War Reporting for Cowards

14 WHILE SHEPHERDS WATCHED THEIR GUNS BY NIGHT

“Murphy, cover me,” shouted Hustler as he pulled out his Beretta 9mm. He yanked open the Humvee’s rear door and jumped out onto the gravel and mud. In front of me, Murphy grabbed his M-16 and also dived out of the vehicle. Then he crouched down behind the front wheel and aimed his rifle over the hood. Buck stayed put in the passenger seat, chewing his lower lip, with a map of Iraq spread out over his lap like a tablecloth at a family picnic. I was in the back, as always, gulping down quick, shallow breaths and fingering the release catch of my Diazepam auto-injector. If this was the end, I wanted to die happy. I didn’t want to feel a thing.

We had made a terrible mistake. It was nearly sundown on Friday, March 21—the day we crossed the DMZ into Iraq—and we were searching for a new firing position. Instead, we had ended up alone, our convoy of howitzers miles behind. When Buck finally got the GPS device to work (it needed new batteries), he realized we were ahead of the front lines. And now we were stuck in a dilapidated Iraqi hamlet, which I guessed was somewhere near Basra International Airport.

The dwellings—it was hard to call them houses—were made from stone, mud, and corrugated iron and guarded by razor wire and a sickly mutt with a hungry bark. White flags fluttered over the rooftops. It had been a muggy day, but now the infernal wind was blowing and it was getting cold.

I felt helpless—as though I was in the front row of a war movie, with the exits locked and bullets coming through the screen. I couldn’t even call anyone or file any stories because we were back in EmCon Bravo. Buck, meanwhile, had given up trying to answer my questions, most of which were unanswerable anyway (“Are you sure we’re safe here?” was one of my favorites). So with nothing better to do, I just sat there and watched Hustler walk slowly forward, his pistol raised in the classic television cop position. About fifty yards in front of him was a tall, robed man, gesticulating and shouting in Arabic. The Iraqi was standing on a steep berm, making it impossible to tell if he was alone or whether this was an ambush. I wondered if I would be expected to fire the Humvee’s machine gun if we were attacked.

“Shall I take him out, sir?” asked Murphy hopefully. The lance corporal had spent the day cursing more than usual—making practically every word an expletive—and sweating feverishly. The hospital-strength doxycycline tablet had yet to knock him out, but I feared it wouldn’t take much longer.

“Negative,” said Buck. “Do not take the dude with the robe out.”

Shoot him, said a voice in my head. Just shoot him. I felt disgusted with myself. The Iraqi was probably terrified; we’d probably just turned his family into “arms, legs, and pink mist,” as the faceless infantry commander had boasted. What I should have been thinking was “Interview him; get out and interview him.” But I was more interested in staying alive than staying objective. The trouble was, I felt like a Marine. I was about as neutral as Murphy’s trigger finger.

Hustler continued walking. You could see the power of the Beretta in his face: the thrill of being able to kill without going to prison. You could see the apprehension, too. He was old enough to know the consequences.

Murphy, on the other hand, was not.

“But I can waste him from here,” the lance corporal protested, his muddy index finger twitching with anticipation.

“He’s a civilian as far as we know,” snapped Buck. “Hearts and minds, Murphy. We don’t shoot innocent people.”

I wondered if Buck would have said that if I weren’t there.

“Maybe he’s got explosives strapped to his fuckin’ underwear,” suggested Murphy, clearly not wanting to give up this early opportunity to lose his war virginity. “Maybe he’s an SEPW, sir.”

An SEPW, I remembered from one of the training sessions at Camp Grizzly, was a “suicide enemy prisoner of war.” The Marines had been warned to expect Palestinian-style suicide attacks from insurgents.

“Maybe this is a ambush, Cap’n,” he continued.

Murphy had a point. We were isolated, miles from any kind of support, and a perfect target. We didn’t even have someone on the roof manning the .50-cal. The Iraqis must have known that taking American prisoners, torturing them, and then parading them on television would be the best way to destroy support for the invasion back home. Earlier that morning I’d heard Sa’id al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister (later to become known as “Baghdad Bob” or “Comical Ali”), threaten Danny Pearl–style vengeance on the invaders. “Give yourself up,” he said on the World Service. “It is better for you this way, because if you do not we will cut off your heads, all of you. Curse you, you have put the U.S. people to shame. We will destroy you.”

“Well, we’ll soon find out,” said Buck.

Hustler stopped a few feet in front of the Iraqi, who was wearing a stained gray dishdasha and leaning on a wooden stick. He looked more like a Bedouin shepherd than an insurgent. Not that Bedouins were harmless: They had a history of acting as battlefield surveillance for Iraqi commanders.

“Sir,” shouted Hustler. “Please leave the area. This is a military operation. It is not safe to be here. Please leave the area.”

The man didn’t budge. He continued his rant, pausing only to wipe tears from his face. He looked tortured, beyond reason.

Then I heard the explosion.

Kilo Battery was in good spirits after crossing the border. We were all still alive, for a start, and resistance from the 51st Mechanized Division had been weaker than expected. More important, the intelligence about the Iraqis being armed with chemical shells turned out to be bogus. “We killed a lot of motherfuckers,” reiterated the radio as we passed the burning, smoking hulk of yet another Republican Guard tank. “We keep expecting to see some infantry, but all we’re seeing are body parts.” I wanted to look at the tanks, and the human off-cuts strewn around them. But that way, insanity beckoned. So I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Hey Cap’n, can we take pictures of the dead people?” asked Murphy.

“No,” said Buck. “That is not cool.”

Iraq wasn’t much to look at. I wasn’t even sure if it was an improvement on the bug-infested sandpit of Kuwait. There were no landmarks or signposts, just endless tank trenches, sand berms, and dirt roads—how the Wild West might have looked in the 1840s. Perhaps, I thought, it would get better.

After crossing more open countryside—which in Iraq means baked scrubland covered with a thin, green weed—we hung a left onto fresh tracks, which I guessed had been made by the infantry in front of us.

Every single muscle and sinew in my body felt stiff, as though fear had given me rigor mortis. I could hardly believe I’d made it over the border. I was excited, in a warped way. I felt like a hero. I also felt like a fool. How would I get out of this? Back in England, I’d promised my grandfather I would leave Iraq if it became too dangerous. “What on earth makes you think you’ll be able to do that?” he replied with a dark chuckle. My grandfather, after all, had spent five years trying to leave Czechoslovakia. The thought of me going to the Middle East made my grandmother cry. She still remembered the single-page telegram sent by the British War Office to my grandfather’s father on November 1, 1940. It informed him that “Dvr. Ross Selkirk Taylor” was missing in action, presumed dead or captured.

We continued heading northeast, toward Basra.

By late morning I became aware of a voice trapped inside my head.

It was a female voice, squeaky and bubbly, with a 1980s backing track. “Borderline,” it sang. “Feels like I’m going to lose my mind / You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline.” So much for war having a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack. My war, it seemed, would be fought to the teenie-bop of early Madonna. Great. I started to zone out, the song still looping interminably in my head. I hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. Perhaps I was becoming delirious. My trance was interrupted, however, by the rhythmic thump of a helicopter overhead, the first aircraft I’d seen since the invasion began. About bloody time, I thought. Where had the air force been? “Look up,” instructed Hustler, lowering himself into the Humvee from the gun turret. “That’s a Marine Huey up there. I’ll bet you General Mattis is in it. Man, he loves the fight.”

This was an understatement.

“Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight,” the general would tell a war conference in California two years later, causing public outrage. “You know, it’s a hell of a hoot; it’s fun to shoot some people. I like brawling.”

Apart from the handful of Bedouins who lived near the border, we didn’t see any Iraqis for miles. The nearest we came was a stray dog, trotting contentedly, and with no urgency, in the direction of Kuwait City.

Murphy, meanwhile, sweated and grunted as he drove. Every so often he seemed to slump in his seat and the Humvee would veer right, causing Buck to shout, “Murphy! Land mines!” I expected the lance corporal to pass out at any second. Even Buck kept giving him worried looks. I wondered who would drive if Murphy had to be medevacked. I hoped it wouldn’t be me.

Eventually we joined a paved road.

The Humvee sped up. Now we were doing 20 miles an hour.

It was a shock when we saw the first Iraqis: about thirty prisoners of war, sitting cross-legged in a roadside ditch, their hands fastened behind their backs with plastic flexicuffs. Their eyes were hard and shiny. Two Marines brandishing M-16s stood over them. The Iraqis looked gaunt and shell-shocked; some of them had traces of blood on their white dishdashas and no-brand jeans. An empty white pickup truck—the Iraqi equivalent of a Humvee—was parked opposite them. I felt as though I’d become trapped inside the television news. It’s easy to ignore the destitute and bleeding when you’re at home on the sofa, dunking donuts into your coffee. It’s easy to avoid asking all those difficult, unanswerable questions about how they got there and whether or not your country had anything to do with it. It’s not so easy when they’re sitting a few yards away, next to their confiscated mortars and AK-47s.

I felt sorry for the Iraqis: They’d been screwed by Saddam Hussein; screwed by the war with Iran; screwed by the first Gulf War; screwed by the sanctions; and now screwed by the 1st Marine Division. They’d also been screwed, of course, by the British, who’d invaded Mesopotamia back in November 1914 and considered introducing the country to mustard gas. “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas,” declared Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, in a memo. “I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes.”

So there the Iraqis were, in their own country, only a few miles from one of the world’s largest oil fields—and barely an hour’s drive from the Rolex retailers of Kuwait City—and they had nothing. I didn’t blame them for hating us. I didn’t blame them for returning fire. I might not have blamed them for using chemicals. Perhaps the invasion would one day be worth it; perhaps one day Iraq would be a rich, democratic republic. But what reason did they have to believe that?

“What do you do with them at night?” I asked Buck.

“We shoot ’em,” interrupted Murphy.

Buck gave him an accusatory look.

Murphy spat tobacco juice out the window. “Just kidding,” he said.

“Actually,” said Buck, “we release them. That means they can go back to their weapons and try again tomorrow night.”

The downside of being in Buck’s Humvee soon became clear. Our job was to drive ahead of the howitzers and find new firing positions, where the Long Distance Death Dealers could set up shop and cover the infantry during another push forward. We were essentially the forward reconnaissance unit. And so, after passing the prisoners of war, we left the howitzers on the relative safety of the road and went off in search of a new location. We drove for an hour, eventually reaching Highway 8, a four-lane expressway that runs from Safwan on the Kuwait border to Basra, then on to Baghdad. Instead of taking the road, we roared over a bulldozed crash barrier, across the central reservation, and down the embankment on the other side.

Highway 8, I noticed, had been blocked by a company of tanks, in front of which was a solitary Iraqi. He was lying bleeding on the tarmac next to a green motorcycle. “Is he dead?” asked Murphy as we passed. “No,” came Hustler’s shout from the roof. “He’s alive, but he sure as hell looks shell-shocked.”

The tanks reassured me. I felt as though we were surrounded by friendly forces. And so, as Murphy steered the Humvee through ditches and barren fields, I began to relax. As the fear subsided, I started to feel strangely bored. So I pulled out my Walkman, loaded up a CD, and dozed off. I felt like a child again, in the backseat of my dad’s Renault 9, on a French summer vacation. In my dream the familiar figures returned, standing in a sun-bleached room from my childhood, all swirly carpets and patterned wallpaper. There was Mum; Dad; Catherine; and Alana. I was looking up. My dad was telling me something I couldn’t make out. He said it again. Now I could hear. “Proud line of cowards,” he was saying over and over again.

When I awoke, the Humvee had stopped and Buck and Hustler were arguing.

“Are you sure?” said Buck.

“I’m fuckin’ sure!” replied Hustler.

“Hey, wakey-wakey,” said Buck, turning to me. “Sweet dreams? Do you have any batteries for that tape recorder of yours?”

Glad to be finally of some use, I dug deep into my North Face laptop bag and produced a twelve-pack of Duracells. The batteries were, in fact, for my electric toothbrush. But I wasn’t going to tell the captain that.

Buck opened up his GPS device, tore out the dud batteries, and replaced them with my Duracells. Then he waited.

“Goddammit,” he said finally. “You’re right. We’re here.” He pointed to the middle of an empty white grid on his map.

