playboy. Above my head was a mural-sized portrait of a smiling Arab with a Blackadder-style mustache and goatee. He was wearing a classic white gutra headdress, with a skullcap underneath and a snakelike coil of purple rope on top. I assumed this was the Kuwaiti emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, who fled to Saudi Arabia when the Iraqis invaded at 2:00 A.M. on August 2, 1990. The al-Sabah dynasty, I remembered reading, had been in charge of Kuwait for more than 250 years. I also recalled that the emir’s favorite way to end political problems was to dissolve parliament.

I felt fine, apart from an almost hallucinatory bout of eleven-hour jet lag and a swollen, throbbing right arm, which had been shot full of vaccines—including the first injection of the three-stage anthrax inoculation—at the News International medical center in London. As feared, the anthrax needle had looked like a hydraulic pump—and felt like a ballpoint pen as it punctured my skin. The experience was made more traumatic by the thick wad of forms I had signed before the jab, which declared that I wouldn’t sue if I came down with anything resembling Gulf War syndrome. I had no intention of visiting an American military hospital in Kuwait to get the other two anthrax shots before the war. As for the smallpox vaccine, I had decided to avoid it entirely after reading online that patients could experience “an accidental spreading of the vaccinia virus caused by touching the vaccination site.” By the time I got to the part about it “usually occurring on the genitals or face, where it can damage sight,” I had made my mind up. Being sent to war was bad enough, without having to deal with a smallpox-infected penis. Or, for that matter, blindness.

There was only one other thing ruining my otherwise comfortable visit to Kuwait: fear. In particular, fear of the immediate future. The overwhelming luxury of the Marriott, with its designer minimall, sushi bar, colonial-style tea lounge, and American steakhouse, made the thought of going out into the desert even worse. I remembered what Brock had told me in Xtreme 19: “By the looks of this list, you’re gonna be sleeping in shit every damn night.” I tried to fight the adrenaline with Earl Grey and Marlboro Lights. But they only seemed to make it worse.

I called The Times at midday, Kuwait-time, even though it was still early in London. I didn’t have anything better to do. It was also a good excuse to test the satellite phone Fletcher had given me in London. Before dialing, I had to extend the chunky antenna and point it out the window, as the phone tried to locate the Thuraya satellite. When it locked on, I felt like a secret agent.

The phone rang in long, distorted electronic beeps, a sure sign the call was going to cost a fortune. Someone in London had told me that the international satellite rate was ten dollars per minute, but I didn’t want to listen.

“Foreign new-ews?” said a familiar nasal voice.

I looked at the screen of the Thuraya to make sure I’d dialed correctly: I had.

“Martin… Barrow?” I asked.

“Your lucky day,” said Barrow. His sarcasm, it seemed, was powerful enough to withstand a return journey into space.

“Don’t you work for business?”

“Not anymore,” Barrow revealed. “Couldn’t bear to be without you, Chris. I’m a distinguished member of The Times’s foreign staff now: I’m a card-carrying intellectual. Yesterday we debated the small print of the Kyoto Treaty for a full forty-five minutes. So what are you doing in Kuwait City, Chris? Knowing your luck, there’ll be a war or something. Did you see lots of people running in the opposite direction when you landed at the airport? Do they know about the curse?”

Barrow was laughing so hard he temporarily lost the ability to talk. I held the receiver away from my ear for a second.

“I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” I said. In some warped way, Barrow was actually making me feel better.

Finally he calmed down. “So what are you offering today?” he asked, meaning war-related news stories.

Nothing, as it turned out. The Kuwait Times didn’t provide much lift and view material. As for the al-Jazeera news channel, I couldn’t understand a word of it because it was in Arabic. Besides, it seemed to broadcast only pictures of dead Palestinians. So I offered to rewrite a few stories from the wire services—which I could get via Yahoo! on a twenty-minute delay, using the computers in the Marriott’s business center. Barrow wasn’t interested. After all, the foreign desk already had a “proper” war reporter working from Kuwait: Daniel McGrory, who had coauthored a book in 1999 about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, called Brighter than the Baghdad Sun. It was clear I was a backup plan: a substitute, kicking my heels on the bench. This, however, was reassuring: Fletcher clearly hadn’t changed his mind about embedding. He still regarded it as an elaborate publicity stunt. Later, when I bumped into McGrory in the hotel lobby, he did his best to be polite, but I got the impression he shared Fletcher’s view. (McGrory has since told me that this wasn’t the case; he simply didn’t want to be with the military. As the American humorist and occasional war correspondent P. J. O’Rourke said: “One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you’re not in the Army. The whole idea of putting you in the Army and not giving you a gun—gee, no thanks.” O’Rourke compared embeds to the “dumber kind” of conscientious objectors in Vietnam.)

With nothing to write and nothing to do, I decided to pretend I was in Los Angeles. So I made an afternoon appointment with the Marriott’s penthouse-level health spa and fitness center. Then I went shopping.

If this was war, I could live with it.

My eighty-three-hundred-mile journey from Los Angeles to Kuwait, via London, hadn’t gone smoothly. It all went wrong when I visited The Times’s office in London to pick up my satellite phone, first-aid kit, flak jacket, and helmet. The problem was luggage space. I had openly flouted the Pentagon’s rules and packed twenty pairs of Calvin Klein boxer shorts, in the hope that my stint in Iraq would last less than a fortnight. I had also packed my electric toothbrush, badger-hair shaving brush, shaving foam, several rolls of double-quilted toilet paper, and dozens of tubes of SPF-40 sunblock and other essential ointments along with a selection of fashionable yet outdoorsy combat outfits. “Have the Marines ever met a metrosexual?” Alana had asked me at one point, holding up a fifteen-dollar tube of Clinique oil-free moisturizer. I gave a humorless grunt, inaudible from deep within the black cavern of the rucksack, where I was trying to re-create my West Hollywood bathroom cabinet. I tried to dismiss the nagging thought that my girlfriend was probably better suited to life on the front lines than me.

Eventually I managed to close the drawstrings at the top of the backpack, but only after I transferred my bright yellow Two-Man Xtreme 19 Mountain Adventure Pod to a separate bag. Weight was also, admittedly, a problem. I couldn’t actually lift my rucksack, but I could drag it across the floor—as well as my tent bag, laptop case, and A4-sized waterproof travel wallet—for a few agonizing seconds at a time, using a bent, shuffling movement. The thought briefly entered my head that I might actually have to march with all this stuff, but I quickly dismissed it: Surely no one marches in modern warfare. I imagined leaving my gear at a desert Marine base and taking short, safe trips to the front lines in an Apache attack helicopter.

By the time I got to London, I knew I’d made a catastrophic packing error. I didn’t realize I would have to carry another bag for my flak jacket and helmet—unless, of course, I wanted to wear them on the plane. To make matters worse, the flak jacket, being made from bulletproof Kevlar, was slightly heavier than a Ford Focus. Body armor, it seemed, hadn’t changed that much since the Gilbertese Islanders in the South Pacific used to clad themselves with protective vests made from coconut hulls. The Kevlar helmet wasn’t much lighter—also, it didn’t fit me properly, sitting awkwardly above my receding hairline, creating a deep, red, circular imprint on the rim of my skull. When I took it off, I looked like the victim of a failed lobotomy. The first-aid kit, meanwhile, was a miniature hospital ward in its own right. It even came with a dozen horse-sized, self-injectable canisters of nerve gas antidote.

Before I left the office to get my injections, one of the foreign desk’s office assistants shoved a thick, cream-colored envelope into my hand. I opened it and saw an immaculate bundle of new one-hundred-dollar bills.

“What’s this?” I asked, taken aback.

“It’s five thousand dollars,” said the young, blonde assistant. “An advance against expenses.”

“What for?”

“Bits and bobs,” she replied with a Kensington laugh. “You know, if you get into any, er, trouble. That kind of thing…”

I stared at the envelope. Then it dawned on me: ransom money. The Times thought I would get kidnapped.

“Is this for kidn—” I began to ask, but she was gone.

I put the envelope in my back pocket.

My luggage-related problems worsened when I emerged from the News International medical center after my vaccinations. My right arm had a circular pattern of bleeding puncture marks in it and felt as though it had just been pumped full of every Third World disease known to man—which, in a way, it had been. I could barely carry my passport, never mind three hundred pounds of combat equipment. Somehow I managed to get my gear into the back of a taxi, which drove me to the Kuwait embassy to collect my visa. As the cab grunted down Kensington High Street, I spotted a shop called the London Luggage Company. I suddenly had a brilliant idea. “Pull up here for a second,” I told the driver, and jumped out. I reemerged a few minutes later carrying a Chinese-made metal dolly, featuring a folding frame, elastic strap, and four rickety casters. It was perfect for my luggage. I just hoped it was combat-proof.

Before dawn the next morning—March 4—I took a taxi from my hotel to Heathrow Airport, picking up Glen at his flat in Notting Hill on the way. Glen, who also had to report for duty at the Hilton Kuwait Resort, sauntered out of his front door carrying two compact, lightweight bags. He was wearing blue jeans, an open-collared shirt, and a cream linen jacket. With his oak tan, angular features, and Hugh Grant hair (still intact, six years after City University), he looked like the classic intrepid English foreign correspondent. I wondered if I had gone too far by following the Pentagon’s list to the letter. Perhaps, I thought, I should have made more of an effort to look cool. In the airport we watched CNN footage of an Iraqi bulldozer crushing three more al-Samoud missiles, bringing the total number destroyed to nineteen. The UN, the television shouted, had asked for one hundred missiles to be put out of action. “Despite whatever limited head-fakes Iraq has engaged in, they continue to fundamentally not disarm,” I heard a White House spokesman comment. I wondered if Saddam had already fled.

I spent the first part of the Kuwait Airways flight staring at the electronic map on the miniature television screen in front of me. It showed our flight path to the Persian Gulf, which involved taking a huge detour around Iraq, which was still being patrolled by American and British fighter jets enforcing the “no fly zone.” I wondered if there was a chance of being shot down by a stray missile. I tried to ignore my stomach, which was doing a good impression of a tumble dryer filled with acid. Then the in-flight meal arrived: It was curry, served with peanuts.

Glen and I finished our meals in silence. Neither of us could quite grasp the consequences of what we were doing.

“Brought anything good to read?” asked Glen eventually.

“Oh, lots,” I said, reaching for my hand luggage. “I’ve stuck to the war theme, to put me in the right frame of mind. I have The Quiet American; Norman Schwarzkopf’s autobiography; Bravo Two Zero; and Endgame, written by that former chief UN weapons inspector bloke. Oh, and I’ve also got the Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. There’s no Rough Guide to Iraq, apparently.”

“Christ,” said Glen. “I brought P. G. Wodehouse. I thought Jeeves might keep my spirits up when the war starts.”

“Jeeves?” I asked.

“It’s good for the soul,” Glen replied testily.

I reconsidered my reading list. Perhaps it was a bit on the heavy side. Graham Greene’s Quiet American was depressing the hell out of me. It was, after all, about a war-weary, opium-addicted, and borderline suicidal Times correspondent in Indochina who kept putting himself in mortal danger only to get a single paragraph, if that, printed in the newspaper. I had reached the part where the hero’s girlfriend (his first marriage had failed) was leaving him for a rich American.

Unable to face another miserable chapter, I pulled out my copy of the Lonely Planet guide and thumbed my way to the eighteen-page section on Kuwait. I started reading a paragraph entitled “Dangers & Annoyances.”

I stopped after coming across a phrase I didn’t understand.

“What’s ‘wadi-bashing’?” I asked.

“Off-roading,” said Glen. “You’re going to be bashing a lot of wadis with the Marines, I imagine. Why do you ask?”

I winced, then read the paragraph out loud: “Because of the difficulty in detecting land mines, wadi-bashing is a very dangerous sport in Kuwait and you ought to think long and hard before indulging… people who keep track of these things emphasis that stuff still blows up every month…”

Glen laughed, then shrugged.

I remembered the SAS class on land mine injuries: Most of it had involved learning how to perform battlefield amputations. That was when I’d nearly passed out trying to secure a tourniquet on my own leg.

Suddenly I became aware of something behind me. I turned to see a fellow passenger looking over my shoulder. He was in his thirties with a Midwestern belly, and a sleeping blindfold pulled up over his forehead, giving him an unflattering quiff of thick, dirty brown hair. He was blinking wearily.

“Are you guys embedded?” he asked through a yawn that smelled of curry.

“Yeah,” we said in unison.

“Me, too,” he replied. “Jake Hansen, cameraman, ABC News.” He offered a sweaty hand over the back of the seat. Glen and I took it in turns to shake it. Neither of us were really in the mood to socialize.

“Hey guys,” said Jake, excitedly. “Have you seen this?” he passed over what looked like a mascara pen with its lid on.

“What is it?” I asked, studying it. Then I gave it to Glen.

“It’s a lipstick cam,” said Jake, proudly. “Look: it’s tiny.” He snatched it from Glen, then held it up to his forehead, over his blindfold. “We stick it to the top of a Marine’s helmet, like this, and watch ’em shoot,” he said. “How cool is that? The folks at home get a front row seat on the front lines!”

It was, indeed, an incredible piece of technology.

“Are you sure the Marines are going to let you do that?” I asked. “And how d’you know you’ll be going to the front?”

“Are you kidding?” said Jake. He whipped a sheet of paper from his laptop case. “Did you read this?” he asked, showing me the title. It read: “Public Affairs Guidance On Embedding Media During Possible Future Operations.” I shook my head. With a chewed fingernail, Jake pointed to an underlined section. Then he read: “Commanders will ensure the media are provided with every opportunity to observe actual combat operations. The personal safety of correspondents is not a reason to exclude them from combat areas.” He paused for dramatic effect. Then he smiled.

“It’s going to be hardcore,” he said.

We climbed off the plane in a daze and got stuck immediately in a line for immigration. The airport officials looked deeply unhappy about the white people swaggering into their country—Kuwait, after all, doesn’t issue tourist visas, and only 37 percent of its population are actual citizens. The rest, mostly from the Indian subcontinent and Asia, are there on work visas. Kuwait used to be home to thousands of Palestinians, but they sided with the Iraqis in 1990 and haven’t been seen since. After an hour, and a brief interrogation, we were allowed into the country. It didn’t take long for my rucksack and flak jacket to appear on the baggage carousel—the Kuwait Airways jet had been almost empty, after all. My metal dolly was awkward to assemble, but worked nonetheless. I was delighted it had survived the journey so far. As we left the wing-shaped terminal, I noticed scores of Kuwaiti families heading in the other direction. It seemed like the sensible thing to do. We stopped briefly to get ripped off at an airport Bureau de Change. Then we made our way to the taxi lineup.

Ten minutes later we were approaching the city at ninety-five miles an hour on a California-style desert highway, complete with floodlit billboards displaying Western brand names and Arabic slogans. The taxi driver’s passing technique was to almost nudge the bumper of the car in front while leaning on the horn, flicking his headlights onto highbeam, and swerving out toward the central reservation. As he did this, a riot of Middle Eastern percussion and a crazy, strangled wind instrument blared out of the AM radio. I cracked open my window and felt the dragon’s breath of the desert on my face. Then I saw it: the country’s most famous landmark, the Kuwait Towers, poking out of the horizon. The towers are three enormous, upturned spikes, two of which bulge in the middle, as though liquid has been injected into them and got stuck halfway. They were designed by a Swedish architectural firm in the late 1970s, but could easily have come from the brush of Salvador Dalí. The bulges, the cabdriver told us in mangled English, hold the city’s 4.5-million-gallon supply of drinking water.

All I could think about, however, was the Iraqis crashing over the border in 1990 and claiming this alien world as their own—before looting the place and trashing it when they couldn’t get their way. Saddam’s forces set more than six hundred oil wells ablaze as they retreated, an environmental catastrophe that took nine months to contain. The scale of Saddam’s ambition was astonishing.

I wondered if Saddam would lob a few Scuds at the Kuwait Towers when the coalition forces invaded. I imaged 4.5 million gallons of purified drinking water drowning the city, like an airborne tsunami.

“This is mental,” I said to Glen.

He grinned and nodded in agreement. We were both thinking the same thing: that in spite of the fear, the bowel pain, and the crappy pay, there is sometimes no better job on earth than being a foreign correspondent. There I was, with five thousand dollars in cash, a satellite phone, and a dozen canisters of nerve gas antidote in my bag, speeding into a deserted foreign city on the brink of Armageddon. At that giddy, fleeting moment, I told myself that it was worth it. And that if I died as a result of this stupid, ill-thought-out embedding scheme, at least I had lived in my twenty-seven years.

The feeling didn’t last.

When we reached the hotel, there was good news: A notice on a bulletin board in the lobby informed us that our initiation as embeds had been delayed indefinitely, and we no longer had to report for duty at seven the next morning. Perhaps, I thought, President Bush was losing his nerve. Perhaps, without Turkey on side, an invasion would be impossible. Or maybe it was just the weather: Time was pressing on, and the spring storm season was approaching, as was the summer heat.

That night Glen and I had dinner at the Marriott’s Terrace Grill. A local family was throwing a birthday party, and a karaoke system had been set up at the back of the dining room. We sat at a dazzling white tablecloth and nibbled on celery and raw carrots as a teenage girl in a black cloak and hijab head scarf performed an atonal rendition of a Kylie Minogue song. Eventually a Pakistani waiter appeared, and we both ordered beers. It felt appropriate to celebrate. The waiter returned a few minutes later with a silver tray, on top of which were two bottles of Budweiser, dripping with icy condensation. He poured them carefully into the crystal glasses on our table. “Cheers,” I said, raising my drink, before taking a long, thirsty gulp. I grimaced. Something was wrong. I looked at the bottle. “The beer’s off,” I declared.

“No, it’s not,” said Glen from behind his enormous menu. “It’s nonalcoholic. Beer’s illegal in Kuwait. Thought you knew.”

“What?” I spat, looking at the bottle with disgust. I felt like a child at a fairground who’d just dropped his stick of cotton candy.

“Don’t worry,” said Glen. “This stuff still gives you a hangover. So at least you can feel like Hemingway in the morning.”

It was only when I saw the Marriott in daylight, after my epic two-course breakfast in Café Royal, that I realized Kuwait was preparing seriously for war. The building was protected by a wall of concrete and brown sandbags as well as a platoon of Kuwaiti soldiers, who had installed an airport-style X-ray machine in front of the revolving door. They smiled sarcastically—the way teenagers with semiautomatic weapons do—as I walked past. My plan was to visit two of Kuwait’s American-style shopping centers: the Marina Mall and the Souq Sharq, on the Kuwaiti seafront. I would head back to the hotel for a swim and a massage that afternoon.

“Taxi?” asked the middle-aged Pakistani bellboy.

It was windy, and I could barely see the other side of the street through a stinging cloud of dust being blown in from the desert.

I gave a bilingual nod. Moments later a white Ford Taurus—straight out of the American suburbs—crept up beside me. The driver, a distinguished-looking Kuwaiti with a heavy mustache and two-tone hair, grinned and nodded at me through the passenger window. I found it a bit unnerving.

“Hussein will look after you,” said the bellboy with a singsong accent.

“Hussein?” I said, sliding warily onto the worn leather of the backseat. I feared this was some kind of awful practical joke. The door clonked shut behind me and the Taurus began to inch forward on its big, wobbly American suspension. Hussein, I noticed, was staring at me in his rearview mirror. I wanted to beg him not to kidnap me. I wondered if the bellboy was in on the plot. I patted my pockets for the five-thousand-dollar envelope, before remembering I’d left it at the hotel.

“Hi,” I ventured. “I’m a journalist. I’m a journalist for the London Times, a British newspaper. I’m here to cover the war.”

The taxi driver grinned and nodded. We edged out of the hotel’s valet parking area and onto the busy two-lane highway. Every other vehicle was a U.S. military Humvee, with a machine gunner poking out of the roof. I could feel the slow drumbeat of a headache inside my frontal lobe. Glen was right: The bloody nonalcoholic beer had given me a hangover. And quite a nasty one, too.

“Sahaffi?” asked Hussein.

I had no idea what he meant.

“Yeah, very happy,” I said, hoping that would be the end of it.

“La tapar, ana Sahaffi!” he continued as he started to laugh riotously. I wished I’d learned Arabic before leaving Los Angeles. (I later learned that sahaffi means “journalist”; “La tapar, ana sahaffi” means “Don’t shoot, I’m a journalist.” It’s extremely ill advised to travel without learning such basic phrases.)

“My name’s Chris,” I said, slightly irritably, in an effort to steer the conversation back into English. “Nice to meet you.”

The driver turned to look me in the eye. Then he grinned and produced a business card from under his armrest. At the top was a blue logo in English, which read, “Al Kuds Taxi Service, 24-hours.” Underneath I saw confirmation that the bellboy wasn’t joking. “Salman Hussein—Chauffeur.”

As I looked out the taxi’s window, Kuwait’s lottery-style oil wealth was obvious: The skyscrapers, hotels, and minimalls all looked as though they’d been FedEx’ed overnight from Texas, then dumped in the sand. It was also clear from the patchy infrastructure: It seemed as though the Kuwaitis hadn’t had time to join up the hastily constructed buildings. Pavement stopped and started at random, making way for the occasional open sewer. A lunchtime stroll would probably get quite unpleasant without a pair of rubber boots. The city’s dilapidated souqs, meanwhile, looked older than the Old Testament but were stacked full of the latest in Silicon Valley gadgetry, from Xboxes to forty-two-inch plasma screens. In spite of the wealth, however, scars of the Iraqi invasion were still visible: Every so often the Taurus cruised past the blackened foundation of an office building that was mottled with bullet holes and shell craters.

Hussein dropped me off at the Marina Mall first. He asked for fifteen dinars, which seemed reasonable, so I paid him twenty, largely out of relief at having arrived safely. Once inside, I experienced profound culture shock as I watched a young Kuwaiti woman lift up her veil so she could take a bite out of a Quarter-Pounder. At the Virgin Megastore, meanwhile, was a gigantic banner that read: “If it’s not banned, we’ve got it!” I wondered if the Kuwaiti authorities had read Sir Richard Branson’s autobiography—which contains anecdotes about the Virgin founder’s wife-swapping and the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards running naked from his studio at gunpoint—before giving the Megastore a license. I doubted it.

The English-speaking Kuwaitis I talked to were convinced that, because I was a sahaffi, I knew exactly when the invasion would start. They became visibly irritated when I told them I knew nothing. They hated Saddam Hussein, they said, but the war was bad for business, so they wished the Americans would hurry up and get it over with. I was taken aback by their pragmatism.

Bored, I bought a CD from the Arabic section of the Virgin Megastore and called Hussein to ask him to pick me up. The Souq Sharq, however, turned out to be much the same, only with more fast-food outlets. Hussein’s fare, meanwhile, seemed to increase every time I got in. It cost twenty-five dinars to get to Souq Sharq, even though the journey seemed shorter than the last one.

By the time I got back to the hotel—in time for the daily “turndown” service and the chocolate truffles left on my pillow—I had laid waste to a fifty-dinar note. Before ducking through the X-ray machine at the revolving door, I asked the bellboy if he knew the dinar-dollar exchange rate. “I believe the dinar is worth about $3.30, sir,” he said with a deferential smile and a slight bow. That meant I had spent about $170 on cab fares. Shit. Once again I dreaded the expense account I would have to send to Fletcher. Either taxi fares were extraordinarily high in Kuwait (unlikely, given that a gallon of gas costs about seventy-seven cents), or I had been given the full tourist workover by Salman Hussein. The bellboy noticed my look of anguish. “Is everything okay, sir? Did Hussein look after you?” he asked. I gave a desultory nod and headed inside. Back in my room, I found the entry on taxis in the Lonely Planet guide. “Kuwaiti taxis have no meters,” it said. “Negotiate a fare at the beginning of the trip.”

Days passed. Hussein got richer. I became a regular at the Marriott’s penthouse health spa. I put on weight. On the roof of the hotel, television news networks set up cameras to watch for incoming Scuds. The desert haunted me. At night, storms decorated my hotel room window with sand. On some mornings the only view from my room was an eerie orange glow, flying sand having rendered the sun useless. I wondered how the Marines could fight a war in such conditions. I became a veteran of the alcohol-free hangover. I kept the television tuned to MTV. The headlines, however, were unavoidable: “Saddam destroys another two al-Samoud missiles; UN soldiers guarding the twho-hundred-mile-long ‘demilitarized zone’ between Kuwait and Iraq complain that American Marines keep cutting holes in their fence; the pope calls on Catholics to commemorate Ash Wednesday by fasting and praying for peace; Colin Powell accuses Saddam of ordering the production of more al-Samouds; and in Washington, Iraqi exiles say Western antiwar protestors are ‘ignorant and misinformed.’”

Finally, almost a week after arriving in Kuwait, the notice I had been dreading appeared in the lobby: “All embeds must report for duty at the Hilton Kuwait Resort at 7:00 A.M. on Tuesday, March 11.” On Monday, Glen and I moved to another hotel, the Golden Tulip at Messilah Beach, because our reservations at the Marriott had expired and the hotel was full. The hoteliers of Kuwait would all probably retire after the invasion, I thought. My five-night room bill at the Marriott had come to nearly twenty-five hundred dollars. The Golden Tulip was to the west of the city, with gardens that sloped down to the shores of the Persian Gulf. The hotel was still undergoing reconstruction after the Iraqis razed it in 1990. It even had a bulletin board positioned in front of a half-demolished wall next to the swimming pool showing what the place looked like immediately after the war. “The Iraqis did this,” it read. The hotel’s tennis court, however, had survived, albeit with a few bullet holes in its surface. And so, on our last day of freedom, Glen and I thwacked out a couple of amateur sets to the soundtrack of a call-to-prayer, which echoed out of speakers bolted to the telephone poles.

I needed all the prayer I could get.

“It happens,” said the burly female army instructor, with a sigh. “If you’re in the suit a long time, you’re going to do it. No question.” She used a thick, manly palm to wipe the sweat from her forehead, and made a tough-luck face. I could see saddlebags of sweat under the armpits of her T-shirt. I squirmed on my folding plastic chair, pulled my brown Nike baseball cap lower over my face, and glanced around at my fellow media embeds. We were all wearing the same expression: that of children playing a fun, but forbidden, game, a game that could get us all killed.

It was hot out on the tennis court of the Hilton Kuwait Resort—hotter than California, probably hotter than Venus on a hot day. In fact, the Hilton looked as though it belonged on another planet. Whoever had built the place, with its 134 rooms, four presidential suites, 80 beachside chalets, and 62 private apartments, was a big fan of 1950s space-age modernism. The building was long and flat, and constructed almost entirely out of concrete rectangles and blue-tinted glass. Its size was inhuman; the hotel was more than 90 percent full, but it felt deserted.

We had been led out onto the clay court to learn how to use our gas masks and chemical suits—a relief, given that I’d missed the “NBC” course in London. The instructor’s claim—that “it happens”—was in response to a query from an aging Canadian with a foie gras belly and a beard that sprouted like white moss over both his chins. “Excuse the question, Ma’am,” he’d rasped. “But what happens if we shit in our chemical suits during an attack?” It was clearly a question that the instructor—barely out of her twenties, with a wide, oval face and a boyish bowl of black hair—had thought about at length. “It will degrade your suit’s ability to perform, sir,” she said. “It’s water-resistant, but not water-proof. You shouldn’t urinate inside it, but you’re going to be sweating so much, you won’t have to. As for defecation… well, sir, you never know how your body’s gonna react to being slimed.”

The phrase “being slimed” made me think of Ghostbusters, the film in which Dr. Peter Venkman, played by Bill Murray, gets gunked by a ghost called Slimer. I had to hand it to the military’s euphemism department: It made the thought of being gassed a lot easier to stomach. It certainly beat Wilfred Owen’s description of a gas attack victim in “Dulce et Decorum Est”: “… yelling out and stumbling / And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime… the white eyes writhing in his face.”

The day—March 11—had started at 6:30 A.M., when Glen and I left the Golden Tulip in Hussein’s taxi. Glen initially refused to get in the car, claiming that Hussein had ripped him off consistently on every trip. Eventually, however, a fare was negotiated, the Taurus was loaded with our luggage, and we headed to the Hilton. The traffic outside the hotel was so bad that we decided to get out and walk the last few yards: It seemed like a good idea, until the wheels of my metal dolly got stuck in a patch of gravel, bending the frame. It survived, however, making it beyond the sandbags and concrete antitank barriers to the military checkpoint, where a Kuwaiti soldier went through every item in my rucksack. “Is this yours?” he asked, holding up my electric toothbrush. Behind me, I heard sniggering.

Glen and I had to report to different sections of the hotel, so we parted in the lobby with an unsentimental “See you later.” A handshake would have been too weird. I wondered if I would ever see Glen again.

The Hilton felt unreal, a vision caused by dehydration and too many days in the desert. Completed in 2002, it was a $100 million shrine to the oil economy sitting on sixty-one acres of ground on a mile-long private beachfront—one of the longest on the Arabian Peninsula. On a clear day, with a pair of binoculars, you could see Iran over the molten Gulf. Today, however, there was a sandstorm blowing, and sunbathing would have been as much fun as taking a bath with a metal sponge. Not, of course, that anyone wanted to fry themselves on the sundeck anyway. This was primarily a place of business. And now it was also a place of war, where the Coalition Press Center had taken over an entire floor of one wing, and where Halliburton contractors were already working on their GDP-sized room bills. They were there, like the embeds, for a transaction of a different kind: the hostile takeover of the Republic of Iraq.

At the hotel I hurried up and waited. I didn’t receive my official “embedded media” press pass—which featured a scowling passport photograph of me taken at a souq opposite the Marriott—until late morning. In the press center, embeds mingled awkwardly, like freshmen on the first day of college. While I waited, I ordered breakfast at Teatro, one of the Hilton’s several restaurants, and smoked about a hundred cigarettes. I sat with Mike Wilson, a nervous, bespectacled reporter about my age who worked for the New York Times. He had already been assigned to an artillery unit; it sounded less hellish than the infantry, but not much. The truth was that I had no real idea what either would entail. I was never one of those teenage boys who played war games on computers or read books about Napoleonic campaigns. “This war’s making me fat,” complained Mike as he edged a half-pound Angus burger into his mouth. “When I get back to the newsroom, they’re gonna think I went to the Mideast to fight a frickin’ chocolate pudding.” Teatro’s clientele was an even stranger mix than the Marriott’s: Marines in desert fatigues with their hip-mounted gas masks sat next to Arab couples with young children. I couldn’t work out if the Arabs were there for business or pleasure. If it was the latter, they didn’t seem to be having much fun.