“Where’s the front line?” asked Hustler.

“There,” said Buck, moving his finger down and to the left.

Then, on the berm in front of us, a robed figure appeared.

For a fraction of a second, Buck, Hustler, Murphy—and, of course, the cowering blue-helmeted embed in the back of the Humvee—thought we’d been ambushed. Then we realized the explosion was too big, and too distant, to be aimed in our direction. It was an industrial noise, like machinery pounding metal into metal, and on a totally different scale of violence to the artillery fire I’d grown used to. I guessed it was an air force bomb, taking out an Iraqi weapons bunker.

“Boy, someone’s gettin’ all messed up over there,” declared Buck. “I sure as hell would not like to be gettin’ some of that…”

“That shit would suck,” agreed Murphy, who was still kneeling down and peering through the sights of his M-16.

The Bedouin, I noticed, had ducked. Now he was back on his feet, and Hustler was trying to communicate with him using hand signals. The exchange began with Hustler saluting, then giving the Iraqi a questioning look. The nomad began frantically shaking his head. This, I assumed, meant he wasn’t an Iraqi soldier. Then the Bedouin cupped his hands toward his mouth. This was followed by a patting motion, as though he was tousling the hair of a young child.

“He’s saying he needs water for his family,” said Buck, getting restless.

Hustler turned and started jogging back to the Humvee, his gun now back in its holster. He stopped outside Buck’s window.

“Hey, Captain,” he said. “Do we have any spare water?”

“What did you tell him?” asked Buck, passing the first sergeant his own bottle of al-Qassim through the window.

“I basically told him I’d give him the water if he would take his fuckin’ sheep somewhere else and keep them there.”

“Good work,” said Buck through a snorted chuckle.

“Man, that dude was old and crusty,” said Hustler, grinning. “He kind of looked like the guy from Lord of the Rings.” With that, the first sergeant turned and jogged back to the Bedouin, handing him the water. The tribesman waved thank you with his wooden crook and hobbled off over the berm.

“How do you know he’s not going to give away our position?” I asked Buck.

“I don’t,” said Buck.

Hustler, now coughing up sand and sweating, jumped back into the Humvee.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, Murphy,” said Buck. “Before we meet someone who isn’t from Lord of the Rings.”

“Foreign new-ews?”

It was 7:10 P.M., and we were back in EmCon Delta, which meant I could use my satellite phone. Buck had found a position for the Long Distance Death Dealers near Highway 8, and the howitzers were hard at work again, reigning down death and dismemberment on some poor bastards eighteen miles to the east. According to the World Service, that was where the 1st Marine Division and British 7th Armoured Brigade were trying to take Basra. In a few hours’ time the 51st Mechanized Division would surrender. Not, of course, that I knew that.

“Martin,” I said.

“Chris! How’s it going?”

Barrow sounded chipper. He probably knew more about the progress of the war than I did. Buck wouldn’t tell me anything.

“Great,” I said in a voice thick with phlegm. “This is so much fun.”

One of the howitzers went off, drop-kicking me in the stomach with the back blast. By now, however, I was used to it.

“Still at war then,” said Barrow.

“Yeah. Did my story go in on Thursday night?” I asked.

Barrow suddenly sounded distracted. His keyboard clacked in the background.

“Oh, er, yeah. It went through.”

It went through? This, in Barrow-talk, meant the story went through the computer system but didn’t get in the newspaper.

“Martin, did it make it into the paper?”

“I’m not sure,” said Barrow, now bullshitting for Britain. “I think something went in the first edition. Don’t know about the second…”

“What?”

The first edition, as Barrow knew, was shipped overseas to newsstands in Europe. No one else in Britain, apart from the night editors of rival papers, and the drunks who bought The Times from the Leicester Square tube station at midnight, would ever see it. It probably wouldn’t even make it into the electronic archive. The Times spiked my story from the first day of the war! I felt afire with betrayal. This, I knew, was punishment for dictating “mucky copy.”

The silence, transmitted via space at ten dollars per minute, was uncomfortable.

“Not to worry,” I said eventually. “I’ve got another story, this one about the Bedouins. I’ll file it over the weekend.”

“Good stuff,” said Barrow.

The line went dead.

I felt so utterly dejected I almost didn’t hear the Iraqi mortar when it exploded less than two hundred yards outside the camp.

“Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!” bellowed Hustler. We looked at each other, both thinking the same thing: the Bedouin.

As he masked up, Hustler shook his head in frustration.

Still upset with Barrow, I flung my cracked, mud-smeared glasses into the sand and pulled out my own mask.

I wondered if this story would get spiked, too.

War makes you feel special. It makes you feel better than your office-bound colleagues, gossiping over the watercooler or wiping mayonnaise from their mouths as they hunch in their veal-fattening pens. War gives your life narrative structure. The banal becomes the dramatic. When you’re at war, you don’t worry about American Express bills. War spares you the washing up. Life at the brink of death makes all other life seem trivial. You’re a hero when you’re on the front lines. Here’s another thing about war: As much as you hate the fear and the MREs and the mutilated corpses and the incoming mortars and the freezing nights in the Humvee, you know you’ll be a more popular and interesting person when, or if, you return.

Because war is all about death, and everyone wants to know what death is like.

These, as far as I can tell, are the upsides of war. But I suspect war doesn’t make you any better. All life, ultimately, exists on the brink of death; war just makes it obvious. Besides, no matter how close to death you come, you never get any closer to understanding it. “Death is easy,” as one veteran combat correspondent once said to me. “Life is hard.” War, I fear, makes it impossible to go back home. And then you have to go to war again, to make sure you’re still special.

So this was what I did on the weekend of March 21. On Friday night I lay in a shallow foxhole wearing a chemical suit, with my fingers plugged in my ears as the Iraqis threw mortar rounds at us and we killed them in return. We killed a lot faster than they could throw, and soon the mortars stopped.

On Saturday morning I squatted in Kilo Battery’s FDC, or fire direction center, writing a story about Bedouin nomads on my laptop, which I had wrapped with plastic sheeting to stop the sand from getting between the keys. The FDC was constructed of two Humvees parked back-to-back with a heavy tarp canopy in between. Under the canvas was a bulletin board, a table with a map flattened out on it, and a steel-cased computer. The computer, I was told, could analyze weather, wind, map coordinates, and other variables—including the color of the Iraqis’ underwear, probably—and then decide how much gunpowder should be put inside the shells and the angle the howitzers should be pointed at. All of this ensured, using mathematical rules that the Mesopotamians themselves had probably invented, that Kilo Battery produced the maximum possible number of body parts per round.

The big guns might have looked primitive, but they were deceptively ambitious in their destruction, and more accurate, I suspected, than any billion-dollar air force gadget. From my dusty corner of the FDC, I heard new targets being called in over the radio by forward observers, who were somewhere out in the kill zone ahead of us. I was grateful I wasn’t embedded with them. Seconds after each new coordinate was processed, the pompous bolero of the howitzers resumed.

I wondered how many we’d killed. Hundreds? Thousands?

On Saturday afternoon we filled up with fuel. This was more complicated than it sounds. It involved skidding down into a dried riverbed, where four jumbo-size tanker trucks had been parked behind a cover of yellowing palms—the only vegetation I’d seen so far. The tankers were guarded by a semicircle of unsmiling Marines, pointing .50-cals out into the murk. One by one, Kilo Battery’s vehicles filled up with diesel, then wobbled and grunted out of the mud forecourt. Behind us, other units were lined up in a perfectly choreographed ballet of military logistics.

With full tanks, we rejoined Highway 8, this time using the four-lane paved surface. The road was littered with rubber. Then I realized the rubber was, in fact, black leather. As we began to pass makeshift pens with barefoot prisoners inside, I understood what had happened. The eight thousand or so soldiers of the 51st Mechanized Division had surrendered—by taking off their boots. And now there was a cobbler’s nightmare of scuffed leather and snapped laces flung all over the asphalt. The Iraqis who hadn’t been captured stood on the roadside and cheered at the military convoy as it thundered past. I wondered if they were genuinely happy to see us or if they just wanted our rations. It was hard, however, not to feel stirred by the welcome. Perhaps the Iraqis, mainly Shiites in this part of the country, wanted to be liberated after all. The cheering and waving continued for miles, until I felt a stinging pressure behind my eyes. I looked at Hustler. He was smiling like he’d just won the lottery and smoking a victory cigarette. “Boy, this sure makes you feel good,” he said. “Now I know we’re doing the right thing.”

I was growing to like Hustler. I respected the way he’d handled the Bedouin, and the fact that he’d turned down my offer to call his wife on my satellite phone. “If I call the missus, it’ll just make it worse,” he said. “She’ll hear one of the howitzers go off and think I’m about to fuckin’ die.” Murphy in contrast had jumped at the chance to use the phone. “No shit, I’m in Iraq,” I heard him boast to his girlfriend, a college student in Nevada. “There are dead guys everywhere.”

We spent Saturday night in a camp outside Basra. Surrounding us was enough military hardware to invade China, never mind Iraq. For the first time since crossing the border, I felt safe. I felt so safe, in fact, that I contemplated putting up my Xtreme 19 Two-Man Adventure Pod. I thought the better of it, however, and decided instead to sleep on the ground beside the Humvee. I hoped there were no tarantulas in Iraq. Before I passed out, I called Alana, then my mum. It was the first time I could talk without a background soundtrack of artillery fire and incoming alerts.

“Are you safe?” asked my mother. “A man from the Iraqi information department says he’s going to cut everyone’s heads off…”

“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Don’t listen to the Iraqis. They don’t have a chance. This will all be over pretty quickly, I’m sure.”

After seeing the welcome party on Highway 8, I almost believed it.

“Can’t you come back?” asked my mother.

“Leaving would be more dangerous than staying,” I said.

I wished I’d been making this up. But it was true. There was simply no way of going south. Even if there was, it would be career suicide. As far as I knew, I’d managed to get only one story published, in one edition of the paper. And besides, I didn’t have my passport, so I wouldn’t have been able to leave Kuwait anyway. I was stuck with Capt. Buck Rogers and his men until the end of the war.

Or at least until I could come up with a better plan.

The next morning the 1st Marine Division went on a Sunday drive. Iraq was supposed to be the worst camping trip of my life, but it felt more like the worst road trip—a crawl to the seaside on a sweltering August vacation day, on an empty stomach, with the locals taking potshots at you from the hard shoulder. We set off at dawn in a steel fist of a convoy that stretched further than I could see in either direction. This, I was told, was known as a “thunder run.” We headed north, up Highway 8, in the direction of Baghdad. We were well covered: On either side of the freeway were formations of U.S. Army missile launchers, raised into the firing position. Then we saw the army’s bridge-building division, comprised of hundreds of amphibious trucks, each one carrying gigantic folding metal structures. In spite of the firepower, I flinched every time an overpass loomed. Each one had a sinister brick sentry box on top with narrow slits for windows—perfect for lobbing out grenades.

By early afternoon we had followed the Shatt al-Arab waterway toward the town of al-Qurnah. With bleached desert on one side and sparkling blue water on the other, it almost felt as though we were in California. The asphalt of Highway 8, however, was virtually unmarked. Road signs, in Arabic and English, were few and far between. And I hadn’t seen a single gas station.

I kept my shortwave radio switched on and listened to furious Arabs being interviewed by the BBC. They predicted apocalpyse and defeat for the Western infidels. There seemed to be no reports about the Marines’ steady progress northward. I did learn, however, that Basra International Airport had been secured and that the Marines were encountering “pockets of resistance” near al-Nasiriyah, capital of Iraq’s date-growing region. I remembered reading in my Lonely Planet guide-book that Nasiriyah is only a few miles from Ur—Prophet Abraham’s alleged birthplace—which was excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. The royal tombs of Ur had survived for forty-five hundred years. I wondered if they would make it through 2003.

As we chugged forward, rarely getting over 10 miles an hour, I tried to eat an MRE, but I’d left my appetite behind somewhere in the Kuwaiti desert. Every few miles we’d see Iraqi civilians standing on the side of the road with young children on their shoulders. They would wave, make peace signs, and point at their mouths. Sometimes a Marine would throw them a yellow bag of humanitarian rations. At one point we passed a Marine who had constructed a roadside lavatory out of an upturned ammunition crate. He sat on it, ignoring the passing traffic, reading a book. The cover looked like Hemingway. Surrounding him was a junkyard of Western consumer culture: crushed Marlboro packs, dented Coca-Cola cans, torn Skittles wrappers, and hundreds of empty bottles of al-Qassim water. I later read that the coalition troops in the Middle East were going through 45 million fifty-ounce water bottles every month.