At about 2:00 P.M. we were ushered into a conference room that had a digital video projector and big leather chairs designed for overweight oil executives. I quickly learned that I shouldn’t have worried about buying the technical-sounding items on the Pentagon’s list: The Marines would provide us with a MOPP suit, which was essentially a Marine uniform with a chemical-proof lining, a gas mask (the mysteriously titled “M-40 Series Field Protective Mask W/Filter”), and a bag of other equipment, including chemical boots, gloves, and a decontamination kit. “We’re assuming that every incoming Scud is biological or chemical,” said the Marine public affairs officer to a silent room. I shivered in the subzero air-conditioning. “The good news is that we don’t think Saddam has nukes.” After being reminded of the “ground rules”—in short, that everything was “on the record” apart from precise information about the location of troops—we were shown outside to a row of tables, where cheerful Marines were handing out our standard-issue equipment. It meant carrying yet more luggage.

By the time I reached the end of the last table, I was clutching a heavy-duty plastic bag containing a MOPP suit, gas mask, decontamination kit, chemical-resistant water canteen, rubber boots, gloves, and two medical packs, which included twenty-one tablets of pyridostigmine-bromide and three “auto-injectors”—one each of atropine, pralidoximechloride, and diazepam (the “happy death” juice). The labels said they should be “administered by a buddy to soldiers incapacitated by nerve agent poisoning.” Along with the canisters The Times had given me, I now had enough liquid narcotics to fuel a Hollywood rave. If I survived the war, I could probably sell it all there and retire on the proceeds. I attempted to lighten my bags by wearing my gas mask holster and chemical-proof canteen, which came with a green nylon belt. Without my trusty dolly, however, I would have been in trouble. I prayed for it to survive the war. I also prayed that I would be traveling in a vehicle, not on foot.

While waiting in line to get my NBC equipment, I stood next to a blond female photographer whom I recognized as being a part-time paparazzi from the Hollywood party circuit. She was casually eating a chocolate croissant, licking her fingers after each bite, as she threw the items into her plastic bag. “Isn’t this fun,” she giggled with a flirty smile. I began to wonder if I was going insane.

A few minutes later I was standing on the tennis court in hundred-degree heat wearing a gas mask, chemical suit, hood, Wellington boots, and gloves. I felt like some kind of cyborg from the twenty-fifth century: a reportinator, perhaps. The Wellies were so big they could be pulled over my hiking boots. Inside the mask, the only thing I could hear was my own breath—it came in shallow, panicked gulps—and the muffled shouting of the army instructor. My baseball cap was lying on the ground and the sun was frying the top of my skull in its own oil. I tried to concentrate on not passing out.

The instructor, Lt. Tiffany Powers, was the kind of girl you wouldn’t bet against in a bar fight. She had a rugby player’s complexion and knuckles the size of beer bottle tops. Her face was set in an expression that dared you to shock her. It was a dare that countless soldiers had probably failed.

Earlier, Powers had shown us how to use our gas mask holster like a Wild West gun sling. She whipped the mask out, pressed it to her face, exhaled, then breathed in with her hand slapped over the filter, creating a seal. All this happened within nine seconds. Then she took the mask off and said: “Let’s see who has the fastest draw in the Mideast.” There was a pause. Then she shouted: “GAS! GAS! GAS!” After a full minute of inept fumbling, I looked around to make sure everyone else was doing as badly as me. They weren’t. In fact, everyone, including the Canadian, was fully masked up. I felt as though I were back in the Cub Scouts, failing my reef-knot class. With my fellow embeds watching, I eventually got the rubber straps of my mask over my head. Then I snapped them into place and yanked them tight. Something, however, had gone horribly wrong, and the straps acted like a catapult, flinging the mask onto the floor. Powers doubled up, her muscular forearms covering her face. For a moment I thought she was pretending to be a mustard gas victim. Then I realized she was laughing. She was laughing so violently, in fact, that she almost lost her lunch.

“This guy,” she said, red-faced and pointing at me, “is one very dead media representative. But well done to the rest of you.”

I made a second attempt to don the gas mask, with more success. My stubble, however, seemed to interfere with the seal. It was then I remembered reading somewhere that embeds had to remain clean-shaven. It made sense now. I was glad I’d brought my Mach3 razors and badger-hair shaving brush.

By now I felt as though I’d lost ten pounds in body weight through sweating alone. Inside my mask I could feel beads of saltwater drip onto my nose. I instinctively lifted a gloved hand to scratch it. The mask, of course, made it impossible. I felt dizzy. I needed a drink of water. Badly. I started to panic.

“Now we’re going to learn how to rehydrate in a chemical environment,” said Powers. She lifted up an NBC-proof water canteen, pulled out a plastic drinking tube, and fitted it to a sealed attachment on her gas mask. It looked easy enough. In practice, however, I found it impossible to handle the canteen with my gloves, and I couldn’t find the sealed attachment on my mask. I ended up pulling off the mask in frustration, unscrewing the canteen, and taking a swig.

I gave Powers a defiant look.

“Tut, tut,” she said, waving a thick finger. “Dead again.”

After what seemed like hours, we were allowed to take off our suffocating MOPP suits. As I looked at my pale skin, trembling under my drenched T-shirt, I wondered how long I would survive once the invasion started.

The tutorial resumed.

“MOPP stands for Mission Oriented Protective Posture,” shouted Powers. “There are four MOPP levels. One, just the suit; two, the suit and boots; three, the suit, boots, and the gas mask; and four, the whole miserable ensemble, including the rubber gloves and the hood. Your suit has an activated charcoal lining and is good for forty-five days and six washes. Does everyone understand that?”

She looked at me while the group gave a collective grunt. I felt blood rush to my face, which was red anyway from the heat.

“Good,” said Powers. “When we cross the line of departure, we’ll be at MOPP-level two. If the Iraqis decide to attack Kuwait, the MOPP level will be higher. If we get slimed by Mr. Hussein, it’ll go up to four. Once contaminated, your suit is good for only twenty-four hours. After that, the suits will be bagged up and buried. As soon as we detect an attack, we’ll relieve your unit from duty.”

I imagined spending twenty-four hours in a soiled MOPP suit, in one-hundred-degree heat, with only one canteen of drinking water. And I wondered how much of the gas mask routine was simply for psychological reassurance. Still, I liked the sound of the “line of departure”—presumably the Kuwait-Iraq border—because it sounded like a sporting term: something, perhaps, from an American football game. Combat jargon, it seemed, was already having a sedative effect on me.

Powers continued: “Inside your gas mask carrier, you’ll find a decontamination kit, which includes these charcoal towelettes.” She held up what looked like a clump of dirty baby wipes. “If your skin is exposed to a chemical agent,” she said, “you can use the towelettes to remove the contaminant. Remember, pat the charcoal onto your skin, do not rub it in. Also remember that you have a selection of nerve gas antidotes in your auto-injectors: If you have been incapacitated, a buddy will inject you. Simply push the canister into a meaty part of the thigh or the buttock and wait for the needle to pop right out. Inside the auto-injector is a coiled spring that is powerful enough to push the needle through your MOPP suit, your thermal long johns, your skin, and straight into your deep tissue. I’m not going to demonstrate, because the last time I did it the goddamn needle activated and I ended up being medevacked.” I winced at the thought of one of Powers’s thighs being penetrated by an atropine injector. “After you’ve used the towelettes and auto-injectors,” she went on, “we should be able to get an operational decon unit out to you, which will remove any other liquid contamination and hose you down with water until you’re stripped to your mask and gloves. That’s when we’ll assess battlefield casualties, both ambulatory and nonambulatory.”

She gave me an accusatory look.

“After today’s performance,” she said, “this gentleman would definitely fall into the category of nonambulatory. Questions?”

The tennis court fell silent. I felt woozy in the sun. Wind tousled the palm trees. Then the blond photographer put up her hand.

“If we’re attacked, will we be able to see the chemical agent?” she asked.

Powers pursed her lips. “If there are large puddles of nerve agent around you,” she said, “that means the fucking thing went off right next to you, and you’re probably not going to be alive anyway.”

The photographer nodded studiously.

“So I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Powers. “Next.”

Now it was the Canadian’s turn. I braced for another scatological inquiry.

“How do we know if there’s been a chemical attack?” he asked.

“Well,” said Powers, “one way to know is if someone yells ‘GAS! GAS! GAS!’ Another is if someone shouts ‘Lightning!’—which means a Scud attack; or ‘Snowstorm!’ which means indirect fire. We’ll assume that all these attacks are chemical in nature. There’s also an NBC claxon, and there’s a visual signal, which is the touching of shoulders. Either that, or you’ll just start dancing the funky chicken.” Powers did a horrible, jerky dance to make her point. “That’s when you definitely know you’ve been hit.”

“Is there anything else we should know?” asked the photographer.

“Well, if it’s very windy, like it is today, that works in our favor,” she said. “The nerve agent will just blow away. If it’s cold, on the other hand, a blister agent will last longer, so that works against us…”

I raised my hand, feeling like a disgraced schoolboy.

“Yes?” snapped Powers.

“What’s the weather been like lately?” I asked.

“Pretty cold,” she replied.

Back inside the soothing chill of the press center, there was a commotion near one of the bulletin boards. I saw Mike from the New York Times standing nearby. “What’s going on?” I asked. He pointed to the jostling embeds. “They’ve assigned everyone’s places,” he said. “You should go and take a look.” After the ordeal of the chemical tutorial, I was expecting the worst. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd and scanned the board for my name. I soon found it.

2nd Battalion/11th Marines—Artillery

London Times, Int’l Newspaper: Ayres, Christopher R

Boston Globe, US Newspaper: Nelson, Scott

BBC, Int’l TV: Willis, David R

BBC, Int’l TV: Hiney, Mark A

BBC, Int’l TV: Beale, Mark

I was relieved: I wasn’t with the infantry. I was also glad to be with some fellow Brits from the BBC. Underneath the announcement was a note telling “2/11 embeds” to report to the outdoor terrace of the Blue Elephant, a Thai restaurant in the Hilton that had an extensive “mocktail” menu. My contact there was Capt. Jim Hotspur, the public affairs officer who had given the 2:00 P.M. lecture.

I was the first to arrive. The captain, who was at least six feet, two inches, with a flushed tan and high-laced desert boots, was waiting.

We nodded hello.

“Do you wear eyeglasses,” he asked, unexpectedly.

“Contacts,” I said.

“That’s a negative,” said Hotspur, shaking his head and aiming his eyes at me. “We strongly recommend against the use of contacts. They’re impossible to keep clean out in the field. Wear your eyeglasses.”

“Okay,” I said. I felt like a recalcitrant private at a court-martial.

“Did you order prescription lens inserts for your gas mask?” asked Hotspur.

Shit. I shook my head slowly, fearing the consequences.

Hotspur gave an exasperated snort.

“You’ll be blind in your gas mask,” he said, chewing his lower lip with frustration. Then he added: “But it’s better, I suppose, than you gouging your own eyes out when your contacts get slimed.”

I began to suffer another Cub Scout flashback.

“Show me your boots,” said the captain.

I lifted up my left foot and he examined it. I had scrawled my Social Security number onto the sole with a marker pen.

“I can see your Social Security number, but where’s your blood type?”

“I don’t, er, know my blood type,” I admitted. It was one of the few things I had forgotten to do before leaving Los Angeles.

Hotspur looked as though he was trying very hard not to pick me up and throw me through the Blue Elephant’s screen doors.

“Let’s hope you don’t get injured then,” he said, slapping me on the back.

Then he said, “Let me see your passport.”

I produced it. I didn’t expect this to go well, either.

Hotspur was shaking his sunburned head again. I was starting to worry about the loaded 9mm pistol strapped to his chest.

“Your visa’s valid for only thirty days,” he pointed out. “That might not be long enough.” He slipped the passport into his trouser pocket and said, “I’ll keep hold of it. We’ll apply for a Kuwait residency permit and get your passport back out to you in the field. Should only take a few weeks.”

A few weeks? I had hoped to be home in a fortnight.

Hotspur began to stride away on muscular, camouflaged legs.

“Captain,” I called out.

He turned to face me, walking backward.

“How dangerous is this going to be?”

“Don’t worry,” he said with a straight face. “People think artillery is boring. But we kill more people than anyone else.”

It was done. There was no way out. Even my passport was gone. I hauled my dolly with its heavy load of war reporting equipment to the east side of the vast, deserted Hilton parking lot, where an unmarked white bus was waiting. It would drive us north, to the other Kuwait: the land of unexploded mines, tank trenches, and camel-herding Bedouins, where 150,000 troops from a foreign superpower were living in camps named after New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Soon I would also be living in one of those camps. Soon I would become a Marine.

It was only when I stopped and turned that I saw it: a desert mirage, to the far right of the hotel, partly hidden by a row of dancing palms. It was unmistakable—the crowned siren, her long hair falling over naked breasts. She was peering seductively out of a dark green circle decorated with two stars and white lettering. It made me think of happier times; of safe, sunny mornings sitting on Sunset Boulevard with the Los Angeles Times. I pictured Alana, saying good-bye at the airport. I thought of my parents. I dropped my bags and ran. I could make it to the other side of the parking lot and back. The bus wouldn’t leave without me. There was still time before the war began. There was still time for my last Starbucks before Baghdad.

12 “THE WORST CAMPING TRIP OF YOUR LIFE”

I immediately regretted getting on the bus. I wished the damn Starbucks had swallowed me into a wormhole and spat me out somewhere on a beach in Malibu. I felt as though I’d been suckered: by the Marines; Fletcher; the Kuwaitis; even the other embeds. What the hell was I doing here? The reality of the chemical drill on the Hilton tennis court was only just beginning to sink in. The Marines, it seemed, were preparing for the worst. That made me wonder about the real reason for the embedding scheme. President Bush hadn’t shown much concern for world opinion so far in his campaign against Iraq; so why was he now lavishing so much money and attention on journalists—especially foreign ones? One of the embeds at the gas mask tutorial had been from Agence France-Presse, for God’s sake. As if Bush cared about him. After the tutorial, I’d asked Lt. Tiffany Powers for her theory on embedding. “If Saddam uses chemicals, no one’s gonna believe it unless they see it on CNN or read it in the newspapers,” she told me. “They’ll only believe it when it comes from you guys.” But how could we tell anyone about it if we were too busy coughing up our own lungs?

The bus headed north for about an hour on Kuwait’s pristine, four-lane Highway 80, otherwise known as the “Highway of Death” after the U.S. Air Force bombed the Iraqi convoys on it fleeing toward Basra in 1991. After passing a billboard near Mutlaa Ridge that read “God Bless U.S. Troops,” the bus swerved off the highway and onto a rocky dirt track. Soon we came across a signpost made from a wooden ammunition crate that read: “Camp Matilda: 10 miles.” This, apparently, was where we would spend our first night as honorary Marines. I unleashed an internal tirade at myself: You’re doing this because you’re too scared to say no; you’re going to die for a stupid news story; you’re going to ruin your parents’ lives; you’re going to ruin Alana’s life; you’re being used as bait to prove a political point. Another voice, which sounded worryingly like Fletcher’s, defended me against myself: Other journalists have been to war and survived; it’ll be a character-forming experience; the Americans won’t let you anywhere near the front lines; the Iraqis will surrender immediately; Saddam’s chemical arsenal is all a gigantic bluff; it’ll be something to tell your grandchildren.

I scoffed at the last line: I had already been told this by several friends.

“How am I going to have any grandchildren if I’m dead?” I said out loud, lost in thought. Luckily the diesel grunt of the engine drowned it out and only the Canadian, who was sitting next to me, looked up.

“Did you say something,” he asked through a warm garlic breeze.

“No,” I growled.

I stared at the luggage rack in front of me. I noticed that one of the embeds had brought with him an Old Glory flag—on a collapsible pole—to stick in the Iraqi mud. So much for us being “independent” observers. I started to whistle Tom Waits’s “Waltzing Matilda” for lack of anything better to do.

How was I supposed to feel at this point? Glad that Saddam was going to get his comeuppance and excited by the professional challenge ahead? Or should I have felt moral outrage at the imperial violence about to be visited on Iraq, and proud of my role in exposing the horror of twenty-first-century warfare?

To be honest, I didn’t feel any of those things.

All I felt was an overwhelming concern about my personal safety. And, of course, a tug of guilt over my selfishness.

To my right, a man was smiling at me. I recognized him as a reporter for National Public Radio. “Hey,” he stage-whispered. “Ever get the feeling we’re cheerleaders on the team bus?” He continued smiling.

I nodded and continued sipping the dregs of my cappuccino.

Eventually we arrived at Camp Matilda, a city of “hooches” in a hot gravel wasteland. The hooches were yellow, Bedouin-style tents put up by Kuwaiti contractors. The name came from a combination of the words “hut” and “uchi”—Japanese for “interior.” Each hooch was about the size of a tennis court and looked as though it belonged at a circus: a terrible, military circus, where the lions eat the clowns. The embeds—I counted ninety-five, including myself—were led inside one of them and offered an unappetizing selection of what the Marines called “chow”: bruised fruit, boxes of breakfast cereal, stale white bread, and a warm liquid that tasted like twenty gallons of water mixed with one spoonful of freeze-dried Nescafé. As feared, the contrast with the Marriott’s room service menu was brutal. We were invited to sit on white plastic chairs. Then came another miserable chemical attack drill. I got the feeling the Marines were now shouting “GAS! GAS! GAS!” for kicks. Still, I needed all the practice I could get. After my conversation with Captain Hotspur, I had taken out my contact lenses and put on my rectangular, wire-framed Dolce & Gabbana glasses. I couldn’t work out a way to take them off while putting my gas mask on in anything less than forty-five heart-pounding seconds. I had now been told about half a dozen times that I was “totally fucked up.”

At some point Hotspur strode into the room holding a clipboard. He looked at my glasses, squinted, then nodded approvingly. I could see my red British passport still poking out of the top of his trouser pocket.

“Okay, folks,” he said. “The NBC training’s over. We have an important visitor for you now. You might want to take notes.”

The embeds stopped short in the middle of their MOPP-suit anecdotes. For a brief, giddy second, I expected President Bush to jump out from behind a tent pole. Instead, I turned to see an older man in a stiff uniform push through the tent’s opening. His gray hair had been shaved into a crew cut of mathematical precision and there were two silver stars on his lapel. He made his way around the chairs with all the speed and purpose of a man with an invasion to organize.

“Please welcome Major General James N. Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division,” said Hotspur.

By now, Mattis was standing at ease in front of the sweating reporters. If it weren’t for the “digital cammies”—the latest style of pixelated camouflage—he would have looked almost grandfatherly. The general didn’t so much have bags under his eyes as two heavy, matching black suitcases.

He offered us a busy smile. Then he said: “If you’re crazy enough to be here, ladies and gentlemen, you’re welcome.”

Great, I thought, even the two-star general thinks we’re idiots. I wondered if he knew what the Republican Guard had in store for us over the border. I wondered if he had already estimated media casualties.

“At times,” he continued, “you will hate being with us. You will stink like a billy goat. The comforts of life will all go downhill from here, folks. In short, this will be like the worst camping trip of your life. And if we cross the line of departure together, you’ll be taking the same chances as us.”

I wondered what the general would do if he knew it was the first camping trip of my life, never mind the worst.

I took a sip of the vile coffee.

We were being embedded, said the general, to witness the heroism of the Marines and to prove that America’s military could be “opened up to the scrutiny of the world.” If it weren’t for a war photographer, Mattis told us, there would be no monument to the Marines who raised the flag above the Japanese island of Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945. The scene was captured by Joe Rosenthal, an Associated Press combat photographer; he won a Pulitzer Prize for it.

“Unsung,” the general quoted, “the noblest deed will die.” He caught my eye. “And we’re going to do a noble deed here.”

I felt an elbow between my ribs.

“Is that Pindar?” whispered the embed sitting next to me, his pen aloft.

“No,” I said, slightly baffled. “It’s Major General Mattis.”

The embed scowled at me. “I meant the Greek poet,” he hissed. “The noblest deed, etcetera.” He raised his eyes to the canvas ceiling, which was billowing in the wind.

“Oh, right,” I said. “I’ve no idea.”

The embed gave me a look that said “clearly.”

I looked up to see Hotspur watching me and fingering his gun.

“We have no fight with Muslims,” the general was saying. “I have Muslims in my own ranks. We have no problem with the Iraqi people. There will be an abundance of innocent people on the battlefield. Last time, if we saw a guy with a gun, we shot him. Now, moving up into Mesopotamia will require a lot more discrimination.” He folded his camouflaged arms. “The whole concept of a clean open desert, with two armies coming together, is completely gone,” he said. “We’d much rather go around a city if we can, even if the main road goes right through it.”

I wondered if this was Mattis’s plan or the secretary of defense’s. I wondered if, in a few years’ time, we would all find out that Mattis privately thought this plan was insane. It certainly sounded insane to me. A war without taking cities? Wasn’t that like playing Monopoly without buying properties?

“We can move very, very quickly,” said the general. “These boys were brought up in Southern California. They’re fast on the freeways.”

A couple of embeds laughed. I wondered how much death I would see in Iraq. I wondered what the charred bodies would look like.

“Okay, time’s up,” said Hotspur. “Any questions?”

The Canadian’s hand was first to rise.

“Are we gonna get slimed, sir?”

“Chemical warfare is going to kill more Iraqis than Americans, given the poor protective gear they have,” said the general. “If you’re a real man, you can fight without that crap. But if Saddam wants to use it, we can do that, too. I’m not in the least bit concerned about whippin’ the Iraqis.”

I wondered if Saddam would be in the least bit concerned about whether the general considered him a “real” man.

The wind rattled the poles that held up the hooch.

The general looked at his watch. “These Marines are very young men,” he told us. “But it’s going to be their Battle of Guadalcanal when they go in. We’ve come out here to do a noble deed.”

I scrawled in my notebook: “Guadalcanal??”

The embed beside me put up his hand.

“What about the weather?” he asked. “Won’t it make it harder to fight?”

“Absolutely not,” shrugged the general as another gust assaulted the hooch. “We’re an all-weather fighting force.”

With that, the general nodded thank you and left.

Later, I called Alana on my satellite phone. It was 9:00 A.M. on the West Coast. I asked her to look up the Battle of Guadalcanal on the Internet. There was a ten-dollar-per-minute pause as she went downstairs and loaded up the Google home page. I heard her fingers clatter on the computer keyboard in my office, eighty-five hundred miles away. I wished I were back in California. “One of the most important battles of World War II,” she read out loud from an online encyclopedia. “The 1st Marine Division landed east of the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal island in the South Pacific. The Japanese defeat was so bad the commander committed hara-kiri.” She made an “eew” sound as she pictured the disgraced Japanese warrior committing suicide by ritual disembowelment.

“How long did the battle last?” I asked.

Alana paused. I began to feel uneasy.

“Six months,” she said before realizing what it meant.

Six months?

“Christ,” I said. “Mattis probably thinks that’s how long it’ll take to invade Iraq. How many American casualties were there?”

Alana paused again.

“Just tell me,” I snapped.

“It says six thousand.”

There was an awkward silence.

I wondered if the general had mentioned Guadalcanal on purpose: to prepare the embeds for a mass slaughter. The thought made me nauseous. I contemplated taking a swig out of my Diazepam auto-injector.

“What else did the general tell you?” asked Alana.

“He said that after we cross the line of departure into Iraq, we’ll take the same chances the Marines will.”

Alana’s chilly laugh beamed its way from Los Angeles into space and then back to my handset in the Kuwaiti desert.

“Yeah, right,” she said. “Apart from the fact that the Marines have guns and training. And you have neither.”

I’d never thought about it that way before.

“Sorry,” said Alana. “Didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

But she was right. Even the general himself agreed: This assignment was madness. But there was no stopping it now.

It was a long, miserable night. After the general’s talk we were led to another hooch on the other side of Camp Matilda, our sleeping quarters for the night. I claimed a tiny patch of space on the chipboard floor and began to unpack my sleeping bag and unroll my Xtreme 19 ground mat, which turned out to be Day-Glo orange. “Cheers Brock,” I muttered as the embeds around me tutted and shook their heads. Everyone else’s equipment seemed more professional than mine. As I prepared my makeshift bed, I realized I hadn’t used a sleeping bag since 1987—on a youth hostel trip with the Cub Scouts. I began to fantasize about the Marriott.

The hooch was lit by fluorescent strip lights that were bolted onto metal bars running horizontally under the canvas ceiling. I didn’t know any of the other embeds, and I wasn’t in the mood to start making friends. Neither, it seemed, was anyone else. For a tent full of ninety-five journalists, it was extraordinarily quiet. By now it was 9:00 P.M., but it felt later. The sun had given up on Kuwait hours ago.

The heat and stress of the day had given me a toxic body odor and I wanted to freshen up. So I picked up my hundred-dollar super-absorbent camping towel, electric toothbrush, washrag, and double-quilted toilet paper and set out in search of the bathroom. After about twenty minutes of wandering, I found a portable shower cabin with a row of white ceramic sinks in it. The overhead lights were blinding. I didn’t dare look in the cracked, soap-splattered mirror. The taps, meanwhile, produced only a slow drip of cold, dirty water. Above them was a handwritten sign: “DO NOT DRINK.” The outdoor toilets—Porta-Johns, as the Marines called them—were much worse. They were unlit and stank of fresh human feces, which lay in a pool of urine and chemical solvent a few inches under the soaked horseshoe of the seat. There must have been a few hundred pounds of waste down there. Luckily, I had a miniature key-chain torch, which gave me some idea of where to aim. The only way I could stand the smell, however, was to light a cigarette and keep it wedged between my lips. Afterward, I used a cheap antiseptic handwash, with no water, to sterilize my hands. If truth was the first casualty of war, I thought, personal hygiene was a close second.

On the way back I got hopelessly lost. Each hooch looked identical in the gloom. The camp, meanwhile, vibrated to the bass soundtrack of helicopter blades, Humvee engines, and diesel generators. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t on a film set. Every so often I lifted a random tent flap to be confronted by a hoochful of nineteen-year-old Marines, their faces aglow from DVDs playing silently on their laptops. The men, it seemed, would rather lose themselves in Hollywood entertainment than socialize with each other. Eventually I found the media tent, with the 1st Marine Division’s press corps passed out inside it. Tomorrow, Captain Hotspur had told me, I would be driven to Living Service Area 5—aka Camp Grizzly—about thirty miles south of the Iraqi border. There, I would finally meet my unit: the 2nd Battalion, 11th Marines. I wondered if they would be pleased to see me. I doubted it. I imagined the embedded scheme the opposite way around—having a Marine live in my office and stand over my shoulder as I interviewed sources and wrote news stories. It would be unbearable. I climbed into my sleeping bag, zipped it up, and waited for sleep to arrive. It didn’t. By sunrise I was still awake, with “Waltzing Matilda” still echoing in my head.

“Hey, media dude, you should do a story about me sometime.”

This was the first Marine I met at Camp Grizzly. He was young, white, and sunburned, like a Texas farmer’s son. It was the next day, and I’d just arrived on the back of a seven-ton truck along with another embed, Scott Nelson, a Boston Globe reporter, also assigned to the 2nd Battalion. It had taken me several minutes to unload my bags, and I was sweating and woozy from the noon sun. The last thing I wanted to do was write a story about anyone.

“Oh right, of course,” I said. “Can we do an interview later?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. I noticed him ball his fists with frustration. “That’s not what you’re supposed to say.”

Then he repeated, at a dunce’s pace: “You… should… do… a story about me sometime.” He gave me an expectant look, like a dog waiting for a stick to chase. I wondered what the hell was wrong with him.

“Okay,” I said, trying to resolve the issue. “I definitely will.” I could feel the sun on the back of my neck like a branding iron.

“Jesus Christ,” grunted the Marine. “Ain’t you never seen Full Metal Jacket?”

I began to feel as though I’d just failed a crucial initiation test.

“Er, yeah… but a long time ago,” I stammered.

Blood made its way urgently to my face.

“Well, remember the scene when they’re in the helicopter and the gunner is shootin’ the women and children and shit, and the gunner says to Corporal Joker, ‘You should do a story about me sometime.’”

“Oh yeah,” I nodded, my memory as blank as a new computer disc. I wasn’t even sure if I had seen Full Metal Jacket.

The Marine’s fists balled again. He tried to prompt me: “And then Joker says…?”

I wanted to go home.

The Marine wasn’t giving up. He exhaled. Again, he prompted: “Joker says to the gunner, ‘Why should we do a story about you?’”

There was a long, hot silence. The Marine’s blue eyes, like pilot lights, continued to set me ablaze. Then I realized what I had to do. He wanted me to play the part of Corporal Joker, the fictitious war reporter.

“Why should we do a story about you?” I asked triumphantly.

The knot in the Marine’s brow unraveled. He beamed at the chance to deliver the next line. I almost passed out with relief.

“Because I’m so fucking good!” he shouted. Then he turned on his heels and high-fived a buddy behind him.

The two of them bellowed with laughter.

“Shityeah!” said the Marine. “I’ve always wanted to say that to a media dude.”

If the first ten minutes of my time at Camp Grizzly were bad, the next ten were even worse. After dumping my bags in one of the hooches, I strolled back outside to find something to do. But there was nothing to do. I noticed four Marines sitting on ration boxes in the tent’s five inches of shade. All of them wore white painter’s masks, to keep sand from getting into their lungs. “D’you mind if I join you?” I asked. They seemed to welcome the novelty of my company. One of the men gave me his box to sit on. When I crouched down, however, I felt a strange sensation. Then I realized, with growing anguish, what it was: A tube of oil-free Neutrogena sunblock had just exploded in my right pocket. I looked down, slowly. A dark, oily stain was making its way across the crotch of my North Face hiking trousers.

I tried my best to ignore the stain. And in an impressive display of military discipline, the Marines didn’t say a word. Instead, they handed me a tan-colored ration pack—otherwise known as an MRE, or “meal, ready-to-eat”—and invited me to try it. Each MRE, the Marines warned me, contained about 1,250 calories. If you ate three meals a day, it added up to 3,750 calories.

“That shit’s gonna give you a fat ass unless you’re out diggin’ foxholes in the sand all day,” advised one of the men. On his left jacket pocket was written US MARINES and on the other, TRUX.

Inside the MRE was a random assortment of menu items, each one packaged in the same slippery tan plastic. I had chicken with Thai sauce, pilaf rice, peanut butter, crackers, M&Ms, and a sachet of cappuccino powder. There was also an “accessory pack” that contained a miniature bottle of Tabasco sauce, matches, salt, chewing gum, and a single toilet tissue. Trux showed me how to heat up the chicken by putting it inside a bag of dry chemicals—a “flameless heater”—and adding water. After folding the top of the bag and leaning it at 45 degrees, it began to pop and fizzle, as if by magic. A few minutes later hot steam was wafting out of it.

“The MRE is a marvel of modern technology,” said an older Marine with a silver cross on his lapel. I guessed he was one of the 2nd Battalion chaplains. “It’s waterproof, windproof, vermin-proof, and camel-proof—and it can survive a one-hundred-foot fall without a parachute. You can even leave an MRE out in the stinking heat for three years and it won’t go bad. Ain’t that incredible?”