“The second we take Baghdad,” muttered Murphy, “someone’s gonna get a fat-assed contract to clean this shit up.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Buck. “That’s probably our job.”

At about 4:00 P.M. we left Highway 8 and crossed the Euphrates on a temporary iron bridge. Murphy, who had taken another doxycycline tablet at the camp in Basra, was starting to look a bit perkier, although his face was still streaked with sweat and mud. On the north side of the river, Iraq changed for the worse. We found ourselves in a ghoulish landscape of desiccated mud banks. The place looked as though it had been hit by a nuclear bomb. Dying reeds slumped in pools of brown water. Then, through a gritty fog, came men who looked like apparitions: skeletons in torn robes, with bare feet, and festering blisters on their legs and faces. They held up bony infants as diseased mutts snapped at their feet. We drove on, throwing out rations as we passed. As the sun ducked under the horizon, I wondered if we’d descended into purgatory. Was this really what had become of the Babylonians: the people who invented the number zero; who split the day into twenty-four hours, and the hours into sixty minutes?

“Welcome to the marshlands,” said Buck. “The most fucked-up place on earth.”

I kept thinking we would stop, but we never did. We just lumbered onward, down a recently bulldozed surface of dried mud. To the right of us, over a berm, Saddam appeared to be building a new freeway. Either that, or it was one of the Iraqi president’s drainage plants, installed after 1991 to destroy one of the world’s largest freshwater ecosystems and make half a million Marsh Arabs homeless. Saddam apparently saw the Shiite marsh-dwellers as a political threat. I wondered what the mudflats would have looked like back in the 1950s, when the Ma’dan still crossed the marshes in wooden canoes, raised water buffalo, and made cathedral-like mudhifs, or huts, out of dried reeds. It was almost too depressing to think about.

As we pushed on, we were overtaken by white Nissan pickup trucks. One of the drivers, I noticed, was wearing a black dishdasha and a New York Yankees baseball cap. The vehicles streaked past like grounded comets, leaving behind trails of stinging orange dust. One of them almost clipped our Humvee.

“Who the fuck are those dudes?” asked Murphy, coughing.

“Special forces,” said Buck with a sneer. I wondered if any of them were SAS, the next generation of David Silvers.

“They need special fuckin’ driving lessons,” concluded Murphy.

For the first time since Kuwait, we all laughed.

The convoy continued. By now it was almost completely dark outside, so Buck handed Murphy a pair of night-vision goggles. When he put them on, Murphy looked as though he had a telescope strapped to his forehead. I recalled what the colonel had told the Marines in Kuwait: “Your average Iraqi, 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.”

We drove with our lights off, as did everyone else. From the back of the Humvee, without the benefit of night vision, it felt suicidal. Our progress came in short, jerky bursts, with Murphy stamping on the brakes, making us crunch violently to a halt inches from the luggage rack of the Humvee in front.

I’d been at war for almost seventy-two hours now, and the nights were turning out to be a lot worse than the days. I kept wondering what was lurking behind the berm to our right. I’d once read that some of the Ma’dan were descended from the Zenj—a race of cannibal slaves who revolted under the leadership of Ali the Abominable in the year 869, until they were driven back into the marshes by the Babylonians. The image of the slave warriors made me shiver. I wished I had no imagination. I pulled my North Face jacket over my shoulders and tried to fall asleep. My limbs, however, were aching too much. And, as always, the reports over the Humvee’s radio were getting more horrifying as the night progressed. At 10:00 P.M. the first medevac requests were called in: A seven-ton had overturned; a Humvee had crashed; a tank had fallen into the Euphrates. These hellish dispatches were all delivered by the same disembodied bass monotone—like a voice from the underworld coming out of the darkness.

Five hours later, at 3:00 A.M., we finally stopped. We had been driving for twenty hours. I fell out of the Humvee and dry-heaved. I looked up to see a corporal from the vehicle behind us. “Christ, I’m saddle sore,” he said.

Murphy, exhausted, pulled off his goggles, threw down his sleeping bag in a ditch, and collapsed on top of it. He passed out with his arms over his head. The Irishman, I realized, had pulled off an astonishing feat of physical endurance. Buck, as usual, made his bed on the Humvee’s hood; Hustler curled up on the roof. By now it was savagely cold. Each gust of wind whistled through the Humvee’s panel cracks. I wished my chemical suit was lined with wool, not charcoal. I lay in an inverted U-shape across the rear seats, my back arched over the gunner’s footplate in between. The armor of my flak jacket, useful for once, helped support my shoulders. My head, meanwhile, drooped backward, as though I were in the recovery position. I started to shiver uncontrollably, probably because I hadn’t eaten since Kuwait. I couldn’t sleep. Wouldn’t this be the perfect time for the Republican Guard to attack?

We were in EmCon Bravo, so calling Alana was out of the question. If I powered up my satellite phone now, a Klaxon would probably go off in Baghdad. Instead, I flicked on my shortwave radio and plugged in the earbud headphones. This was a mistake. The World Service informed me that the Republican Guard had captured five American soldiers, including a woman, and killed eight more. The report said the Americans had been ambushed near al-Nasiriyah. Wasn’t that where we were? Two of the American prisoners had already been interviewed on Iraqi television, in contravention of the Geneva Convention. They said they were from the 507th Maintenance Company. I tried not to imagine the horror of being caught alive.

My heart changed tempo.

There was more to come: ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd had been killed in Basra; a cameraman for Australia’s ABC network had died after a car bomb exploded in northern Iraq; an American soldier had been arrested for throwing a grenade into a hooch in Kuwait; two British pilots were presumed dead after being downed by a “friendly” Patriot missile; ten Marines had been slaughtered in a fake surrender in the marshlands; and the Iraqi information minister was claiming that the Americans’ advance up Highway 8 was all part of an elaborate trap. “We have made them enter the quagmire and they will not be able to get out,” he declared. What the shortwave radio didn’t tell me was that the army’s 3rd Infantry Division—in which Oliver Poole was embedded—was already less than a day’s march from Baghdad.

After the onslaught of bad news, the BBC announcer changed tone. “And now,” she crooned, “we go live to Hollywood.” It was then I remembered: Tonight—still Sunday, March 23, in California—was the seventy-fifth annual Academy Awards. Somewhere, in an alternative universe, I would be eighty-five hundred miles away, in a bow tie and black tuxedo, sipping champagne in the pressroom of the Kodak Theater. After the show, perhaps, I would take Alana to the Vanity Fair post-Oscars party at Morton’s Steakhouse. Perhaps I would meet Kate Winslet, Brad Pitt, or Julia Roberts.

But there was no alternative universe.

I was stuck in some godawful swamp in a faraway country on the front lines of an invasion, shivering, lonely, and waiting to die.

I was awakened at 6:30 A.M. by a voice in my head.

“We live in fictitious times,” it said. “We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man who’s sending us to war for fictitious reasons.” For a while I thought I was still dreaming. I wanted to sit upright, but there was no blood in my limbs. I released a low groan of pain. “My back,” I said. “Oh no. My back…” Somehow, I managed to shift the dead weight of my legs. Then I realized that my shortwave radio was still switched on and the headphones were still jammed into my ears.

“We are against this war, Mr. Bush,” said the voice, which I now recognized as belonging to the filmmaker Michael Moore. “Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you.” I could hear booing and whistling in the background as an orchestra started to play cheesy show business music. I released another groan.

For a moment I wanted Moore to be out there with Kilo Battery. I wanted him to make his antiwar speech in the marshlands, to the Marines. I wanted him to see what Saddam had done to the Ma’dan. I wanted him to know what it feels like to wake up in a Humvee, surrounded by people who want to kill you, and listen to a tuxedoed film-maker in California tell you that it’s all based on a lie.

It was then I realized the true genius of the embedding scheme: It had turned me into a Marine. I was thinking like a fighter, not a reporter. And yet I wasn’t a fighter. I was an idiot in a blue flak jacket. The Marines didn’t even want me there. Being an embed, it seemed, was the loneliest job on earth.

Buck, Murphy, and Hustler were already awake.

“Did you hear the World Service?” I asked, stretching my legs.

“If you listen to the BBC World Service,” declared Buck, “we lost this goddamn war four days ago. It’s depressing.”

“Want some coffee?” asked Hustler.

I didn’t respond. I thought I must have misheard him.

“Coffee?” he said again.

Then I smelled it: hot, chocolaty coffee, like an olfactory orgasm.

“God yes,” I said, walking around the Humvee.

Behind the rear wheel, Hustler had lit a camping stove and was boiling water. In it, he’d poured MRE cappuccino powder. I winced at the thought of what it would taste like: I was used to ten-dollar tins of gourmet espresso.

“Welcome to Starbucks,” said Hustler, grinning.

He handed me a steaming metal mug. I slurped the hot liquid warily. It was the best cup of coffee I’d tasted in my life.

“First sergeant,” I announced. “If you were a girl, I’d marry you.”

“Fuck off,” he replied.

I didn’t blame Hustler for not wanting to marry me. I hadn’t washed or changed my underwear for four days. I was living like an animal. My morning routine involved digging a hole for my morning evacuation, washing my face with a dollop of foam hand sanitizer, then shaving in the Humvee’s rearview mirror using cold bottled water. (By now the Marines had been told to get rid of their mustaches, because they interfered with the gas masks.) Then I’d try to eat breakfast, usually a sachet of peanut butter or raspberry jam. More often than not, it would make me retch.

Today, however, Hustler’s coffee, along with the relief of surviving the night, had cheered me up. By the time I climbed back into the Humvee, I was humming “Borderline” again. Then I realized it: I was actually proud of myself for lasting this long. I was proud of myself for not backing out of the embedding scheme at the Kuwait Hilton. I was even proud of my stinking, four-day-old underwear. What’s more, the stress of the invasion seemed to be using up all my excess adrenaline, so that during my fleeting moments of safety, I felt in better physical form than I had in years. Perhaps Dr. Ruth had been right all along. I remembered what she’d told me about “fight-or-flight” anxiety at her clinic in New York, before September 11. “It’s called ‘acute stress response,’” she said. “Young men used to need that on the battlefield.” I almost wanted to call Dr. Ruth and tell her that my adrenaline had finally come in useful. At last, it was doing its job. That was when I realized it: Part of me was actually enjoying this.

It didn’t take long for the part of me enjoying the war to come to its senses. It took until sundown, in fact, when the fighting resumed. The attacks weren’t the organized, tank-led assaults we’d expected from the Republican Guard. Instead they were opportunistic potshots from Iraqi “irregulars,” who appeared out of the mud and vanished just as quickly. Even tracking their mortars by radar was pointless; by the time we fired back, the insurgents had moved. They were clearly smarter than their recently slaughtered comrades in the 51st Mechanized Division.

The 1st Marine Division was much further north now, toward the city of al-Diwaniyah, and the convoy had split up into tactical units. Kilo Battery had spent the day, as usual, looking for a safe place to park the howitzers, eventually finding a suitably grim stretch of marshland in the late afternoon.

The Marines went through their usual routine of surveying the site twice, using a plumb line and an arc, to make sure the guns would fire in the right direction. No sooner were they done, however, than a herd of camels began strolling haughtily through the camp. Buck groaned. “I’m sure the goddamn Iraqis are dressing up as camels now,” he muttered. Then came the inevitable Bedouin shepherd, ushering his animals with a bent wooden stick. He wore a look on his face that said, “Who? Me?” Buck thumped his palm against his forehead. “Lance corporal,” he said to Murphy, “will you get the Arabic phrase book, find the word for ‘Danger,’ and write it on some big pieces of cardboard from the MRE boxes. I wanna put up signs.”

Murphy did as he was told. Before long our camp was surrounded by notices telling the Bedouins to bug off. It was too late now, however. We all knew what the incident with the camels meant: Our position had been compromised. At just after 9:00 P.M., this was confirmed by the Humvee’s radio. “You have about a dozen technicals heading your way,” the deadpan voice informed us.

“What’s a technical?” I asked, hoping for the best.

“It’s like what they had in Somalia,” explained Buck. “The insurgents take a civilian vehicle and put a machine gun on the roof. We call ’em technicals.” The name, Buck told me, came from the days when the Red Cross used to buy vehicles for militias in return for not being attacked. The bribes were written off as “technical expenses.” I wondered who’d paid for the Iraqis’ vehicles.

“So we’re… being attacked?”

Buck looked at me for a while.

Then he said, “Don’t you ever look on the bright side?”

I gave a weak, humorless laugh.

“Pass me the night visions,” said Hustler from the backseat. He put them on and heaved himself up into the gun turret.

“They’re still approaching,” announced the radio. “You’ve got three mikes before contact.” This meant three minutes.

Hustler’s boots tap-danced on the flootplate beside me as he swung the .50-cal from side to side, trying to see the technicals.

Buck and Murphy started klacking rounds into their M-16s.

I wished there was something I could do other than just sit and wait. I almost wanted to take Hustler’s place in the machine-gun turret. Instead, I concentrated on trying to silence a hysterical internal monologue. It reminded me of what Wilfred Owen had once written in a letter from the front lines: “There is a point where prayer is indistinguishable from blasphemy. There is also a point where blasphemy is indistinguishable from prayer.” I felt slightly ashamed of my prayers, even in their current blasphemous form. I’d stopped going to church as soon as my parents would let me, and it seemed corny, predictable, and convenient that I would convert while under gunfire. But praying is rational. I’d prayed on September 11, while watching the office workers fall from the floors of the World Trade Center. Unless you knew for a fact that it wouldn’t do any good, why wouldn’t you?

I looked over at Buck, who was now playing with the silver crucifix on the dashboard. I knew that Buck hated having me around (on several occasions he’d tried to get me to ride in the back of one of the ammunition trucks), but I respected him nevertheless. After all, the captain had a war to fight, and I wasn’t just a distraction; I could get him killed. Although there was a permanent knot of worry in his brow, he had remained supernaturally calm since Kuwait.

Before I could finish this thought, Buck exploded.

“Goddammit! Goddammit!” he screamed. “Fuck! Fuck!”

“What the hell’s wrong?” hollered Hustler from the roof.

Murphy launched himself out of the Humvee and crouched down in the firing position. I put my head between my knees.

Perhaps this was the end.

“It’s okay,” said Buck, sounding embarrassed.

“What?” came the hoarse shout from the roof.

“I thought I’d lost my M&Ms,” admitted Buck.

Hustler and Murphy cursed simultaneously.

I wanted to throw up.

“One mike,” said the radio.

Then we heard it: a hateful chorus of gunfire, blasting through the mudflats. It was followed by a clap of man-made thunder and a white flash from our own camp as one of the howitzers spat out more heavy metal.

The noise continued for a while.

When I opened my eyes and took my fingers out of my ears, Buck, Murphy, and Hustler were laughing in disbelief.

“What is it?” I asked, wondering if I was the punch line of the joke.

“The guys up front asked for support,” said Buck. “So they sent up a whole company of tanks. A whole goddamn company.”

Hustler gave a low whistle.

Murphy slapped the dashboard.

I wondered how many tanks were in a company.

The next morning we drove past what was left of the technicals: molten heaps of charred and smoking metal that looked as though they might once have been Toyota pickups. After their late-night rendezvous with fourteen Marine Corps M1 Abrams tanks, however, it was hard to tell. I tried to not look at the human outlines in the crushed, upside-down cabins. “They thought they were being real sneaky,” tutted Buck as he surveyed the wreckage. “They probably didn’t realize we have night-vision goggles and can see them coming. We had all freakin’ day to engage.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Murphy, “is why they wanna fight anyway. Why do they still love that cocksucker Saddam?”

“It’s probably more of a hatred of Americans than a liking for Saddam Hussein,” said Buck. “They think we’re imperialists and that we’re gonna change their way of life and make them all Christians. Hopefully they’ll think otherwise when we take Baghdad and get the hell out of their stinking country.”

Later, after we found a new position—this time raiding the surrounding houses and confiscating AK-47s and Iraqi uniforms—I saw a familiar face approaching across the mud. He was an older Marine, bespectacled, slightly overweight, and with a silver crucifix on his lapel. I noticed a scar on his neck. For a while I couldn’t figure out how I knew him. Then it came to me: He was the chaplain I’d met on my first day at Camp Grizzly. He brought bad news: A nearby Marine unit had opened fire on a civilian truck, killing its driver, after it refused to stop at a roadblock. “I don’t think the Iraqis realize that you’ve gotta stop for the Marine Corps,” he said. The chaplain also told us that a lance corporal from a tank unit had been killed by one of his own company’s .50-cal machine guns. The screws on the gun’s safety catch had worked themselves loose during our twenty-hour convoy. Someone had grabbed the .50-cal while pulling himself out of the tank, and it went off. The round from the gun virtually sliced the lance corporal in half, who was smoking a cigarette nearby. The sheer pointlessness of the Marine’s death depressed me. Another Marine, the chaplain said, had shot himself in the leg with his own 9mm pistol, probably in an attempt to get sent home. The Marine survived and got his wish: He was medevacked to Germany.

The chaplain, I soon realized, got to hear all the hard luck stories.

Then he said: “Have you seen the white buses yet?”

“What white buses?” asked Buck.

“The Iraqis are driving around the towns, picking up all the fighing-age men, and taking them to the front lines,” said the chaplain. “We found a few of the buses and, at first, we couldn’t determine what the heck they were for. We found one guy, no more than nineteen years old, lying outside one of them with a gunshot wound to the back of his head. It didn’t make any sense. Then it dawned on us.” The teenager had been shot by the Republican Guard, explained the chaplain, for refusing to fight. In other words, he’d been killed for refusing to get on the bus, which would have driven him to the front lines, where the Marines would have killed him instead.

Yes, the chaplain heard all the hard luck stories.

“I’ve never seen nothin’ like this before,” said Murphy the next day. “This is just crazy.” It was now Wednesday, March 26—day seven of the war—and we were still stuck in the marshlands. It wasn’t yet noon, but the sky was the color of tangerine and we could see only a few yards ahead. Something very bad was happening. The conditions, the Marine Corps meteorologists told us, were the result of an “anticyclone” sitting over Europe, forcing the jet stream into two paths, one through Scandinavia and the other straight through our camp. The gale was whipping up dried mud from the marshbanks, creating a thick, acrid fog. Even Murphy looked scared.

It had been another miserable day. After a week spent in a Humvee with three Marines, I was desperate to talk to a civillian, or at least another embed. I tried calling David Willis, the BBC reporter I’d met at Camp Grizzly, but I couldn’t get through. From what I’d heard on the World Service, he was still stuck in Nasiriyah, which, like Basra, was proving harder to secure than expected. I also tried Glen, who I assumed was still embedded at Al Jaber air force base, but his line was dead, too. Instead, I stumbled over to the FDC and charged up my laptop by plugging it into Kilo Battery’s diesel generator. Even fully charged, my beleaguered Sony had only an hour of battery power. My satellite phone wasn’t much better. Convinced that we weren’t going anywhere in the storm, I took advantage of the power connection and wrote six hundred words on the technicals, then filed it to Barrow via Copymaster. I internally congratulated myself on becoming a slightly less incompetent war correspondent.

I would tell you about the rest of the morning, but you already know: the foxhole; the sunscreen leak; the explosions; and finally the leaflet telling Buck “how to deal with a dead media representative.” It ended, of course, with the order to move positions. It must have come straight from General Mattis—he was determined to prove that we were an “all-weather fighting force.” I hoped he was right. I jumped into the Humvee’s backseat while dialing London on my satellite phone. This would probably be my last chance to call Barrow before we went back into another radio blackout. As I listened to the phone ring, I restarted my laptop. The battery indicator, for some reason, was flashing red. I wondered if my Sony was about to raise the white flag.

“Foreign new-ews?”

“Hi, Martin,” I said. “Do you want something on the weather? We can’t see a bloody thing. Are you watching Sky?”

There was a pause.

“Crickey, yeah,” said Barrow. I pictured him looking up at the television in the newsroom. “Can you file us a few words?”

“We’re going back into EmCon Bravo,” I said, sounding like a professional. “Shall I dictate you something now?”

“That would be great,” said Barrow, taken aback.

I leaned out the window and spat out a gobful of orange slime.

“It was like fighting a war in the depths of hell,” I began. “Howling winds blew up mud from the marsh banks of central Iraq…”

15 …THIRTY MIKES LATER

By the time I’d finished dictating the story, my face was a mask of orange mud. The stuff was running out of my nose and down the back of my throat, forcing me to cough and spit every few seconds. It was in my eyes. I could even feel it dripping out of my ears. I tried wearing the painter’s mask I’d been given for the oil fires, but it didn’t do any good. I never imagined I could be so involved in the weather. The visibility in our tangerine world had shrunk to just a few feet. Buck’s GPS device had stopped working. Murphy’s night-vision goggles were useless. And somewhere out there, the Iraqis were waiting for us. They were probably as at home in the mud as I would be in the bar of the Beverly Hills Four Seasons. The Marines cursed in disbelief. “When this shit clears, I keep thinkin’ we’re gonna be surrounded by the motherfuckers,” said an exasperated Buck, again playing with his silver crucifix.

Eventually he ordered Murphy to stop. “We’re all gonna die in a goddamn crash if we don’t pull over,” he said. “Kill the engine.”

The Humvee shuddered to a halt and its big V-8 died with a mechanical belch. The southern jet stream seemed to be blowing right through the vehicle, making it wobble. We were on another bulldozed dirt track, having turned west off Highway 8. To our right was a berm. I wondered if there was an infantry unit on the other side or whether we were alone. To our left was a billowing curtain of fog.

“Dammit,” said Buck from the passenger seat. “We’ve lost the convoy.”

I got out of the Humvee, still finalizing my story with Barrow on the phone, and looked behind us. I could see only a couple of other Humvees through the murk. We were stranded. I cursed General Mattis. Some of the Marines were doing the same. Moving positions in this weather was surely insanity.

“Is everything all right?” I heard Barrow say from twenty-six hundred miles away.

“Not really, Martin,” I replied. “We’ve just stopped on an unprotected stretch of marshland. I think we’ve lost our unit.”

I was amazed that the satellite phone was still working.

Buck, I noticed, was now sweating and thumping the GPS device.

“Hang in there, Chris,” said Barrow. “And look on the upside.”

“What’s the upside?”

“It’s nice and sunny here in Wapping.”

“Cheers,” I said.

Barrow gave a strangled chuckle. He was trying to cheer me up.

“I hope we get through this,” I said shakily. I felt a convulsion somewhere deep inside my stomach. It was the second time in seven days that I’d nearly choked up on the phone to Barrow. This had to stop.

“You will,” said Barrow. “You’ll be all right.”

I heard thunder, or an explosion of some kind. The weather, it seemed, was determined to kill someone today.

If wondered if Fletcher or Barrow really knew what it was like out here.

“Okay, let’s talk tomorrow,” I said. “Is my stuff getting in the paper?”

“Yeah,” said Barrow. “It’s all running. Speak later, okay?”

It’s running? That didn’t sound very reassuring.

“Okay,” I said, and hung up.

In fact, my stories were running. Fletcher and Barrow were only just beginning to realize the importance of the embedding scheme. At this point of the invasion, I was the only Times reporter anywhere near the front lines. It was laughable—and terrifying. Even our Baghdad correspondent, Janine di Giovanni, had been ordered out of the city by Robert Thomson, The Times’s editor. “Reporters are pulling out their hair with boredom in Kurdistan,” di Giovanni wrote at the time. “There’s a real war in the western desert on the Jordanian-Iraq border, but no one can get to it; and on the border of Kuwait most of the press corps are miserably camping out in their cars, unable to get into the desert.”

These so-called “unilaterals” had been shaken by the death of ITN’s Terry Lloyd, who had charged into Basra without the support of American troops. According to one account, he’d suffered a shoulder wound from friendly fire and had then been hit again by a U.S. helicopter as he was being taken to a hospital in an Iraqi minibus. Now his body was lying in one of the city’s teeming hospitals.