I nodded, scooping my plastic fork into a sachet of steaming gunk.

“As far as I can tell, there’s only one downside,” the chaplain continued.

The chicken was now in my mouth. I chewed tentatively.

“That is, it tastes like horseshit,” he concluded.

I continued chewing. “It’s not actually that bad,” I said. The Marines had clearly overestimated the quality of British food.

They looked slightly crestfallen.

“Let’s wait and see what you think in a few days,” said the chaplain.

It sounded like a threat.

The Marines told me they’d been at Camp Grizzly since January. Many of them had been deployed straight from a base on Okinawa Island in Japan. It had been months since they’d seen their families or, more important, their girlfriends. The MREs, it was claimed, were pumped full of chemicals to reduce the men’s sex drive, but I doubted it. The only effect the rations had on me was to induce a constipation so stubborn I feared I would never use my bowels again. My normal routine involved at least two evacuations per day, partly a result of war-related nerves. Now there was nothing: just a nagging sensation of growing heavier with every meal.

Camp Grizzly, I learned, was home to the 11th Regiment, which was made up entirely of artillery battalions—these being comprised of monstrous, truck-towed howitzer guns and mobile headquarters units, where mapping experts, radar operators, engineers, and meteorologists worked out where the rounds would land. The headquarters units could also track incoming Iraqi mortars by radar and return fire with dismembering accuracy within a few minutes. During the invasion, the 11th Regiment artillery battalions would be loaned out to infantry units, providing them with an onslaught of cover as they advanced on foot and in tanks. If there was anything positive about all of this, it was that I wasn’t with the infantry, and that the 2/11 Marines were “mechanized,” meaning I wouldn’t have to carry my bags anywhere.

Together, the 11th Regiment and the infantry were known as Regimental Combat Team 5 (RCT-5), which was made up of 7,503 troops and more than 2,000 vehicles. I found it hard to comprehend the scale of the American presence in northern Kuwait. RCT-5 alone had nearly four times as many residents as Wooler, my hometown. One of the more bookish artillerymen had pointed out to me that the total number of coalition troops in Kuwait—at least 150,000—was the equivalent of the entire fighting-age male population of Manhattan. In a matter of weeks the Americans had built one of the world’s largest cities in the desert—a sprawling Deathtropolis, where every last resident was a trained killer. Still, 150,000, which rose to about 250,000 if you included all the forces stationed in the Middle East, was less than half the number of coalition troops deployed in the first Gulf War. And I wondered if it would be enough, especially given that they were advancing from only one direction.

I spent the rest of my first day at Camp Grizzly walking around the hooches in a sun-frazzled daze. Outside one of them, a Marine had built garden furniture out of ammunition crates. He’d also put up a road sign, pointing north, that said: “Baghdad, 325m.” Every so often an inquisitive Marine would stop and ask me what kind of stories I would write, and why the 11th Regiment couldn’t have had a female embed (a “fembed” as they were known) or “the dude from Rolling Stone.” They wanted the latter, I suspected, because they thought he might have some drugs. They were also keen to congratulate me on Tony Blair’s “balls” or tell me jokes about the French. “How do you defend Paris?” asked one. I told him I didn’t know. “Neither does anyone else,” came the punch line. “It’s never been tried before…”

That afternoon I was told grudgingly by a captain that I had been made an “honorary major.” This meant nothing, other than the fact I could use the cold, navy-style showers once a day instead of every four days. (I later found out that one embed, Charlie LeDuff from the New York Times, had tested the limits of his honorary rank by handing out “field promotions.” They weren’t upheld.)

At 9:00 P.M., I repeated my Camp Matilda bathroom routine, hung my camping towel out to dry, then climbed into my sleeping bag. I was surprised by how painfully cold the desert became at night. My sleeping bag felt about as warm as rolled-up newspaper. I wished I’d brought blankets, or a pillow.

I was woken at 2:00 A.M. by a gale of apocalyptic fury—as if the gods themselves were throwing a tantrum about the coming invasion.

Someone flicked on the lights in the hooch, but nothing was visible amid a thick orange mist of sand. “This is Iraq’s El Niño,” a Marine explained, his P.E. instructor’s voice barely carrying over the wind. “It’s called the southern wind change and it happens every spring. This year it’s early. We should have fucking invaded in February.” At 3:00 A.M. some of the Marines formed a human chain to walk the hundred yards to the camp’s Porta-Johns. When they got there, however, they found that most of them had been blown over. I pitied the Marine who would have to clean up the lake of sewage in the morning.

By sunrise, everything in the hooch looked as though it had aged by a thousand years. My blue Sony VAIO laptop had become yellow, with ditches of wet sand between the keys. Every item of clothing in my rucksack, meanwhile, looked as though it had been left on a beach overnight, while the pages of my notebooks had turned the color of parchment. Worst of all, when I walked outside, my hundred-dollar super-absorbent camping towel, which I’d hung on one of the hooch’s support ropes, had disappeared. It had probably crossed the line of departure before me. I sighed at the thought of drying my face with underwear for the rest of the war.

Life at Camp Grizzly was an excruciating combination of boredom and fear, interrupted only by rations and Scud alerts—each one forcing us to go to MOPP-level four in the oppressive heat. The only way to get my gas mask on in nine seconds was to throw my glasses into the sand. Once the mask was on, I could see nothing, just as Captain Hotspur had warned. Blinded, and with my spectacles uncomfortably close to my steel-capped boots, my only option was to remain frozen on the spot until the all-clear was called. Then I would get down on my knees, my body still tight with adrenaline, and pat the ground in an effort to find where they’d landed. The panic of losing my glasses was almost greater than the panic of the chemical alert itself. Not, of course, that I liked wearing them. The fashionable metal frames felt white hot in the sun, burning my already sunburned temples. The glare from the lenses, meanwhile, gave me a spike of pain in my frontal lobe. I was glad I’d bought a pair of Bono-style fly goggles at the Kuwait Hilton in a last-minute bolt of inspiration. The goggles were big enough to fit over my glasses, blacking out the sun and protecting my eyes against the relentless wind. The downside, however, was they made me look like Bono.

Gradually I picked up Marine jargon. I learned that “the head” was the lavatory, with a “head call” being a miserable trek out to one of the Porta-Johns (positioned as far away from the hooches as possible, for obvious reasons). My actual head, bizarrely, was my “grape.” The Marines, meanwhile, called each other “Devil Dog”—or just “Dawg,” for short—after the Germans’ nickname for them during World War I (the German translation was Teufelhunde). Morale was boosted by bellowing “Ooh-rah!” or “Semper Fi!” at any opportunity. The latter was a shortened version of the Marine Corps motto Semper Fidelis, meaning “Always faithful.”

I dealt with the tedium of the long, hot days by using the kidnap survival technique that David Silver had taught me at the SAS course in Herefordshire. I split each hour into segments, creating routines for each one. Every time I successfully completed a routine—brushing my teeth, for example, or taking a cold shower—I considered it a small victory for Ayres’s morale.

Every morning I’d walk to the “chow hall,” where I’d eat a plateful of hard, green scrambled eggs (MREs were for lunch) and talk to my fellow embeds—Nelson from the Boston Globe and David Willis from the BBC. Willis had turned up in the camp in a desert-colored Land Rover Discovery, of which I was intensely jealous. He had with him a cameraman and a bodyguard. I wondered why Fletcher hadn’t given me a bodyguard. Willis and Nelson looked almost as incongruous at Camp Grizzly as I did. We all had fair hair, pale skin, and bad eyesight. It was as though the Marines had looked at a selection of passport photographs and deliberately picked out the wimpiest-looking reporters, for the sheer comedy value. When Willis went on camera, however, he would take off his spectacles, don an Afghan scarf, and lower his voice by an octave. All this gave him the presence of a kind of ginger Lawrence of Arabia. Off camera, Willis refused to take Camp Grizzly too seriously. In fact, if it hadn’t been for his rowdy, backslap-ping laughter, I might have gone insane.

The rest of the morning would be spent snoozing in the chaplain’s fold-down camping chair. Then I’d listen to BBC World Service on my shortwave radio, call the office, open an MRE, and, in the afternoon, try and write a story. I could send text files to London by plugging my satellite phone into my laptop and loading up a software program called Copymaster. The process felt antiquated—like something from a 1980s science fiction film. A blue box would open on my desktop, with DOS-style text scrolling down inside it. After logging on, a message would pop up saying, “Welcome to Wapping. Waiting to connect.” After an agonizing $250 wait, it would finally tell me how many words had been sent to London. Sometimes, Copymaster would simply hang up, beep, and tell me that the “attempt failed.” Then my laptop would freeze, forcing me to reboot. I hoped that wouldn’t happen in Iraq.

There was very little to write about, apart from the sandstorms, or the lost camels that would occasionally tiptoe grumpily between the hooches and gun trucks. I wondered how many of the poor beasts had been turned into exotic steak by stray artillery rounds. Their owners, the nomadic Bedouin tribesmen, must have been furious. The only other newsworthy event came when the Marines were handed two pocket-sized laminated cards, the first outlining the rules of the 1929 and 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the second offering a phonetic pronunciation guide to basic Arabic phrases. On the first card, in bold type, was written: “Marines do not attack medical personnel, equipment or facilities; Marines do not harm those who surrender; Marines do not kill or torture prisoners.” It was the second card, however, that provoked the most interest. The Marines were particularly pleased with the unlikely phrase “And Upon You Be Peace” [Wass-alamu Alay-kum] and the translation of “What’s up?,” which appeared as “Shoe-koo, McKoo.” For hours after the cards arrived, Camp Grizzly echoed with Marines bellowing it at each other, then high-fiving.

Every so often I would try to think of way to get medevacked out of Camp Grizzly before the war began. I considered deliberately losing my glasses; breaking my wrist; or simply taking one of the Marine’s rifles and shooting myself in the foot. I even contemplated sabotaging my laptop or satellite phone. I was convinced, however, that anything other than being hit directly with a weapon of mass destruction would be considered wimping out by Fletcher. It was too late now for lame excuses. To save my career, I had to spend at least a few days under enemy fire in Iraq. Only then, perhaps, could I try to work out a way to go home.

Before going to Kuwait, I hadn’t been much of smoker. Nicotine, however, was the only drug available at Camp Grizzly, and I suspected I would need more of it once the war started. So, on a whim, I asked the BBC cameraman to buy me a pack of 200 Marlboro Lights on his next trip to Kuwait City. He brought back 400. After every Scud alert, I’d rip off my gas mask, locate my glasses, then immediately light up, sucking the carcinogenic fumes, along with all the airborne mud and filth, deep into my lungs. And I’d pray that Saddam wouldn’t use chemicals.

The main source of entertainment in my hooch was Joe Trux, the first lieutenant I’d met on my first day at Camp Grizzly. With his smart East Coast accent, French fiancée, and exhaustive knowledge of English trip-hop, Trux struck me as an unlikely warrior. In fact, I often wondered what kind of trauma had inspired him to sign up for boot camp. When I was first introduced to Trux, I’d assumed he was my age or younger. It was only when he pulled off his floppy camouflaged sun hat to reveal a bald skull shaven down to the pink, flaking skin that he suddenly looked much older. “What happened to Portishead, man?” he asked me once. “Are they making another album? Did you hear Dummy? That was outstanding, wasn’t it?” Before arriving at Camp Grizzly, Trux said he’d been on extended leave in Europe. Now, like everyone else, he spent his days sitting around and waiting for his chance to kill.

Trux’s first big project had been to build a Monopoly board out of the brown cardboard boxes in which the MREs were packed. With a felt-tip pen, he branded it the RCT-5 Monopoly: 2003 Kuwait Edition. Boardwalk, inevitably, was replaced with Baghdad, while Park Place became France. (This made me wonder how the poor bugger from Agence France-Presse was faring in the camp opposite.) Instead of being sent to jail, players were directed to Camp Grizzly. Trux had even gone to the effort of writing out Chance and Community Chest cards.

The Chance cards included the following:

1. Clean the shitter. Miss a turn.

2. You are guilty of negligent discharge [accidentally firing an M-16]. Go back five steps.

3. Skittles in MRE. Collect $10.

4. Media rep falls into foxhole. Collect $500.

I was slightly concerned that No. 4 was rewarded with cash. Trux reassured me, however, that it was a joke. The only other entertainment at Camp Grizzly came from fake news, most of which was blamed on the Marine Corps’ internal online news service. The biggest commotion was caused by a report that Osama bin Laden had been captured. For hours cheering could be heard around the camp. Marines slapped each other on the back and yelled “Shoe-koo, McKoo!” Then came news of Julia Roberts’s death in a car crash, and a gory account of Britney Spears’s facial disfigurement, also at the wheel of a car. My short-wave radio, however, had an unpopular habit of contradicting these sensational headlines. Trux, therefore, felt personally obliged to come up with another scheme to entertain the unhappy campers.

Eventually he had an idea.

“Hey guys,” he said in the hooch one morning.

“Shoe-koo, McKoo?” replied several voices simultaneously.

“How about a talent contest?”

There were murmurs of encouragement.

“Imagine it: Camp Grizzly’s first-ever annual talent show,” said Trux. “We could turn one of the ten-tons into a stage…”

This got the Marines excited. Logistics and dates were discussed.

“All we need now,” said Trux, “are some performers.”

The men looked at each other with blank faces.

Then they looked at me.

The day before the talent show—almost a full week after I’d first arrived at Camp Grizzly—the colonel in charge of the 11th Regiment turned up in a military convoy to give the Marines a pep talk from the back of a seven-ton truck. As the sun sank into the horizon behind him and the wind blew up a tornado of dust from the desert floor, all I could make out was his uniformed silhouette.

“There’s a very good chance we’ll get the word to go in the next couple of days,” he said through the tin rattle of a loudspeaker. “On Monday or Tuesday night, the president is expected to make an address to the nation, so make sure you’ve got everything you need to go all the way to Baghdad.” The men ooh-rahed. “The indications we’re getting from over the border is that there’s not much motivation for a fight,” he continued. “Last week a bunch of Iraqis came up to the Brits and tried to surrender, but the Brits said, ‘It’s not time yet.’”

The men laughed at the thought of the Iraqi army’s 51st Mechanized Division trying to lay down their weapons before the fight even began. If the story was true, I thought, the men would probably have been executed as traitors by now. The colonel cupped a hand over his eyes and surveyed the crowd. “Your average Iraqi,” he said, “when he sees a Marine with night-vision goggles and an M-16 rolling past his house in an armored Humvee, is gonna think he’s having a close encounter of the third kind. Don’t do anything to alienate the people up there: Treat ’em with dignity and respect.” He paused, as if savoring the moment. Then he said, “We’re gonna go to Baghdad, fight the Republican Guard, take care of them, replace Saddam, and put stability operations in place. Then we’re gonna come back home.”

The men cheered, whooped, and Semper Fi’d as the colonel jumped down from the back of the truck. He waved, climbed inside the cab, and the convoy clattered off to the next camp. I hated Camp Grizzly more than I had ever hated any other place on earth. So why was the thought of leaving so unbearable?

That night, under the billowing circus-top of the hooch, I shivered in my sleeping bag and listened to the Marines talk among themselves. The lights were off, but one of the men, the corporal who had wanted me to reenact Full Metal Jacket on my first day, was reading a letter by torchlight. Others were watching DVDs. The mood seemed different, more subdued. No one was saying much.

Then the corporal announced: “Man, this letter’s depressing the hell out of me. Even my goddamn brother’s against the war.”