In fact, most British reporting from Iraq was being done by relatively unknown war correspondents. Take the BBC: John Simpson was stuck in the north while Fergan Keane was reporting from a hotel roof in Jordan. The BBC was instead relying on David Willis and his embedded colleague Gavin Hewitt. As for the frontline coverage of The Times and Daily Telegraph, it was all coming from their two respective Hollywood correspondents—one of whom was handling the challenge with more grace than the other. I later saw a photograph of Oliver Poole as an embed. Shirtless beneath an unzipped army flak vest, he was casually smoking a cigarette in front of a blackened mural of Saddam Hussein. To his right, an Iraqi truck was on fire. Poole’s Goa necklace, I noticed, was still intact. He looked good; dashing almost. The Telegraph, meanwhile, had come up with a name for the phenomenon of war reporting veterans stuck at checkpoints miles from the action: “Nick Wapshott Syndrome.”

The phone call over, I got back inside the Humvee and wished for sleep. There was nothing else I could do. Sleep, I had discovered, was the only way I could relax. It was almost worth the sadness of the dreams. Since Kuwait, I had developed an almost Zenlike ability to fall into a meditative doze.

You’ll probably recall what happened next: the darkest night in Iraq’s history; the trucks overturning in the wind; the lightning that was confused with a chemical alert, forcing us to clamp gas masks to our mud-drenched faces; and, worst of all, the bass monotone on the radio informing us that we had “contact.” This time the attack was serious. The dark shapes moving toward us weren’t customized pickup trucks; they were Republican Guard tanks. A dozen of them had been spotted by an artillery unit to the south, which had fired a few rounds of white phosphorus over us so the forward observers could see what was ahead.

The shapes were grunting south with only one purpose: to kill. Behind us, the artillery started firing, hopelessly off target. There was no way they could have surveyed their position, I thought, never mind used their GPS for targeting. I pictured the Marines aiming the howitzers manually, like rifles. I hoped they knew what they were doing, otherwise we would end up suffering the fate of Iraq’s dismembered 51st Mechanized Division. Then, finally, came the impossible news: The air force, making a belated entrance, was sending some F-15s to the marshlands. There was, however, a horrible catch. It would take them thirty “mikes” to get there.

There was no doubt about it: We were dead.

So what do you do when you think you have thirty minutes to live? In ideal circumstances, I’d pour myself a large vodka martini, put on a favorite record, and write down some final thoughts. Perhaps I’d make a few phone calls: thank yous, good-byes, good-riddances, that kind of thing. If drunk-dialing is bad, imagine death-dialing. That could really get you into some trouble in the morning—if you were unlucky enough to survive whatever it was you thought was going to kill you. But here was my problem: I was with three Marines in the back of a Humvee, in a mudstorm so thick I could barely see my hand in front of my face. There was no booze. And I couldn’t use my phone. Death, it seemed, was not going to happen on my terms.

I’d expected death to feel profound, or at least cinematic. But this felt strangely underwhelming. For a start, I was more angry than scared. What’s the point of dying at the age of twenty-seven? It’s like walking out of a play after the first act. It’s meaningless. It’s a waste. So that’s it then, I thought. I wished I’d done more. I wished I’d tried harder at everything. I wished I hadn’t spent so much of the past decade worrying. I thought about all my visits to Dr. Ruth’s clinic. I wished I’d known then what I knew now: You’re stronger than you think. Then again, I’d been right to be anxious. I’d always thought the 1990s were a scam and that the war virgins’ dot-com lifestyles would end in violence and tears. Now I’d proved myself right.

I thought about the consequences of my death. My grandparents’ final years would be ruined, as would most of the rest of my parents’ lives. My father would blame himself for giving me permission to go to war. Perhaps my parents would divorce, as married couples who lose a son or daughter often do. As for Alana, who knows how my death would affect her? She’d at least become richer. I’d felt so rotten about leaving her alone in Los Angeles that I’d made her the biggest beneficiary of my News International life insurance policy. Perhaps I should have married Alana. Perhaps I should never have dragged her to California in the first place.

I looked at the timer on my glowing digital watch, which I’d set to count down from thirty minutes. There were seventeen more to go.

So did I still consider myself a coward as I sat there waiting to die? Hemingway neatly defined cowardice as “a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.” But how are you supposed to turn off the imagination when you’re trapped in the dark, waiting to find out what it feels like to be dissected and burned by a round from a Soviet-built tank? I’ll be honest: I didn’t feel like a coward for being scared of war. I felt like a coward for agreeing to go to war. I felt like a coward for letting my journalist’s ego get the better of me. I felt like a coward for being so selfish. Because there was more at stake here than my life.

With less than ten minutes remaining on the stopwatch, the howitzers were thumping out rounds of DPICM almost indiscriminately. I wondered if it was a good idea to hose down such a large area: After all, the rounds from the big guns had a “dud rate” of up to 14 percent, and we’d have to drive through our own unexploded munitions if we advanced any further north toward Baghdad.

On the other hand, that wouldn’t be a problem if we all died tonight.

I couldn’t bear to listen to the World Service. If I had, I would have learned that American aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf were having to ground flights because of the weather conditions. I would also have learned that some 2,000 Iraqi troops plus 1,000 irregulars were managing to keep the Coalition forces out of Basra. Other reports, meanwhile, were claiming that Iraq’s Special Republican Guard was advancing south from the Iraqi capital, toward the marshlands.

“Contact in five mikes,” said the radio.

“What are you gonna do when this shit is over?” asked Murphy, who had been sitting in silence, staring at the steering wheel.

“Sit in my backyard and have a fuckin’ beer, probably,” said Hustler, who was standing rigid in the Humvee’s gun turret.

“Maybe I’ll go back to Trinidad and see my folks,” suggested Buck. “My old man can’t fly. We ain’t seen each other in a while.”

“What are you gonna do, Murphy?” I asked.

“I’m gonna get the fuck out of this shithole swamp and go snowboardin’,” he said. “I’m gonna get my truck from my parents’ house, put some Bob Marley on the radio, and drive up to Vermont. It’s gonna be sweet.”

I’d never thought of Murphy as the Bob Marley type.

I looked at my watch: three minutes now.

The fear was making me cold. I pulled my sleeping bag around me.

I closed my eyes.

Then it started. There was a low boom, followed by what sounded like a machine stripping the threads off a bolt. The boom came from ahead of us; the ripped screech came from somewhere above. The noise that followed was so loud I thought it would shake the flesh off my bones. I imagined a steel trapdoor being slammed shut, amplified by Wembley Stadium’s PA system and played back through the echo chamber of the Grand Canyon. The mud banks shook to the rhythm of unconditional annihilation. Someone was gettin’ some, as the Marines would say. I found myself shouting involuntary expletives. Then another trap-door was shut. The noises kept coming until I felt as though someone had torn the membrane out of my eardrums.

The F-15s, I later learned, had arrived just in time. They’d turned off their GPS guidance systems, swung low into the orange fog, and used manual overrides to target the tanks, which had started to flee up Highway 8. The tank drivers mustn’t have been expecting the air force on a night like this.

I almost felt sorry for them.

When the destruction was finally over, everyone in the Humvee was shouting. This, I thought, is what the will to live sounds like. “YEAH! YEAH! OH, YEAH!” we all howled in union, like the animals we were.

“Targets destroyed,” said the monotone on the radio.

By dawn the mudstorm had cleared. I’d never felt better in my life. We were lucky, of course: We hadn’t lost anyone. But the nightly purging of terror followed by the relief of the sunrise was making me feel superhuman. When you’re not scared, it’s impossible to remember what fear is like. Ironically, the war had probably improved my health: My bowel movements had slowed to one every other day, and the face mask of mud I’d worn since crossing the Iraq border had cleared up my stress acne. Hustler’s morning coffee, meanwhile, was more refreshing than any Starbucks cappuccino. My happiness was pure; childlike almost. It was the joy of being able to wiggle my toes or jump up and down. It was the elation of simply being alive.

As we prepared to move north and reunite with the rest of our convoy, I heard one of the lance corporals from the FDC singing the “Oompa Loompa” song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. “Ooompa loompa, doompadee doo,” he chanted. “I’ve got a perfect puzzle for you…” The movies, I thought, have got the soundtrack to war all wrong. War isn’t rock ’n’ roll. It’s got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna tracks. War is the music from your childhood. Because war, when it’s not making you kill or be killed, turns you into an infant. For the past eight days I’d been living like a five-year-old—a nonexistence of daytime naps, mushy food, and lavatory breaks. My adult life was back in Los Angeles with my dirty dishes and credit card bills.

By 8:00 A.M. we were on the move. As we roared back onto Highway 8, we realized that the previous night’s attack had been more ambitious than imagined. Bloodied Iraqi bodies were strewn over the road, some of them heaped on top of each other next to more obliterated white pickup trucks. Iraqi mortars, never to be fired, were lined up in the ditches. The dead wore olive drab jackets, head scarfs, and civilian shoes. I found it sad, in a way, that they couldn’t even afford proper uniforms. Ahead of us, meanwhile, were the flattened remains of the Republican Guard tanks. I wondered if the tank crews had been as reluctant to fight as the nineteen-year-old that the chaplain had found next to the white bus. “We took quite a number of prisoners last night,” said the voice over the Humvee’s radio, “including a brigadier general.” In fact, Coalition forces had so far taken nearly nine thousand Iraqi prisoners of war. General Mattis, it seemed, had been right all along: The Marines were an all-weather fighting force.

By noon we were rumbling up Highway 8 at 50 miles an hour. The postnuclear-attack landscape of the marshlands had finally ended, replaced by green farmland and adobe-style homesteads in palm-tree-lined tracts. I assumed that these properties belonged to the local Shiite landowners. At about 11:00 A.M. we passed the first blue overhead freeway sign since Nasiriyah. On it were three white arrows pointing north toward Baghdad and al-Hilla, with the place-names written in English and Arabic. This meant that we were now only about ninety miles south of the Iraqi capital—barely a two-hour drive. I remembered reading about Hilla after the first Persian Gulf war. It was one of the towns where Saddam had quashed the Shiite uprising by murdering 170 men and boys at the al-Mahawil garrison. Other Shiite insurgents were allegedly thrown from the top floor of the city’s hospital or pushed into the Euphrates with weights tied to their feet. Some victims were hung from power lines. Members of the Republican Guard from Hilla who refused to fight their own people were also executed. I wondered how much these people could hate the Americans, given what Saddam had already done to them.

At 11:30 A.M., Barrow called my satellite phone. I felt as if we hadn’t spoken in years, even though it had been only twenty-four hours.

“Just so you know,” said Barrow, “the editor’s very keen for you to file anything you can. You’re the only one at the front.”

“Okay,” I said, my muscles tightening. “I’ve been a bit, er, busy. But I’ll try and get something over to you by the end of today.”

“That would be great,” said Barrow. “As much as you can.”

The familiar pressure of newspaper deadlines almost made my life in Iraq feel more normal. But fear returned, like an unmissed companion, the further north we went. On the Humvee’s radio we were hearing reports of sniper fire from the roadside ranches. “Two Marines down,” said the calm bass voice.

Buck, as usual, was giving away nothing about our mission. Eventually, after driving perhaps thirty miles, we skidded left off the express-way and started looking for a new position. My knowledge of the routine made it no less terrifying, especially when we resumed our job as the forward reconnaissance unit. Predictably, the faces of two Iraqi shepherds bobbed out of the long grass as soon as a suitable location had been found. “These guys are sheep herders by day and warriors by night,” announced Buck. “I’ve had enough of this shit. Let’s go search their house.”

Murphy swung the Humvee into a U-turn and headed in the direction of a small mud-and-brick dwelling in the adjacent field. I wondered how the Iraqis would react to the Marines storming into their home. Hustler was in the gun turret, chewing loudly. I could tell he was itching to let loose with the .50-cal. I didn’t blame him. I felt as though a gunfight might break the tension. Another Humvee from Kilo Battery followed us. The vehicles stopped about fifteen feet from the house and four Marines, including Buck, jumped out. They crept up on either side of the doorway, rifles locked and loaded, then burst in, shouting. They emerged a few minutes later carrying two AK-47s and four rounds of ammunition, plus a couple of Republican Guard uniforms. The property had been empty, even though the Iraqi shepherds had sworn that their wives and children were at home there. “This is getting like Vietnam,” said the sergeant who led the raid. “We can’t fight ’em during the day because we don’t know who the fuck they are.” It was the first time I’d heard the V-word since leaving Camp Grizzly.

We drove back to our position and I started digging another coffinsized foxhole, probably my tenth since the war began. I’d just finished when we got the order to move again. “We’re gonna CSMO in about ten mikes,” declared the radio. “We’re drawing some sniper fire so keep your grapes down.”

I was sweating and filthy with a ring of sunburn around my neck. I had changed my underwear only once since leaving Kuwait.

Soon enough we were on the move again. It took me a while, however, to work out what was happening: We were going backward, toward the marshes. Was this a retreat? By the time we joined Highway 8, every other vehicle in the 1st Marine Division seemed to be going in the same direction. The rest of the afternoon was spent in a DMZ-style traffic jam, going nowhere. Tanks, burning up gallons of diesel, wheezed and choked around us. I caught sight of Speckled Ali, the NBC pigeon, swinging in his cage from one of the seven-ton trucks. He looked well. At one point we heard the pfut-pfut of sniper fire from a building a thousand yards from the roadside. Minutes later a navy F-14 Tomcat howled overhead, making a steel trapdoor sound with its payload of five-hundred-pound bombs. The Marines cheered. The scale of the destruction, however, seemed disproportionate to the threat of the riflemen.

By dusk we were back where we’d started, in the ocean of mud. There were rumors that we’d tried and failed to take an airport, or that the advance was a feint—a giant bluff—to divert the insurgents’ attention from al-Najaf, where they were fighting the 3rd Infantry Division, in which Oliver Poole was embedded. Whatever the reason, it was a right hook to morale: especially mine. I began to seriously question what I was doing in Iraq. How much more fighting could I take? And what was the point of being an embedded journalist anyway? Proper war correspondents write about both sides of a conflict. I might as well have been paid by the Marines. Also, I had no idea what was going on. Buck made sure that the only information I got was what I heard on the Humvee’s radio or saw with my own eyes. Perhaps he was worried that I would be captured and interrogated by the Iraqis—Saddam had already imprisoned four journalists, including a Newsday reporter and photographer, calling them “spies.” My battlefield perspective, therefore, was about as useful as Baghdad Bob’s. My mum knew more about the war than I did. Sometimes I felt as though all I could do was stand next to the guns and describe how loud they were. Was that worth dying for? The alternative, of course, was to go unilateral. But that seemed like suicide.

It was about 6:00 P.M. when I trudged over to the FDC, plugged my laptop into the diesel generator, and started to write an account of the previous night’s tank ambush. It had taken me a while to realize that it even merited a story, probably because I was so involved in the action—I remembered suffering exactly the same problem on September 11. I’d worked out that by prewriting most of my stories in longhand, I could make the best use of my time in the FDC, using it mainly to just type and edit. So by 8:00 P.M. my first-person tank narrative was done, along with a shorter piece about the house raid near Hilla. Pleased, I walked outside to send it all.

“Hurry up,” said Buck. “We going back into EmCon Bravo any second. It might be a couple of days before we go back to Delta.”

I panicked: This was probably my last chance to get something in the paper by the weekend. After that, the tank story would be out of date. Besides, Barrow had told me that the editor wanted as much Iraq material as possible.

“Hey, Captain,” I said as Buck jogged back toward one of the guns.

“Yeah?”

“Where are we? Can I put a dateline on this story?”

“Just say we’re near al-Diwaniyah,” he said, turning away.

By now I was an expert at getting around the problem of “light discipline” on the battlefield. I simply put the computer inside my sleeping bag and crawled in after it. Using the zipper, I created a hole at one end big enough for my hand and satellite phone to poke through. Then I waved the phone around, my fingers over the glowing LED display, until it locked on to a satellite. After that, I loaded up Copymaster and started the erratic process of sending a story to London. Even though my laptop was fully charged, the battery icon was flashing red. I was amazed, however, that the trendy purple-and-blue computer had survived this far. Even though it was wrapped in plastic sheeting, it now looked like a five-thousand-year-old relic from the royal tombs at Ur. Please work, I thought. Just one more time. “Wecome to Wapping,” said Copymaster. “Waiting to Connect…” My laptop gave a strangled beep and a message popped up on the screen: “Change power source immediately!” it said. “Come on, hurry up for God’s sake,” I muttered under my breath. The laptop squawked again and the screen flickered. Oh no. I held my breath. Then, with a wheeze and a sigh, the little machine died.

I exhaled, thumping my fist on the ground.

Just before the laptop crashed, I could have sworn I saw a message pop up in Copymaster’s low-tech blue dialogue box.

“2,134 words sent,” it had said.

I called Barrow immediately to check that my words had made it to London. The moment he picked up, the howitzers started to fire. I knew it was only a matter of time before another chemical alert and an EmCon Bravo radio blackout, so I tried to get the conversation over with as quickly as possible.

“Bloody hell, Chris,” said Barrow as the back blast from one of the guns almost knocked the phone out of my hands.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Did you get my stories?”

I heard the plastic rattle of Barrow’s keyboard.

“Yeah…” he said. “Good stuff. Thanks.”

“Okay, Martin,” I began. “I have to go n—”

“Hang on, Chris. Ben Preston would like a word.”

Oh no. I’d never worked directly with Ben, but given that he was The Times’s deputy editor, I knew he’d been involved in getting me the job in Los Angeles. He’d probably also had a say in sending me to Iraq.

I stood in the mud, listening to Vivaldi, as Barrow patched me through. Even in my chemical suit, NBC boots, and flak jacket, I felt like a schoolboy. I wondered how much more surreal my life could get.

“Chr-is?” said Ben. I pictured him in Wapping: athletic and boyish with short dark hair and modern rectangular glasses. Ben’s father, Peter Preston, was the legendary former editor of The Guardian. It was always worth thinking carefully about what you said to Ben. I shuffled on the spot.

“Hi, Ben,” I said.

“How are you holding up?” he began.

“Not that great, to be honest,” I blurted. “But, y’know, it’s okay.”

I was trying hard to sound nonchalant and professional, like most of the other war correspondents I’d met in the Middle East.

It wasn’t working.

“I hear you’re having second thoughts about being a war correspondent,” said Ben. I wondered if Barrow had told him about my incompetent performance on the opening night of the invasion.

“You’re giving us some great stuff from Iraq,” Ben continued, “and you’re the only person we’ve got on the front lines. But as much as we need you there, if you want to leave, no one’s going to think less of you. It’s a decision only you can make. You can say I ordered you out if you want.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. At last, I knew The Times understood how dangerous the embedded scheme had become. I felt like a madman who’d realized that it was the world, not him, that was insane.

“Okay…” I said warily.

“Could you get out even if you wanted to?” asked Ben.

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “It could be more dangerous than staying.”

“Well, it’s your call,” said Ben. “No one’s going to second-guess you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Can I, er, sleep on it?”

“Of course,” said Ben, sounding surprised.

Across the mud bank, I saw Buck making the throat-slitting action. “Kill the goddamn phone!” he was shouting.

16 A.W.O.L.

Sleep on it. I could hardly believe I’d used the phrase. This was how the evening progressed: At 10:00 P.M. a Marine from a nearby infantry unit had one of his legs blown off after tripping over one of our unexploded shells; at 11:00 P.M. the artillery behind us shot white phosphorus into the air, illuminating thirty Iraqi pickup trucks advancing south; by midnight the irregulars had retreated or been killed, but only after the howitzers had scattered yet more unexploded ordnance around our position; and at 1:00 A.M. came a chemical alert accompanied by a rumor that Saddam had authorized the Republican Guard to use “dirty” mortars anywhere north of Karbala, the most northern of Iraq’s Shiite cities. The rest of the night was enlivened by five-hundred-pound satellite-guided bombs, small-arms fire, the occasional incoming shell, and, at 4:30 A.M., another Scud warning. The violence ended at 5:50 A.M., when the sun rose wearily over Friday, March 28: day nine of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I hadn’t slept at all.

I like to think that by morning my mind hadn’t been made up. I like to think that I was still deciding whether to stumble on ineptly toward Baghdad or give up and return to the JW Marriott Hotel, with its luxury spa and room service menu. But perhaps there was no decision to make. Perhaps I knew exactly what I was going to do, the moment Ben Preston offered to “order me out” of Iraq.

Buck, of course, was of no help. He wouldn’t tell me if Kilo Battery was even heading toward Baghdad or whether we would bypass the capital and go north to Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace. He had other things on his mind. Kilo Battery was running short of MREs, water, and fuel, and the supply lines were under attack. After the first week’s dash, we seemed to have skidded to a muddy halt.

Murphy, meanwhile, was baffled by my dilemma.

“So you don’t have to be here?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“But you get a big-assed bonus for this shit, right?”

“No. Nothing.”

“So you’re not getting paid… and you don’t have to be in Iraq?”

“No, not really.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing here then?” he asked.

I couldn’t think of a good answer.

Then three extraordinary things happened.

First came an unfriendly tap on my blue, Kevlar-plated shoulder. I was squatting in my foxhole, wiping smears of mud from my broken glasses and smoking one of my last Marlboro Lights. Beside me was the shortwave radio. It was saying that the Iraqis were being helped by “volunteers” crossing the border from Syria and Iran. As I turned and looked up, I almost yelped with surprise. Looming above me was Capt. Jim Hotspur, the public affairs officer from the Kuwait Hilton. He looked sunburned and irritated. I wondered what I’d done wrong.

“Ayres?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied, trying to stand up. I fell backward instead.

“I’ve got something for you.”

This couldn’t be good. Had I broken the “ground rules”? Was I going to be disciplined? Would I get court-martialed?

Hotspur reached into his pocket and produced a red booklet.

“Congratulations,” he said, handing it to me. “You’re a Kuwaiti resident.”

I stared at the worn, royal-crested passport in my hands. It seemed as though it had come from another world, another era. I opened it up and saw three pages of Arabic script, which would no doubt cause a lifetime of problems with U.S. immigration officials. The visa, I noticed, had cost me nearly a hundred dollars.

“Thank you,” I said as Hotspur about-faced and marched away in an orange haze. He was carrying a plastic bag full of passports belonging to other embeds. I could hardly believe the captain had found me.

I was free. With my passport I could theoretically get on the next flight out of Kuwait International Airport (not, of course, that there were any flights to London; they’d all been canceled because of the war). The problem, of course, was that I was more than two hundred miles north of the airport, two hundred miles of death and anarchy. I remembered what my grandfather had said about leaving Iraq if it became too dangerous: “What on earth makes you think you’ll be able to do that?”

By now it was 10:00 A.M. The sun was crouching low on the muddy horizon, preparing for another hard day’s work.

I tried to forget about my passport and any question of going home. Instead, I decided to find out what had happened to my tank ambush story. The only way to do this was to call Alana, who could look it up on The Times’s website. We were back in EmCon Delta, but I still flinched when I switched my satellite phone on, half expecting it to trigger another Scud alert. It was 7:00 A.M. in London, and Friday morning’s edition of the paper had already been online for a few hours.

In Los Angeles, the other side of the world, it was 11:00 P.M.

I’d managed to call Alana once a day from Iraq, sometimes more, and by now she was used to the ambient noise of 155mm gunfire in the background. I asked her to look for my article in the World News section. I wondered if the story had been shortened, or if it had even made it into Friday’s newspaper.

“Can’t see anything,” she said.

Behind me, the big guns shouted. Somewhere, more Iraqis died.

“Isn’t there a section on Iraq, or something?” I asked.

I heard the hollow clatter of my office keyboard.

“Yes, I’m looking at the Iraq section now. Can’t… see… anything…”

I sighed, which unsettled the mud, sand, and phlegm that coated my lungs. It ended as a dry heave. I couldn’t believe it: My frontline dispatches had been spiked, again. All that fear and death for nothing.

“That’s it,” I said bitterly. “I’ve had enough. This is pointless.”

“Hold on,” said Alana. “I can see your photograph here.”

“What?”

“Your picture. It’s… it’s on the, wow, it’s on the front page. There’s a long story underneath; something about tanks?”

“You’re kidding!”