The roof of the tent flapped in the wind like a flag at full mast.

“No shit,” came a muffled reply.

The corporal continued: “My brother’s the kind of guy who usually says, ‘Let’s just kill the motherfuckers.’”

He paused, allowing the men to consider this important background fact. Then he said: “What’s our job here to do anyway?”

No one, it seemed, wanted to have this conversation. They were all trying to forget about the desert outside.

Then Trux said, “Our job is to kill the enemy.”

The corporal didn’t seem to be listening.

“Man, it’s gonna be just like Vietnam,” he complained. “When we get home, we’re gonna have folks throw stuff at us.”

With a heavy sigh, he switched off his torch.

In the darkness, sleeping bags rustled uncomfortably. Outside, Iraq’s El Niño was now whistling tunelessly.

Then the muffled voice said, “Nobody gonna throw nothin’ at me.”

“Good evening, er, ladies and gentlemen,” said the shy, bespectacled gunnery sergeant, squinting under a solitary floodlight. His Noël Coward impression, not convincing at the best of times, was faltering with stage fright. “Here’s a little number I tossed off recently in the Caribbean,” he continued. “It’s called ‘The Penis Song.’” A hundred or so heavily armed Marines peered up at the makeshift stage, which doubled as the back of a ten-ton flatbed tank-transporter, and gave a raucous cheer. The reflection of the floodlight in the sand made their faces glow dirty orange.

Above and around us was nothing—a cavern of black, empty desert. It was cold and the air smelled of sand, tobacco, and Porta-Johns. The gunnery sergeant—“Gunny” for short—was gripping a microphone that was plugged into a PA system designed for giving orders to Iraqi prisoners of war. To his left, a metal cage creaked in the wind. Inside it perched Speckled Ali, the 11th Regiment’s “NBC pigeon.” Ali was looking good: cheerful, almost. That meant the gas alert of five minutes ago was just a drill. We would live, at least until the end of the talent show.

I wondered what would happen if Ali came down with bird flu. Would the entire regiment be medevacked to a quarantine facility? For a brief, exhilarating moment, I contemplated poisoning Ali’s bird feed.

The Marines remained fixated on the stage.

Gunny cleared his throat, spat out a gobful of yellow dust, then began:

Isn’t it awfully nice to have a penis?

Isn’t it frightfully good to have a dong?

I recognized the ditty as a Monty Python spoof from The Meaning of Life. The rest of the audience wasn’t as appreciative. Gunny had barely reached the third line before the Marines started to unsling their M-16s and cock them with loud ka-clacks. At first it was funny. Then it started to get unnerving. Onstage, to the right of Gunny, Trux made a “shush” motion. Above his head was a homemade banner fashioned from brown ration boxes that read: “The Iraqi Republican Guard is proud to sponsor this event.” Next to it, Trux had tried to create an italicized Republican Guard motto. “We Suck Again,” it boasted.

A blast of wind sprayed the stage with sand and dirt. Gunny paused to empty another mouthful of slime and adjust his rifle’s shoulder strap. The first lieutenant wiped his eyes. I heard cursing over the low grumble of a diesel generator. Gunny’s right hand was now holding down the Velcro flap on his gas mask holster. He gripped his NBC-proof water canteen with the other.

This, I thought, would be a great time for another Scud alert.

Gunny was determined to press on:

So three cheers for your Willy or John Thomas,

Hooray for your one-eyed trouser snake…

The crowd couldn’t take it anymore. “You fuckin’ suck!” shouted a private from the crowd. There was more ka-clacking. Gunny persevered until he reached the last line. “The Penis Song,” mercifully, was only two verses long. When Gunny was finally done he gave a bow, which turned into a duck to avoid a hurled ration of peanut butter. Trux caught it, then held it up to his chest as though he were a model in a television commercial. “Let’s give a BIG thanks to our other sponsor of this evening,” he shouted, snatching the microphone from Gunny. “Delicious ‘MRE’ peanut butter spread!” The crowd roared and stomped its feet as Trux, getting into the spirit of things, began to tap-dance in his desert boots and chemical suit.

I marveled at Trux’s ability to prepare such a varied program, featuring everything from a guitar duo to a rap/dance troupe, in such a short space of time. So far, we’d heard a twenty-two-year-old intelligence officer sing in a Michael Jackson falsetto; a short-tempered Midwestern sergeant recite love poetry; and, of course, Gunny’s rendition of “The Penis Song.” Next up onstage was a captain and first sergeant. They gave a flawless performance of “Sweet Home Alabama” on acoustic guitars. An encore was demanded and so the unlikely duo launched into Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” with altered lyrics. The audience chanted the chorus in unison: “But for now, this shithole is our home.” I found myself singing along.

As Trux took back the microphone, I contemplated the night ahead: the floor mat and the freezing sleeping bag; the inevitable 2:00 A.M. gas alert; the fuzzy 5:00 A.M. wake-up. And then the stale breakfast, the fear, the boredom, and the day made up of segments and routines. Then Trux said: “And now I’d like to introduce you to the real stars of our talent show: the media representatives!”

The crowd cheered and booed simultaneously.

Rifles ka-clacked.

Someone shouted “Semper Fi!”

I turned to look at Nelson. He winced and shrugged his shoulders.

“Come on, boys,” said Trux. “Join me onstage…”

13 SHOE-KOO, MCKOO?

Before we go any further—and before things start to get really ugly—I should probably tell you what happened at the talent show. Trux, being a gentleman, didn’t go through with his threat to haul the embeds onstage. Instead, we were asked to stand as he introduced us to the Marines. Through the gloom, scores of dirty orange faces peered at us with a mixture of curiosity and hostility. The only reporters they’d ever seen, after all, were in the movies; and most of them were scumbags. Likewise, the only Marines we’d ever seen were also in the movies; and they were mostly scumbags, too. “Please give a big Camp Grizzly welcome to Chris Ayres, from The Times of London,” said Trux. There were low cheers and, I couldn’t help noticing, a couple of boos. A solitary rifle ka-clacked. I hoped I wouldn’t end up in a Humvee with that Marine. “Chris is from northern England and his favorite band is Portishead,” Trux continued, making it up as he went along. I wished he’d chosen something more macho, like Limp Bizkit or Rage Against the Machine. I also wished I worked for an American newspaper. To most of the Marines, being interviewed by The Times of London meant nothing. “Why are the folks in London interested in us?” they kept asking.

That night the Marines were in a better mood. In the hooch, everyone was humming the captain’s version of “Good Riddance,” writing letters to their families or girlfriends, and complaining about Gunny’s “Penis Song.” The good humor wouldn’t last long. In fact, this would be my last night at Camp Grizzly. I’d never again see Living Service Area 5, or 1st Lt. Joe Trux.

It was 3:04 A.M. when a captain from the 2nd Battalion burst into the hooch, flipped on the overhead lights, and yelled: “Go! Go! Devil Dogs, let’s go!” I reached for my glasses and squinted up out of my sleeping bag. I checked my Xtreme 19 digital camping watch: The date was Tuesday, March 18, 2003. The captain—a tall black man made entirely from skin and muscle—was already in MOPP-level two. He was also wearing a camouflaged armored vest with a hunting knife and 9mm pistol strapped to it. I wondered what he expected to kill with the knife. From my position on the floor, it looked big enough to disembowel a camel.

“Oh no,” I muttered, trying to shake myself awake. It had been seven days since I’d arrived at Camp Grizzly and I was getting used to the routine of Scud drills, MREs, infrequent bowel movements, and cold showers. I’d almost forgotten that war correspondents, at some point, had to go to war.

“That’s it then,” said Trux, already half dressed and slamming rounds into the chamber of his M-16. “This is for real.”

For the first time I realized that Trux, like me, hadn’t fully believed the war would happen. He’d probably convinced himself, like I had, that it was all part of a diabolical White House plan to mess with journalists’ heads and scare the French. But we were wrong: The president wasn’t bluffing.

I looked over at Nelson from the Boston Globe. Somehow, he’d already gotten dressed and packed his rucksack. He was fizzing with nervous excitement. I might have shared his enthusiasm if I was covering the war from the nearest five-star hotel to the action, as journalists are supposed to do.

“Let’s giddyup, folks!” said Nelson.

Giddyup? What the hell was wrong with him?

“This is a training exercise,” deadpanned the captain, who was still standing in the doorway of the hooch by the light switch. His right leg, I noticed, wouldn’t stop jiggling, as though it had a battery in it.

“My ass this is a training exercise,” said Trux matter-of-factly.

“Two other things,” said the captain, ignoring him. “The president will address the nation at 1:00 A.M. zulu time—that’s 4:00 A.M. local—and we have orders that all hands should grow a mustache.”

The men nodded blearily; no one asked why.

Then Trux exploded: “Grow a mustache?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said the captain slowly. “A mustache. The general says we’ve all gotta grow one.”

“What—now?” asked Trux.

“Just do it, first lieutenant,” came the reply.

Covered in sand and reeking of stale body odor, I pulled on my hiking pants, stained T-shirt, and black tracksuit top. My body felt ruined. I knelt down and began the tedious routine of rolling up my sleeping bag and ground sheet, then fastening them to the back of my rucksack with plastic clasps. When I was done, I heaved my blue flak jacket onto my back, put on my helmet, and stumbled outside to smoke a cigarette. It was 3:30 A.M. Within minutes my shoulders were aching from the weight of the Kevlar, which felt tough enough to withstand a small thermonuclear blast, never mind a sniper’s bullet. I began to wonder if it was worth the pain.

Nothing prepared me for the noise outside. It was though hell had gone on tour and was making a one-night-only appearance in Camp Grizzly. The regiment’s two thousand vehicles clattered and groaned in a terrible symphony, like the cogs of a gigantic, murderous machine. For miles around the desert glowed from the fake dawn of a thousand floodlights. I coughed, shivered, and smoked as a ten-ton truck rolled past the hooch. It was carrying two bulldozers, each one the size of an office building. I assumed they’d be used to tear holes in the demilitarized zone that separated Kuwait from Iraq, creating a “breach” through which the American tanks could pass. The “DMZ” stretched 125 miles from the Saudi Arabian border to Umm Qasr—Iraq’s only port city—and then onward another 25 miles to the Abd Allah Estuary, which eventually opens out into the Persian Gulf. The DMZ, I had been told by the Marines, was currently being “guarded” for the Iraqis by a 775-strong Bangladeshi infantry battalion. I imagined the Bangladeshis, like inept nightclub bouncers, trying to stop 150,000 Americans from crossing the border. If they had any sense, they would have booked themselves into the Kuwait Marriott by now and ordered up the prawns and Wagyu-Kobe beef.

I stepped on my cigarette and lit another one.

My heart, I noticed, was beating in a frantic 2/4 march.

I decided I should call the office. It was 12:30 A.M. in London, and there would still be a couple of night editors on the foreign desk. I pulled out my satellite phone, extended the chunky antenna, and started to dial.

The black captain emerged from the tent as someone in London picked up.

“Y’ello?” said a distant voice.

“Kill the goddamn PHONE!” yelled the captain, making a furious throat-slitting action with his right hand. For a second I thought he was going to tackle me. The phone jumped out of my hands.

“We’re in EmCon Bravo, for Christsake,” he bellowed.

We stared at each other.

“What’s that?” I asked eventually, my hands still shaking.

“Radio… Emissions… Control,” he said, as if trying to stop himself from doing something he would regret later. “You switch that phone on and it gives out a radio signal. Ten seconds later a Scud lands on your head. It lands on my head, too. And I don’t want no Scuds anywhere near my head. Keep it switched off. We’re gonna be in Bravo for the next forty-eight hours. At least.”

I tried some of Dr. Ruth’s breathing exercises. Then a thought struck me.

“So how will I file any stories?” I asked.

“You won’t,” said the captain. “You’re gonna be out of contact. You can send your stories when we go back to EmCon Delta.”

The embedding system suddenly seemed very flawed. I would be joining the front lines with no weapon, no training, and no way to send stories. It was as though I was tagging along just for the opportunity to get shot—or worse. Until now the phone had been my only contact with reality. And now it was useless. The only upside was that Fletcher and Barrow might think I was dead.

I noticed the captain looking at my flak jacket.

“Why the hell are you wearing a blue vest?” he asked. His eyes moved upward with growing disbelief. “And a blue helmet?”

“It’s, er, Kevlar,” I replied. “Bulletproof, y’know?” I rapped my knuckles twice on my helmet and gave a weak laugh.

“Do you have any idea how many blue things there are in the Iraqi desert?” the captain replied, his eyes damp with anger.

I shook my head. I didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “There’s one blue thing. And it’s you.”

Trux appeared from behind me, his M-16 slung over his shoulder. He glanced at my jacket, which had the word PRESS inscribed on the chest in large, fluorescent white letters. Then he gave me a playful shove there.

“What th—” I began to say.

“I’m pressing!” said Trux. He shoved me again, harder. “Look, I’m pressing! It says here I have to press! What happens now?”

Trux slapped his palm on my back, then nearly collapsed with laughter. I thought I detected an upward curl of the captain’s lips.

“That’s very funny,” I said.

“Whoever gave you that vest, man, I wouldn’t send ’em a Christmas card,” said Trux. “I think they might want you dead. Why didn’t they write ‘press’ in Arabic? As far as the Iraqis are concerned, that snazzy blue jacket might mean you’re a goddamn general. I hope the Kevlar comes with a warranty.”

I began to explain that, for ethical reasons, I shouldn’t look too much like a Marine—even though I was wearing a camouflaged Marine chemical suit and traveling in a Marine convoy with a Marine artillery battery. But Trux was right. My jacket should have had SAHAFFI on it, or, as Salman Hussein had said to me in the taxi outside the Marriott, LA TAPAR, ANA SAHAFFI.

“Which unit are you assigned to, anyhow?” asked Trux. I could tell from the folds in his brow he hoped it wasn’t his.

I tried to shrug, but couldn’t because of the weight on my shoulders.

Then the captain said, “He’s with me.”

I almost choked on my Marlboro. The captain was still looking at me as though he’d caught me in a motel room with his wife.

“I don’t think we’ve been introduced yet,” he said, offering me a bony hand. “Captain Rick Rogers. The men call me Buck.”

“I’m Chris,” I said, presenting him with a fleshy, sunburned palm in return. “Chris Ayres. From the London Times.”

“Okay, London Times,” said Buck. “Follow me.”

By 3.52 A.M., I was standing next to an armored Humvee on the dirt track that headed north out of Camp Grizzly, toward the Iraqi border. Behind the Humvee was a seven-ton off-road truck stacked high with wooden crates of ammunition. It was towing a massive 155mm howitzer, which the Marines told me weighed more than the truck itself. I was surprised by how old-fashioned the big gun looked—as though it was only a couple of generations evolved from the wagon-wheeled, horse-drawn artillery that the British used to fire at the Americans. “It has about as much in common with one of those pieces of crap as a Model T Ford does with a pimped-up Cadillac Escalade,” the captain told me later. “That gun can fire a rocket-propelled shell thirty klicks (kilometers) downrange at a rate of two per minute. That’s why they call us the Long Distance Death Dealers. We kill more people on the battlefield than anyone else.”

Behind the howitzer was another seven-ton truck, also towing a gun, and then another, for as far as I could see. To the left of us were four identical artillery convoys, lined up side-by-side. I guessed there must have been at least a billion dollars’ worth of military hardware parked outside the camp.

After leading me to the Humvee, Buck had disappeared for a briefing with the 2nd Battalion’s commanding officer. While I waited for him to come back, I tuned in to BBC World Service. It was now 3:59 A.M. In less than a minute President Bush would address the nation. A dozen Marines huddled around the V-shaped antenna of my shortwave radio: Some of them smoked cigarettes; others ate MREs. In the field, I would soon learn, Marines eat whenever they can.

“My fellow citizens,” the president began through a babble of interference. “Events in Iraq have reached the final days of decision… The United States and other nations have pursued patient and honorable efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime without war. That regime pledged to reveal and destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Today, no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed. And it will not disarm so long as Saddam Hussein holds power.” For a moment the president’s voice faded out, replaced by a solemn Arabic voice and the echo of an Islamic call to prayer. I wondered if this really was the end of the world. I scrolled through the alternative frequencies for the World Service just in time to hear the president’s fuzzy ultimatum: “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing. For their safety, all foreign nationals—including journalists and inspectors—should leave Iraq immediately.”

The Marines shook their heads, cursed Saddam, and made their way back to their vehicles. It seemed inevitable: Some of us would end up dying an unimaginable chemical death. Saddam, after all, had absolutely nothing to lose. Behind us, in a metal cage swinging from the cabin of a seven-ton truck, Speckled Ali, the NBC pigeon, cooed contentedly. Then I saw the captain, backlit by the glare of the floodlights, approaching the Humvee. He still looked pissed off, but I thought I could sense a slight mood improvement. “So, I’ve been told to look after you,” he said without trying to hide his disappointment. “This is the deal: As you probably know, the 2nd Battalion, 11th Marines is made up of four firing batteries—Echo, Fox, Golf, and Kilo—and a headquarters battery. I’m in charge of Kilo Battery. Our mission is to cover the infantry from the 5th Marines, who’ll go through the DMZ ahead of us, when—or IF—we get the order to cross the LOD.” I got the feeling Buck was the kind of military man who never used words when an acronym would do. With any luck this meant I would never understand the true depth of the trouble we were in.

“Where would you rather travel?” asked Buck. “In the Humvee with me, or in one of the seven-tons with the Devil Dogs?”

I turned to look at the Marines perched between the ammunition crates on the back of the truck behind us. I concluded that even Buck’s company would be preferable to sitting on top of several tons of high explosives.

“I’ll go in the Humvee, if that’s okay,” I said.

Buck nodded and tightened his jaw.

“Where are your bags?” he asked.

“Outside the hooch,” I said. “I’ll get them.” Buck nodded, stalked around the Humvee, and climbed into the passenger seat.

A few minutes later I returned, dragging my metal dolly over the sand and gravel. By now one of the casters had fallen off.

“You’re bringing all of this?” asked Buck through his wound-down window as he surveyed my rucksack, laptop carrier, tent bag, travel wallet, toiletries case, and flak jacket holder. He saved his most contemptuous look, however, for my dolly. Before I had a chance to answer, Buck turned to the Marine in the Humvee’s driving seat. “Murphy, will you help the media guy with his shit?” he asked. The driver’s door opened, a mouthful of chewing tobacco was spat, and within a few seconds a short, filthy Marine was standing next to me. He introduced himself as L. Cpl. (Lance Corporal) “Fightin’ Dan” Murphy. His nickname, I was informed, came from his tendency to start nightclub brawls. I suspected he might have made this up. Murphy was twenty-four years old and came from an Irish family that had settled somewhere in upstate New York. He wore his chemical suit extra-baggy, like camouflaged skatewear.

It soon became clear that my bags wouldn’t fit. The Humvee was already overloaded with bullets for the rooftop .50-caliber machine gun, crates of hand grenades, an AT-4 antitank rocket launcher, bottles of Saudi Arabian drinking water, and boxes of MREs. The rest of our water supply, meanwhile, was in a plastic tank on an open luggage rack bolted to the rear bumper. As a conciliatory gesture, I agreed to leave my dolly behind. After all, if my luggage was in the Humvee, I wouldn’t need to carry it—or so I thought. Nevertheless, Murphy still had to unload two boxes of MREs and a few “humanitarian” ration packs to make room for my rucksack. I contemplated dumping my fluorescent Two-Man Xtreme 19 Mountain Adventure Pod, but it seemed too painful after everything we’d been through together. Not, of course, that I had any intention of putting it up anywhere near Buck Rogers. If he was upset about my blue jacket, I didn’t want to think about his reaction to a fluorescent yellow tent.

When the rear hatch of the Humvee was finally closed, I wedged myself onto the tiny, foam-cushioned backseat behind Murphy. The only way I could fit was to jam my knees up against the Kevlar chest-plate of my jacket. That pretty much rendered all of my body, apart from my head, immobile. I stared straight ahead, at the rack for the rifle that I wasn’t allowed to carry, and began to groan.

“Are we ready?” asked Buck. The door opposite me clanked open and a much older Marine—I guessed he was nearly forty—jumped in. “Yeah, we’re ready,” he said, slamming the door behind him. “Frank Hustler,” he added, turning to me and shaking my hand. Before I could ask his rank, age, or where he was from, he said: “If you’re takin’ notes, I’m a first sergeant, thirty-seven years old, from San Diego, California. Back home I have a beautiful Brazilian wife. And when I start shootin’ that 50-cal on the roof, you’re gonna think you’re balls are on fire.” Hustler laughed, then dipped his finger into a tub of Vaseline and smeared it onto his tire-tracked lips. With a grunt, he stood up on his seat, pulled a set of black headphones over his ears, and poked his head through the hole of the machine-gun turret. Then he stepped up onto the metal plate to my right, where my armrest should have been. I couldn’t stop staring at his boot tags, which had his blood type and social security number written on them.

“Okay, Murphy, let’s CSMO,” said Buck.

The Humvee’s V-8 engine rattled and bellowed. I could feel the vibration of the blackened, vertical exhaust pipe behind my door.

We started to lurch forward—toward Iraq; toward fear; toward death.

“What does CSMO mean?” I shouted to the captain.

I could see his shoulders tighten. He really didn’t like questions.

I didn’t blame him, to be honest. He had a war to fight.

“Clear Shit and Move Out,” he said at last.

I didn’t expect to die so quickly. Even with my horror-flick imagination, I thought it would take at least a few days for one of Saddam’s chemical Scuds or diseased mortars to find its way into my foxhole. Part of me even expected to survive the invasion, but get killed on the way home—in a helicopter crash over Baghdad, perhaps, or in a friendly-fire incident in Kuwait. I certainly didn’t expect it to end like this, a whole five minutes and twenty seconds after leaving Camp Grizzly.

We had been driving for only a couple of minutes when Buck realized we were lagging behind the rest of the 1st Marine Division. He began thumping his hand against a GPS device—which could allegedly calculate our position on the battlefield by triangulating our distance from three satellites—and swearing at it using words I’d never even heard before. Spread out over his knees was a map of the DMZ that had been drawn up from spy satellites. It looked about as reliable as the directions on the back of a Chinese takeout menu. “Left, left, go left!” he shouted at Murphy, who promptly swung the Humvee into a ditch, over a three-foot-high sand berm, down a 45-degree rock face, and onto the flat gravel of the wadi. “Jesus Christ, Murphy,” said Buck, “you were supposed to take the track.” I twisted my neck to look at the speedometer over Murphy’s shoulder. It was showing 50 miles an hour. It felt faster.

In a flash of rage, Buck tossed the GPS device over his shoulder, picked up the map, and shook the creases out of it. It was then that he remembered something: “Land mines! Land mines! Murphy, watch out for goddamn land mines!” The muscles in my buttocks clenched so tight I feared I might need surgery to unlock them. “Oh shit,” said Murphy, who started swerving violently to avoid anything that looked vaguely minelike. Unfortunately, every other rock in the chalk-colored desert looked minelike. I winced as I remembered what the Lonely Planet guide had said about the dangers of “wadi-bashing”: People who keep track of these things emphasize that stuff still blows up every month. “Just get back on the track, Murphy,” said Buck, wiping a dirty palm over his face. I noticed he’d hung a crucifix from the Humvees dashboard. He’d also taped a brown prayer booklet, entitled Life & Death, to the inside of the windshield. “Calm down, Murphy, and find the track,” Buck continued. “Ain’t no point in busting the tires for the sake of some rocks.”

Then three things happened simultaneously: Murphy shouted “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”; the Humvee swung so emphatically to the left that it almost flipped over; and the door I was leaning on buckled and popped open. Suddenly my head was a foot from the desert floor and I was looking at the front wheels of the Humvee from an unusual and unwanted vantage point. After the initial shock, I soon worked out that I was being held inside the vehicle only by my legs, which were trapped under Murphy’s seat. My door, meanwhile, kept slamming into my stomach, like a barnyard gate in a storm. I watched helplessly as the contents of my pockets—two notebooks, a pack of cigarettes, and several ballpoint pens—fluttered out into the dawn breeze. It took perhaps thirty seconds for me to realize that no one inside the vehicle had noticed what had happened. Or that they didn’t care. As I hung there, waiting for my legs to give way, forcing me to perform a fatal back-flip under the Humvee’s monster-truck tires, I contemplated the sheer rotten luck of dying in a freak off-roading accident before crossing the Iraq border. The thought made me so angry that I wrestled the flapping door and started to heave my Kevlar-plated torso upright. Eventually, with a bellow of pure animal rage, I threw myself back inside the vehicle and slammed the door shut behind me.

No one said a word.

Buck was still lost in his map—literally.

Murphy was still trying to find the gravel track. (I assumed he’d swerved to avoid a real or imagined land mine.)

Hustler’s boots were still shifting nervously on the footplate.

“Bastards,” I muttered.

Then Murphy swerved again, my door popped back open, and once again I found myself staring into death’s familiar face.

By the time we reached the so-called “dispersal area”—the position from which the 1st Marine Division would invade—I felt as though I’d been at war for a year. My skin, white to begin with, had become even paler from the shock of dangling from the Humvee. Any remaining color had been removed by the chalklike dust that had blown into my face as I tried to avoid being crushed to death. “Geez,” remarked Hustler when he ducked down from the gun turret. “You look like you took a sand bath. Did you have the window open or something?”

“No,” I said, testily. “The lock on the door’s broken. It swung open every time Murphy swerved for a land mine.”

“Oh yeah,” said Hustler absentmindedly. “We’ve been meaning to fix that. You just have to keep pulling it closed.”

“Right,” I said, nodding. The Marines, it seemed, had already changed me: I wanted to rip somebody’s head off.

At the dispersal area—another patch of hot, featureless gravel—Murphy and Hustler busied themselves putting camouflaged netting over the Humvee, creating an awning around the vehicle. The netting, I discovered, didn’t actually provide any shade; it just gave me a camouflage-patterned sunburn.

By midmorning the sun was hard at work napalming the desert, forcing me to strip down to my soaked T-shirt and chemical suit trousers. If the sun was bad, however, the bugs were worse. The air was an exotic soup of insects, some of them the size of meatballs. No matter what evasive action I took, they hovered around my face, taking exploratory bites out of my nose, neck, and forehead. I began to feel as though my head had its own buzzing, snapping weather system. For the first time, the Kuwaitis’ headwear began to make sense. I was relieved to remember that I had a can of Xtreme 19 insect repellent in my pocket. But nope, it had fallen out during my near-death experience with the Humvee’s broken door.

“These are big-assed bugs,” said Murphy, who was trying to punch away the insects without giving himself a black eye.

He eventually gave up and decided to talk to me instead.

“Do they do much fightin’ in London?” he asked.

I looked at the lance corporal. I could tell that somewhere underneath all the dirt, his skin was pale and freckled like mine. The brownish color of his hair, meanwhile, could easily have been a result of personal hygiene. If he’d taken a shower and come back a blond, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Murphy squinted back at me.

“There is on Saturday night,” I said, picturing Leicester Square. That was a mistake. I suddenly felt overwhelmingly homesick.

“Do they fight Americans?” probed Murphy.

I wondered for a second if Murphy was trying to start a fight. He was small but looked as though he could bench-press a bungalow. I imagined he could also get quite creative in his Marine-on-embed violence.

“No,” I said emphatically. “We like Americans. They’re our allies. And friends. No one ever fights Americans.”

Murphy looked unconvinced, and slightly disappointed.

“Wanna learn how to fire an M-16?” he asked, unslinging his rifle.

It took me a while to process the question.

“I don’t think that’s, er, ethical,” I said.

Murphy gave me a disgusted look. He was now holding his gun so that it was pointing at me. I swallowed hard.

After my gun tutorial—which basically involved learning how to switch off the M-16’s safety—I quizzed Murphy about the war.

“Do you think this is it?” I asked.

“You mean… the invasion?” he said slowly.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, last time, they bombed the crap out the Iraqis for thirty-nine days before they sent in the ground troops,” he said. “And that was with double the manpower. So I doubt it. Then again, they keep talkin’ about shock and awe, so maybe they’ll just nuke the terrorist motherfuckers and get it over with.”

Murphy, pleased with this analysis, lit one of my cigarettes. I’d grown so tired of him asking for them, I’d given him a pack. That was less than an hour ago. I noticed he was already down to the last three.

Hustler appeared from behind the Humvee carrying a shovel. He was all suntan and rib cage—like a Venice Beach bum. But he had the flatiron head of a military man. This was a Marine whose youth never involved voting Democrat. Hustler’s hair was staging a retreat from his forehead, revealing the trenches of a life spent in foxholes and gun turrets, learning how to kill people.

“You can’t dig a foxhole in this shit,” he said, throwing the shovel onto the gravel. “You’d need a fuckin’ bulldozer.”

Hustler was panting, with inlets of sweat trickling down his neck into the saltwater estuary of his lower back. I felt relieved: The first lieutenant’s failure to dig a foxhole meant I didn’t have to try.

“What do you think, First Lieutenant?” I asked. “Is this it? Are they gonna send the ground troops in this early?”

Hustler scratched the back of his walnut neck.

“Depends,” he said, lighting a full-strength Marlboro. “They’re talkin’ about shock and awe, but I don’t see how they can do that if they’re trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people at the same time.” His nose, I noticed, had been broken in two places. “We need to go in, kill Saddam, and get the fuck out. Shock ’n awe was Hiroshima; it was blitzkrieg. We’re here to liberate.”

“I’ve heard they have this ‘e-bomb,’” I said. “It gives out an electromagnetic pulse that melts the enemy’s electrical circuits. Maybe they’ll use that on Baghdad. Maybe that’s what shock and awe is about.”

Murphy and Hustler considered my theory, which was based entirely on skim-reading one of Glen’s old copies of Newsweek.

Then Hustler said: “It’s not much use if it lands next to a fuckin’ hospital. And everything in Baghdad is next to a hospital.”

It was late afternoon when we got the order to move. This time I held on to the Humvee’s door handle to keep it closed. I also wore my seat belt, just in case. It didn’t take long for me to realize where we were going—in the distance I could make out several gigantic fireballs, with black wreaths of smoke drifting upward until they formed their own thunderous weather front. I assumed the fires were in the Rumeila oil fields on the Iraq side of the border. “Now that is a battlefield,” bellowed Hustler from the Humvee’s roof. He seemed almost boyishly excited. He had, after all, been waiting his entire adult life for this moment of violence.

We stopped just short of the razor-wire fence of the DMZ. Buck handed out painter’s face masks, to protect us from the fumes. The sun hadn’t set but the sky was already black. Since leaving Camp Grizzly, I’d learned that the best way to keep track of what was happening was to listen to the radio in the Humvee’s dashboard instead of asking Buck questions, most of which he just ignored, feigning deafness. The radio was now saying something about “twelve wellheads” having been destroyed. “Saddam either set fire to them or blew them up,” it reported.