“Actually, your story isn’t on the front page…”

“Uh?”

“It is the front page.”

For a brief, exhilarating moment, I realized why people become war reporters: The thrill of writing an I-nearly-died-a-gruesome-death story is unbeatable. It feels like giving a middle finger to anyone who’s ever doubted you, including yourself. I remembered hearing about two journalists who’d gone to Iraq because their girlfriends had dumped them. I couldn’t understand it at the time. Now it made sense. War makes you feel special; it makes you feel better than all the war virgins back home. But here’s the downside: Writing an I-nearly-died-a-gruesome-death story requires you to nearly die a gruesome death. I wondered what my next big story would be: a chemical attack on Kilo Battery? An outbreak of smallpox? Next time, perhaps, I wouldn’t be so lucky. And was it all worth it, for a “fuck you” and a front page?

“What’s the headline?” I asked Alana.

“We were stuck when the Iraqi tanks came,” she read. “Stranded, ninety miles from Baghdad… from Chris Ayres near al-Diwaniyah.”

I thought about my first week at The Times and the “nib” I’d written for Barrow. How did I end up on the front lines of a war?

Then I looked up and saw Buck. He seemed even less happy than usual. His eyes were pinpricks of violence and determination.

“Finish your phone call,” he said. “We need to talk.”

What happened next would change everything.

I got off the phone and walked over to Buck, who was now standing beside the FDC and sucking on a pen. His hunting knife, I noticed, was still strapped to the front of his flak vest, next to his 9mm Beretta. Sleeping rough for nearly two weeks had taken almost no visible toll on Buck—he still looked like a pro athlete—but I could tell the nightly attacks were getting to him. The Marines hadn’t expected so much resistance. The previous day’s retreat, even if it was a bluff, must also have been disheartening. Before the war there’d been talk of a “ten-day sprint” to Baghdad. The mudstorms and the heavy fighting in Basra and Nasiriyah had made that plan look hopelessly optimistic. To me, it now seemed impossible that the Americans could win a quick and relatively bloodless victory in Mesopotamia. The same thought must have occurred to Buck. Forget hearts and minds. This was going to be about blood and entrails.

“Okay, Chris,” he said. “You ain’t gonna like this one bit, but I have orders. I have no choice. You understand that?”

I stared at the captain’s lean, muscular face and wondered what could possibly call for such a melodramatic opening.

“Ye-es,” I said slowly. “I understand.”

“What kind of satellite phone do you have?” asked Buck.

The phone was still in my hand. I looked at it.

“It’s a Thuraya,” I said.

“I’m going to have to take it,” said Buck. “I have orders to confiscate all Thuraya phones being used by media representatives.”

My jaw slackened in a visual cliché of surprise.

“What?” I said in a slightly alarming falsetto. “What do you mean?” I continued, making an effort to lower my pitch.

My main concern, of course, should have been my ability to send stories. But it wasn’t. I was more worried about not being able to tell anyone I was alive. My family, who were being kept up-to-date by Alana, would think I was dead. (I hadn’t called my mother directly, for the same reason Hustler hadn’t called his wife: The soundtrack of death in the background would have been too much.) Even The Times would probably think I was dead. There were no other journalists in my unit, so I could hardly borrow anyone else’s phone. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

“I need your phone,” reiterated Buck.

“Are you serious?” I asked. “Why?”

I could tell the question irritated Buck. Warriors don’t ask for orders to be explained. He turned to the Marine behind him.

“Staff sergeant,” he said. “Did the order for the phone ban give a reason?”

“It says the French sold the codes of the phones to the Iraqis, sir,” came the reply. “It means the enemy can trace the signals, sir.”

“There you have it,” said Buck. “The goddamn French. I’m not being an asshole, Chris. It’s an order. I don’t have a choice.”

The French sold the codes to the Iraqis?

“Thuraya isn’t even a French company,” I blurted. “It’s based in Abu Dhabi, for God’s sake. There’s got to be a better reason.”

“Nothing I can do,” said Buck, now walking away.

I knew it was pointless arguing. Buck was right: It was out of his hands.

“What about the other embeds’ phones?” I shouted to Buck, who was now thirty feet away. “Are they being confiscated, too?”

He pretended to not hear.

“It’s only Thurayas,” the staff sergeant explained. “Iridium phones are fine.”

He held out an apologetic palm.

I bit my upper lip with frustration and handed him the Thuraya. He ripped out the battery and gave me the empty handset back.

Perhaps the Marines were right. Perhaps the phones had been compromised. I certainly wasn’t going to risk getting myself, or anyone else, killed. But to blame it on the French? I knew that the Thuraya handsets had a built-in GPS feature, allowing phone calls to be pinpointed accurately; but wasn’t that why we had daily EmCon Bravo radio blackouts? Besides, Thuraya’s investors were all from supposedly friendly Middle Eastern countries, including the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, where the Pentagon’s central command was based. But there was nothing I could do. I felt helpless. Without a satellite phone, I was of no use to anyone.

I was dead weight.

So this is it. This is the moment, ninety miles from Baghdad, that will stay with me forever. This is what I think about when I find myself awake at 5:00 A.M., shouting at the red glow of the bedside clock (“Kill the fucking light!”), and wondering if I did the right thing, out there in the mud and the sand. As I tug at the damp and twisted sheets, I feel ashamed for letting myself down—and Fletcher, and Barrow, and the Marines. And I want to go back to the marshlands, to prove that I’m not a coward. By sunrise, however, the moment has always passed. And I don’t go anywhere.

After handing over the phone battery, I went to my foxhole to brood. What should I do? I had my passport; I had my front-page story; I even had permission to leave from The Times’s deputy editor. Was this the end of my war? Surely, I told myself, I could get around the Thuraya ban. Maybe I could go to Kuwait City, buy a new handset, and hitch a lift back into the war zone. Or perhaps I could try to leave Kilo Battery, find a fellow embed with an Iridium phone, and ask to borrow it. What about David Willis from the BBC? I shook my head. I remembered that he also had a Thuraya, and an unreliable one at that; he’d spent most of his time at Camp Grizzly borrowing an ancient device belonging to Scott Nelson of the Boston Globe. I remembered Scott’s phone being the size of a small photocopier, with two floor-mounted antennas for locking on to the Iridium satellite. Besides, I’d be lucky if anyone would let me make a ten-dollar-a-minute call, while draining their battery, more than once. And how would I physically get to David Willis, or any of the other Marine Corps embeds? I’d probably have to embed myself with the bloody infantry, or go unilateral.

“Piss on that,” I said out loud to no one.

I realized, of course, that the Thuraya ban was an extraordinary excuse: a get-out-of-Iraq-free card. “Sir, the dog ate my satellite phone.” But no one in London would believe that. They’d all know I’d lost my nerve. This was worse than Nick Wapshott being stuck on the QE2 on September 11. This was voluntary.

I climbed out of my foxhole, took off my helmet and flak jacket, and trudged over to Buck, who was now standing by the gun line. By now I’d abandoned my hiking boots and was wearing a pair of Nike running shoes. After Thursday night’s conversation with Ben Preston, I’d stopped feeling like a Marine.

I couldn’t believe what I was about to do.

“Captain,” I said, taking a quick, shallow breath.

He gave me an expectant look, as though he knew what was coming.

The moment felt freeze-framed. This was it. I tried not to think about the consequences of what would follow.

Then I said: “Can you get me out of here?”

Buck looked at me for a while. Perhaps he was relieved. Perhaps he was disappointed. Perhaps he didn’t care.

“Okay,” he said carefully. “I can probably get you back to Kuwait down the supply line. But I don’t want anyone thinkin’ I had anything to do with this. I don’t want anyone thinkin’ I wanted rid of you.”

“They won’t,” I said. “I’ll make that clear.”

Buck stared over my shoulder and said nothing. Then he nodded.

“Let me talk to HQ,” he said.

What had I done? Leaving the front lines of Iraq after nine days seemed like failure by any measure. I thought of all the reporters who’d lasted months, or years, in arguably worse places: Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, even Baghdad under the 1991 bombing campaign. Janine di Giovanni, a veteran of all these terrible datelines, once told me that her career was a result of “an abnormal lack of fear.” Perhaps I suffered from an abnormal excess of fear. Even Oliver Poole, my fellow member of the Hollywood foreign press, was able to butch it out in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division. Historically, my nine-day career as a war correspondent became even more meaningless. Ernie Pyle reported from the battlefronts of World War II, on and off, for nearly five years, until his death. And Winston Churchill, at the age of twenty-two, lasted six weeks in Afghanistan’s Swat Valley with Sir Bindon Blood and his troops.

It could, of course, take me a week to get back to London. When added to the time I’d spent in the Marriott and Camp Grizzly, my war would have lasted more than a month. But who was I kidding? Nine days.

After talking to headquarters, Buck told me that a Humvee from one of the supply camps in the rear would come out and get me in an hour. I couldn’t believe it was that easy. The captain warned me, however, that it could be a long and dangerous route back. The supply lines, after all, were easy targets for insurgents. But it seemed to me that I’d be taking a risk no matter which direction I went. And at least there was less chance of encountering chemical or biological warfare in the south.

Back at the Humvee, Hustler and Buck were more sympathetic than expected, although I felt as though I was letting them down. By leaving, I was no longer suspending disbelief: I was admitting that the war was dangerous and that we could all get killed. And no one wanted to be reminded of that.

“If I were you, I’d get my ass out of here, too,” offered Murphy. “You didn’t sign up for this shit. You’re a reporter.”

But I had signed up for this, no matter how naively. And I was a war reporter. This was supposed to be my job.

The Marines, I realized, were different than I’d first imagined. Their motivation, of couse, was as alien to me as mine was to them. They wanted to prove themselves as warriors; I wanted to watch from a safe distance. But during the invasion, the Marines had been more quiet and determined than gung ho and macho. And they’d kept a nihilistic sense of humor throughout. Perhaps they’d toned themselves down because of the “media rep.” But I somehow doubted it.

I walked to the back of the Humvee and started to pull out my bags. Everything was slathered in mud and reeked of desert filth. My dolly was long gone, so I was going to have to work out a way to carry everything. I tried to lift my rucksack onto my Kevlar-plated back, but soon gave up. I’d have to drag it. As for the yellow tent, I was almost tempted to leave it in the back of the Humvee. It was taking up vital MRE space, however, so I decided it had to come with me.

When I looked up, Hustler was standing awkwardly in front of me. He looked tense and exhausted. I remembered that he was nearly two decades older than the high school–age Marines. Hustler hadn’t been called up for the first Gulf War, however, and this was his last chance to use his training.

“Hey, Chris,” he said in a stage whisper. “Can you do somethin’ for me?”

“After all that coffee you’ve given me,” I said, “I’ll do anything.”

Hustler held out a square piece of cardboard from one of the MRE boxes. He’d cut it out with a knife. On it was a message:

Carolina & Kids: I’m doing fine. Hope everything is okay at home. Hope this ends soon so I can come home to you. I promise to stay low. Love You.

Underneath, in a childlike blue print, Hustler had given me his wife’s home and mobile phone numbers. I looked at the first sergeant. He seemed slightly embarrassed. He was probably wondering if this was a good idea.

“If you get time, call my wife and read this out to her,” said Hustler.

“I will,” I said. I wanted to shake his hand, but we just looked at each other. I felt a sudden weight of sadness. I wondered how many men from Kilo Battery wouldn’t make it out of Iraq. I remembered what Robert Capa, the Time-Life combat photographer, had written in his autobiography: “The war correspondent has his stake—his life—in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute… Being allowed to be a coward, and not be executed for it, is his torture.” This was my torture: Buck, Hustler, and Murphy didn’t have the option to leave. Even if they did, they wouldn’t. Marines get court-martialed for cowardice; journalists get a suite at the JW Marriott.

It wasn’t long before the Humvee from the supply camp arrived. When I looked at it, I realized what I was about to do. The vehicle was nothing like Buck’s. It had a canvas roof, no armored plating, and no rooftop machine gun. The left wing had been punctured and torn by rounds from AK-47s.

Maybe I should have listened to my grandfather: Leaving Iraq would probably be more dangerous than staying. Was I making an awful mistake? I threw my bags into the back of the vehicle, then went to say farewell to Buck.

“Thanks for looking after me,” I said.