That night I forced down an MRE and listened to the World Service. Saddam, it seemed, had rejected the option of going into exile. Another headline said that Iraq’s 51st Mechanized Division had been armed with chemical shells. I also learned the most likely reason for the order to grow mustaches: Saddam had apparently equipped the Republican Guard with lookalike American uniforms and was plotting to have Iraqi soldiers commit war crimes while wearing them. Saddam’s Marine impersonators, however, would be clean-shaven. If all the Marines grew mustaches, therefore, his plan would be thwarted. It made perfect sense.

There was only an hour of light left—shortened by the oil fires—when I realized something awful: I had to use the lavatory: urgently. After a week of gut-clogging MREs, my aching bowels had finally surrendered.

The problem was, I didn’t know where, or how, to go.

In the end, I just came out and said it.

“First Sergeant,” I ventured. “How do you use the bathroom out here?”

“Say again?” Hustler was busy trying to get his flameless heater to work.

“How do you, er, take a shit?”

“Did you bring an e-tool?” he asked, trying to contain a smirk.

“What’s that?”

“An entrenching tool,” he explained unhelpfully. Then he ducked inside the Humvee and pulled out his shovel.

“One of these,” he said.

“Oh, right,” I said, still not understanding what I had to do.

Hustler sighed.

“You dig a hole, take a shit in it, and cover it up again. Just think of it as getting back to nature. The great outdoors.”

It seemed simple enough. I looked around for a bush to hide behind. There wasn’t one. There was only sand and gravel.

“Watch out for the scorpions,” said Murphy, who was aiming his M-16 at a vulture sitting on an abandoned propane tank next to a tumble-weed of razor wire. “There’s nine different species of ’em in Kuwait. All killers. They like coming out at night. So do the tarantulas and black widows.”

I was tired of being pestered, so I just grunted, took the shovel, and trudged off into the infinity of sand. I’d got about twenty feet away when I heard Murphy shout: “And watch for fucking land mines, man!”

How much worse could the war get? I remembered my grand-father’s diary entry in 1940 after driving to Boulogne: “Not very impressed by France at present, although it may get better.” France, of course, got a lot worse for my grandfather. I wondered how much worse the Middle East would get for me. Or perhaps, I thought, I would get used to all this discomfort, and it would get better.

Now hyperaware of land mines, I froze on the spot and, after hesitating for a second, plunged the shovel into a soft-looking piece of ground. Eventually I’d made a small, shallow hole. I wondered if the weight of my evacuation would be enough to trigger any 1991-vintage antipersonnel devices. I imagined the humiliation of dying from a land mine exploding in my buttocks.

In the end, nothing happened. But as I was covering up my mess, I noticed several finger-sized holes, like animal burrows, all around me. Then I saw something glint in the reflected light from the fires. It looked like silk. I bent down. All of a sudden I was winded with adrenaline: It was a spider’s web! I swore I could see a black, hairy leg behind it, climbing out of one of the holes.

Before I knew it, I was running back toward the Humvee, no longer caring about buried explosives. “Jesus, stay in your tracks, Chris!” I heard Hustler shout. But I wasn’t listening. Murphy hadn’t been kidding. There were killer spiders out here. And I’d just squatted over a tarantula’s nest.

What with the cold, the wind, the fear, and the cramped rear quarters of the Humvee, sleep was almost impossible. Work was also out of the question: Buck had lectured me on the importance of “light discipline,” which meant I couldn’t use anything that glowed, including my laptop, satellite phone, or digital watch, after sundown. “At night, when the enemy sees a light, he shoots at it,” the captain explained. “If you switch on that laptop screen at night, you might as well put up a goddamn billboard and light it up with pink neon.” It was a long night. Still, I managed to pass out once or twice, a result of years of practice in economy-class seating. The dreams were the worst: wrenching hallucinations of home and family. I wanted to talk to the people in my dreams—my parents, my sister, Alana—but they couldn’t hear me. They just stood around in a silent circle, looking down at me. “I’m sorry,” I kept saying. “I’m sorry.”

The next day—Wednesday, March 19—was a marathon of tense boredom. We just smoked cigarettes and fiddled with our MOPP gear, waiting for President Bush’s forty-eight-hour deadline to pass. I worried about chemical weapons. I worried about the northern front, or the lack of it. I worried about being captured. I wondered what it would feel like to be blown up, or beheaded like Daniel Pearl. Before sundown Buck handed me a printed sheet of 8½ ×11 with the 1st Marine Division’s blue, star-spangled logo on it. It was vaguely dated March 2003. At the top it said: “Commanding General’s Message To All Hands.” I knew it wouldn’t be good news.

It continued:

When I give you the word, together we will cross the line of departure, close with those forces that choose to fight, and destroy them. Chemical attack, treachery, and use of the innocent as human shields can be expected, as can other unethical tactics. Take it all in stride. Be the hunter, not the hunted… fight with a happy heart and strong spirit. For the mission’s sake, our country’s sake, and the sake of the men who carried the Division’s colors in past battles… carry out your mission and keep your honor clean. Demonstrate to the world there is “No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy” than a U.S. Marine.

It was signed: J. N. Mattis, Major General, U.S. Marines. I wondered if it was possible to wage war with “a happy heart.”

The next morning, at 4:00 A.M., the deadline passed.

At 5:43 A.M., local time, a Baghdad correspondent for BBC World Service reported hearing explosions near his hotel. The story was confirmed at 6:15 A.M., when President Bush announced that he had ordered an “attack of opportunity,” using thirty-six satellite-guided Tomahawk missiles and two F-117-launched GBU-27 bombs in an attempt to “decapitate” the Iraqi leadership. “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war,” the president declared over the radio. “These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.”

At 10:38 A.M., as I was trying to eat some MRE peanut butter, Saddam fired back. Flying low under the radar, a Seersucker missile streaked toward us. The president’s decapitation strike, it seemed, had failed.

“GAS! GAS! GAS!” shouted Buck.

I heard the crump of a nearby explosion.

I always feared I would scream like a girl. In fact, it turned out more like a baritone shout, starting out on-key and then veering off into an atonal vibrato. I performed the scream in a crouched fetal position, with my arms wrapped over my helmet, behind the rear wheel of a seven-ton ammunition truck. In hindsight, of course, a gunpowder truck wasn’t the cleverest place to cower. But it was the only protection I had, out there in the nothingness, amid the smoke and the flames

It wasn’t the Seersucker that made me scream. For one thing, it was too far away (it whooshed over our heads and landed six hundred yards outside Camp Commando, headquarters of Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force). And I was too busy putting my gas mask on to realize what was happening. Instead, the scream came later, at about 8:00 P.M. At the time, I was walking in almost total darkness from Buck’s Humvee to the firing line, where six howitzers were pointing upward at the horizon. It was Hustler’s idea: He’d suggested it would be a good idea to interview Kilo Battery’s gunners.

Everything seemed fine; safe, almost.

Then came a flash of light so brilliantly white it bleached my eyeballs, followed by an overwhelming stench of cordite and a pressure wave that right-hooked me in the face, almost knocking me over. All this was accompanied by an explosion so loud I thought it was the last thing I would ever hear. When I closed my eyes, I could see only a flood of white light. When I opened them again, the light was beginning to fade, like a lamp burn in celluloid. For a second I wondered if I was dead, or blinded. Then the light bubbled and dimmed and I began to make out the dark outlines of the vehicles. No one was screaming, or running. Then, to the east, Echo Battery’s guns went off, and I realized what had happened. We had opened fire.

The gun went off again. Stupidly, I’d continued to look at it, and I found myself blinded for the second time. I began to wonder if I’d done some permanent damage to my eyes. My ears, meanwhile, weren’t just ringing, they were shrieking. I felt like Keith Richards after a two-nighter at Earl’s Court.

My panic attack lasted perhaps five minutes. When I finally brought myself under control and got back to the Humvee, I began to feel relief that we hadn’t been hit. That was when Iraq’s 51st Mechanized Division started returning fire. “Snowstorm! Snowstorm! Snowstorm!” bellowed the radio. Buck threw himself out of the Humvee and shouted “GAS! GAS! GAS!” I got my mask on in record time, cracking the right lens of my glasses underfoot in the process. “I thought the Iraqis were going to bloody surrender!” I shouted to no one through the valve near my mouth. “And where’s the air force?” I hadn’t spotted a single aircraft overhead. This didn’t feel like a high-tech war. We were firing cannons, for God’s sake. I thought this was supposed to be like a video game. Fortunately, the Iraqis were fighting an even lower-tech war and shooting hopelessly long, their shells landing hundreds of yards to the south, in the giant parking lot of the desert. The better news was that no chemical weapons had been detected. Speckled Ali, apparently, was still in excellent health.

By the time the all-clear was called, the howitzers were still busy dealing out death from a distance. I was told by a Marine that a bullet from an M-16 weighs barely more than a tenth of an ounce. A shell from a howitzer weighs 13.5 pounds. The round, known as DPICM, or “dual purpose, improved conventional munitions,” contains eighty-eight grenades, which soar over the heads of the enemy, separate, and then explode—piercing armor, dismantling body parts, and slicing through the pulp and gristle left behind. The howitzers turn the battlefield into a butcher’s shop floor. And now, for miles up and down the DMZ, I could see the white flashes of the big guns going off. All four batteries were pumping out rounds at the same time: twenty-four guns firing a total of eighteen rounds, each one with eighty-eight bomblets, every thirty seconds.

Somewhere over the border, death was hard at work.

“Hey Chris,” said Hustler at about 10:00 P.M., as the guns kept spitting out their fury. “How would you like to fire one of the howitzers?”

“What?”

“Maybe we can arrange for you to shoot one of the big guns. That would make a pretty cool story, wouldn’t it?”

“Er, yeah, maybe,” I stammered. I imagined being personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers.

“But, y’know, there might be an ethical problem with that,” I said.

“Damn right there’d be an ethical problem,” interrupted Buck, who was studying a map under a red night-light. “Both your asses would end up in Guantánamo Bay. Ain’t no embeds firing no goddamn howitzers.”

Hustler gave me an “I tried” shrug.

Then Buck said, “Oh, Chris, I forgot to tell you, we’re in EmCon Delta now. You can use your phone and file a story. I think the enemy knows we’re here. If they don’t, they’re either dead or about to be dead.”

The thought of writing a story seemed very strange. After all, I hadn’t spoken to the office since leaving Camp Grizzly.

I switched on my satellite phone, waved the antenna around to lock on to the satellite, and dialed the foreign desk.

“Foreign new-ews?” said Barrow’s familiar voice.

“Martin,” I said.

“Chris!” he said, almost choking with surprise. He sounded genuinely pleased that I was still alive. The familiarity of Barrow’s voice suddenly made me well up. I got a horrible feeling I was going to burst into tears.

I tried to pull myself together.

“This is awful,” I said. “This is really, really awful.”

By now, I’d forgotten that the howitzers were going off in the background.

“Bloody hell, Chris,” he said. “What are those, er, loud noises?”

“Guns,” I replied. “Our guns, mainly. And some incoming. But mainly us.”

“Blimey,” said Barrow. “Are you in a position to file us something? Just give me something off the top of your head?”

For the first time in my career, I blanked out. I couldn’t think of anything. I was the world’s worst war correspondent.

“Come on, Chris,” said Barrow. “You’ve dictated stories a million times before. Just concentrate. You’re going to be fine.”

But I wasn’t fine. I was very much not fine.

And I had nothing to say.

The guns fired for six hours straight. I sat in the Humvee for most of it, wishing I’d been able to dictate a more coherent news story to Barrow. Still, given that I was the only Times journalist with the frontline forces, I reassured myself that a news story with my name on it would appear on the front page. Not, of course, that it seemed worth it. What kind of nutjob would do this for a living?

Inside the Humvee, the disembodied voice of the radio informed us that the infantry had already blasted its way through the bulldozer-torn hole in the DMZ and into southern Iraq. “We have contact, we have contact,” the voice kept repeating. I looked out of the Humvee’s window, but it was still suffocatingly dark outside. The only suggestion of the violence over the border was the distant echo of gunpowder and metal hitting metal. For the first time since leaving Los Angeles, I thought about Oliver Poole, my rival on the Daily Telegraph. I thanked the God I didn’t believe in that I hadn’t been given Poole’s place with the infantry. I imagined him crossing the DMZ on foot, with only a flak jacket and notebook to protect him. The poor bastard. I wondered if he was as terrified as me. (He wasn’t. “I did feel remarkably unapprehensive,” he wrote of the first night of the war. “I was confident in the ability of the soldiers I was with to protect me, and I had no doubt that somehow I would emerge unscathed, with a string of distinguished newspaper reports to my credit.”)

Then one of the infantry commanders came on the radio. “Hey, you artillery guys are doing a good job,” he said. “All we’re finding over here are arms, and legs, and pink mist.” Buck, Hustler, and Murphy laughed. I wanted to vomit. But to be honest, I was glad they were dead. It meant they couldn’t kill me.

We started moving just before dawn. By now we had a purple fluorescent sheet tied to the hood of the Humvee, so the air force wouldn’t accidentally drop bombs on us. Our progress, however, was slow. A couple of tanks had broken down in the DMZ, creating a billion-dollar traffic jam of military hardware. Eventually, with a convoy of seven-ton trucks and howitzers behind us, we crashed through the breach and into the 6.2 miles of no-man’s-land between Kuwait and Iraq. As the sun reemerged from the cover of the horizon, I leaned out of my window to see that we were driving on a four-lane track marked by soft red and green lights dug into the sand. It was as though we were on a runway, taking off into another dimension. “Last week,” announced Buck, “this was a ten-foot berm and a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot tank trench. And now look at it. Where have all those Bangladeshi United Nations dudes gone?”

A few yards into the DMZ we passed a sign saying “US Troops Do Not Enter!” and then another: “Welcome To The Demilitarized Zone!” At the halfway point, two bearded Kuwaiti police officers stood beside their white squad cars, cheering and waving us on.

At the end of the 6.2 miles, there was no sign welcoming us to Iraq, just an abandoned tent where the Iraqi border post used to be and the smoldering remains of a Republican Guard tank. Then another tank; and another. I tried not to look, fearing the charred and twisted human remains inside. The land was greener than Kuwait and we started to pass dirty, withered farm animals and ranting Bedouin shepherds in black dishdashas. Some of them were flying white flags from their ram-shackle, corrugated iron huts, as they had been instructed to by Arabic leaflets air-dropped by the Americans. “Shoe-koo, McKoo!” shouted Buck at one of them. The Bedouin saluted. It was hard to believe that only ninety miles to our south, there was a city with Ferrari dealerships, KFC franchises, and Armani boutiques. I looked at my wristwatch: It was now just after 9:00 A.M., on Friday, March 21, day two of the Iraq War.

“Here, take this,” said Buck, passing me a greenish, horse-sized tablet.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Doxycycline,” he said. “It’s for malaria.”

I examined the capsule, put it in my mouth, and gulped it down with a swig of lukewarm Saudi Arabian bottled water.

In front of me, Murphy did the same.

“I hate those fuckin’ things,” he announced to the Humvee.

“Why?” asked Buck.

“The last time I took them,” said Murphy, “I was in Germany. I started to vomit, then I passed out. I had to be medevacked.”

Buck and I looked at each other. Then we looked at Murphy.

“Yeah, I get real sick with these tablets, man,” he reiterated. “It sucks.”

“Murphy?” said Buck.

“Yeah?”

“Shit like that would’ve been good to know before you took the tablet.”

Murphy shrugged and drove on.

It was three hundred miles to Baghdad.