“Anytime,” he replied with a quick handshake. “Now you can go back to England and tell everyone about that jerk of a captain who confiscated your satellite phone in Iraq.” Buck gave a sardonic grin.

And that was it. I would never see Capt. Rick “Buck” Rogers again.

Before I got into the Humvee, Hustler tapped me on the shoulder.

“You don’t have to call my wife, y’know,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. You’re gonna be busy when you get back. No big deal.”

I couldn’t believe Hustler was trying to spare me the guilt of not calling.

“I will call her,” I promised.

“Thanks,” he said. “But you don’t have to.”

The Humvee spluttered and wobbled, then pulled slowly out of the camp. Soon we were back on the sniper’s gauntlet of Highway 8. I looked out nervously at the wasteland around us. We seemed to be alone.

For three minutes we rattled south.

Then the Humvee’s engine cut out.

“Shit,” said the driver.

The vehicle, now in neutral, began to lose momentum.

“Shit,” said the driver as the Humvee’s starter motor laughed like a wounded hyena. “Start, you fucking piece of crap.”

There was nothing in front of us and nothing behind.

We creaked to a halt.

We sat there for about a minute on the open highway, in our canvas Humvee, before the engine coughed back to life. I almost passed out with fear. This was even worse than the broken rear door in Buck’s vehicle. I wasn’t surprised that the Marines ambushed in Nasiriyah had been traveling in a supply convoy. The good Humvees, it seemed, were reserved for the front lines. This one looked as though it had barely survived 1991. In my head, I started to write the headline of my own death: “Tragic Reporter Killed While Fleeing Battlefield.” That’s the trouble with being a journalist; you see a morbid headline in every situation. You’ve written them all before. There was, of course, a worse scenario than death: becoming an unwilling celebrity on Iraqi television. Or even more terrible than that, the star of an al-Qaeda webcast.

Our journey south continued for another three minutes, with the engine cutting out intermittently in defiance of the driver’s howled expletives. Then, after perhaps a mile, we swerved right into a new camp. The sickly V-8 died and we climbed out. I could still feel the vibration of Kilo Battery’s guns.

“You can stay here for the night,” said the driver. “We’ll see if we can get you a ride back sometime over the next few days.”

I tried not to groan. One mile down, 199 to go. I didn’t even have any cigarettes. At this rate I’d be in Kuwait by Christmas. I dumped my bags by the front wheel and lay on the ground, using my laptop case as a pillow. If we weren’t going anywhere, I might as well get some rest. I fell into a meditative doze.

Hours vanished. The heat soaked up my energy. Insects started to crawl inside the charcoal lining of my chemical suit, which probably made a nice change from all the mud. I was too drowsy to shake them out.

It was late afternoon when I heard a voice. “Hey,” it said, “we got you a ride outta here.” I opened my eyes and saw the tall, rickety Humvee driver. Like me, he looked as though he was having a bad war. The vehicle’s malfunctioning engine had probably already taken a decade off his life. Not that a decade would make much difference if he ended up being ambushed on the open road.

“Great,” I said, stretching my sore joints. “When are we leaving?”

“Now,” he said. “We’ve got a delivery to make. MREs and what-not.” He climbed into the Humvee and started the engine. It sounded like it needed an emergency oil transfusion. I started hauling my luggage back into the vehicle, then yanked open a rear door and folded myself into the narrow seat. Two Marines grunted in after me. I hoped this journey would be less traumatic than the last one. It wasn’t. Minutes later we were gliding in neutral again as the Humvee’s engine took more time out. I closed my eyes, stopped breathing, and waited for the inevitable.

The engine restarted. We hadn’t been ambushed.

This time we kept moving for a while, passing formations of tanks, Humvees, troop carriers, and grounded Marine helicopters. The equipment was lifeless, as though someone had unplugged the American war machine. I wondered if they’d simply run out of fuel. “Looks like we’re takin’ a pause,” said the driver. “Before we get to Baghdad.” Was this part of the Pentagon’s war plan?

Our destination turned out to be a roadside trench in which the Marines had built a camouflaged village of wooden porta-cabins and net awnings. As the Humvee grumbled through the entrance, I saw dozens of men stripped to the waist and taking sponge baths, washing their underwear, or just sunbathing on the hoods of their vehicles. Others were sitting at fold-down tables, playing card games, and listening to the BBC World Service. It was as though the Branson vacation area had opened a holiday camp in hell. One entrepreneurial Marine, meanwhile, had set up his own outdoor barbershop. He sang jazz standards as he worked the electric clippers. He offered two styles—bald or nearly bald—as he stood knee-deep in clumps of hair that hadn’t seen shampoo since Kuwait. He could have been an extra from M*A*S*H.

I got out of the Humvee and headed toward what looked like the camp headquarters. The trailer seemed almost luxurious, making me realize how close to the front I’d been. There were embeds everywhere, wandering around with notebooks, wounded laptops, and satellite phones. For once I felt almost safe. I stared hard at one journalist, who was obviously talking to his news editor in America. There was something familiar about him. Then it dawned on me: It wasn’t the reporter, but his phone, that I recognized. He was talking on a bloody Thuraya! I dropped my bags in a makeshift courtyard and jogged over to him.

“Wasn’t your phone confiscated?” I asked him after he hung up.

The embed was older, possibly in his sixties. He was the first person I’d seen since Kuwait City without a chemical suit. Instead, he wore khaki hiking trousers and a white shirt, decorated with a pin from Vietnam.

“No,” he said, taken aback. “Why?”

“They told me the Thurayas have been banned. Something about the French selling the codes to the Iraqis…”

“That sounds unlikely,” he laughed. “I had one of these in Afghanistan. They’re incredible, aren’t they? Just like a cell phone.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The implication was just too awful. Had Buck lied to me? Was this all a horrible joke?

“Did they take your phone?” asked the embed.

“What?” I said, still thinking about Buck. I wanted to throw up.

“Your phone. Did they take it?”

“They took the battery,” I said.

The embed gave me an experienced look.

“If I were you,” he advised. “I’d get a new battery and forget about it. We’re all using them here. No one mentioned a ban.”

He raised a conspiratorial eyebrow.

It was then I remembered: In my laptop bag, I had a bagful of Thuraya accessories. Perhaps there was a battery in there somewhere. I ran over to my luggage, got down on my knees, and began pulling out freezer bags full of cables, power adapters, and torn instruction booklets. Seconds later, I triumphantly held up a spare, dead battery.

Now all I needed to do was find somewhere to charge it up. So I rapped on the door of the headquarters trailer and squeezed inside. It was full of embeds typing on computers plugged into wall sockets. A few officers were standing around, eating MREs and swapping competitive banter.

“You know what General Patton said about going to war without the French, dontcha?” one of them was saying. His face was the color of a burst blood vessel. The other Marines shrugged innocently.

“He said it’s like going deer hunting without an accordion!” came the punch line.

There was riotous laughter. Palms slapped walls. Boots stomped.

“Am I okay to use my phone?” I interjected, holding up the Thuraya.

“Knock yourself out,” said the joker.

Minutes later I was talking to Fletcher. It felt like a year since I’d spoken to the foreign desk. It had, in fact, been twenty-four hours.

I tried not to think about Buck.

“Nice front page yesterday,” said Fletcher. “We need more from you today.”

I felt myself click back into professional mode. Then I remembered: I hadn’t told him about my decision to leave the front lines. I suddenly realized the almighty mess I was in. This was going to be awkward.

“Martin,” I began. “The Marines have, er, confiscated my phone.”

This seemed like the best way to approach the subject.

There was a short silence as my voice was relayed to London via space.

Fletcher: “So what are you using now?”

Yes, this was definitely going to be awkward.

“My, er, phone,” I explained. “Because… I’m using it without permission. I found a spare battery. But I’m not going to have it for long.”

“A spare battery?”

I felt as though I’d just swallowed a chili pepper.

“They took my battery. The phones have been banned, so they took my battery, which means I can’t use my phone. But now I have a spare battery. And the ban seems to have been, er, lifted. So I’m… er, yeah.”

“Can you file something today?” said Fletcher, eager to move on.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “That’s fine. Absolutely fine. Yes.”

“Gd. We need something on the supply lines being attacked: ‘Marines Get Bogged Down in Marshlands,’ that kind of thing.”

“Okay. Will do.”

“Send over seven hundred words,” said Fletcher. “It’s for the front again.”

The front page?

“Okay,” I said.

I still hadn’t told him about my decision.

“Oh, er, Martin?” I said, casually.

“Yes?”

“I’m heading back toward Kuwait. There’s no point in me staying on the front lines if I can’t use my phone.”

There was a baffled ten-dollar-per-minute silence.

“File your seven hundred words,” said Fletcher. “Let’s talk about it later.”

The phone call was over.

I welcomed the distraction of having to write a story: The situation with Buck, Fletcher, and the satellite phone was starting to get overwhelming. I asked the officers in the trailer if they knew who was in charge of the supply line. They told me to go outside and find Lt. Col. Keil Gentry. It didn’t take long. Gentry was a boyish, fair-haired Marine, probably in his late thirties, who could have been a British Spitfire pilot in another war. I introduced myself and asked if food and water rations were getting through from Kuwait, or whether the invasion was becoming “bogged down,” as Fletcher had suggested on the phone. “Well, we need everything: beans, bullets, and Band-Aids,” he said with a martini bar grin. I asked him if the supply convoys were being attacked. “Everyone’s been taking a few potshots,” he said. “The big threat is these ‘irregular’ forces.” He grinned again. After a day of bullshit, Gentry’s honesty was reassuring. He told me that part of the supply problem was the speed of the Marines’ advance into Iraq, which was faster than General Patton’s six-hundred-mile sprint through Europe after the Normandy landings. And, of course, there was the issue of storms, particularly the one on the night of the Iraqi tank ambush. But the insurgents were the biggest worry. “We planned for it, we trained for it, but we really hoped it wouldn’t happen,” Gentry said. “We thought this would be a liberation. We thought the Iraqis would be throwing flowers at us. But it’s been a lot more hostile than that.”

The interview was over: I had my story.

After filing the seven hundred words, Fletcher didn’t call me back. So on Saturday morning I hitched another lift south. Regardless of whether Buck had been lying about the phone ban, it was too late to turn around now. I’d made my decision. Besides, the 1st Marine Division didn’t seem to be going anywhere. This was clearly affecting the morale of some Marines, who’d expected Operation Iraqi Freedom to be as quick and decisive as Stormin’ Norman’s walkover in 1991. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re the only people in shock and awe,” one of the men confided.

I used my recently liberated Thuraya to call Alana and my mother. They both sounded pleased, but nervous, that I was on my way out of Iraq. I didn’t blame them: I was pretty nervous, too. My mother was worried that even Kuwait wouldn’t be safe: An Iraqi Seersucker missile had apparently hit Souq Sharq, the luxury shopping mall on the Persian Gulf that I’d visited before the war.

The journey down the supply lines was made in short, terrifying bursts, usually via the backseat of canvas-covered Humvees. Each Marine camp seemed bigger than the last. Eventually I reached a base of perhaps one hundred hooches surrounded by tanks and UH-1 Huey helicopters. One of the pilots offered me a lift back to Kuwait. It sounded too good to be true: It was. In an agonizing hundred-yard sprint, I managed to haul my rucksack, tent bag, and laptop to the takeoff site while still wearing my flak jacket and helmet. Then I found out that a colonel had taken my seat.

“Sorry,” said the pilot, giving me thumbs down.

I stood in the dirt, sweating and exhausted, as the downdraft from the Huey’s blades sandblasted my face. I was devastated.

By late afternoon I’d resigned myself to spending the night at the camp and resuming my journey south on Sunday. I was surprised, therefore, when Capt. Jim Hotspur turned up in a Humvee and offered to take me further down the supply line. I’d never felt pleased to see him before. We sat together in the back of the vehicle with Hotspur pointing his M-16 out the window. “We’ve got the package!” he yelled into his radio. I felt as though I’d been kidnapped.

“Why are you leaving?” asked Hotspur as we drove.

“My editor wants me back in Kuwait,” I lied.

“Interesting,” he said.

Hotspur was aware of the real reason. He knew that I was BS’ing him.

“By the way,” said Hotspur. “Do you have a Thuraya phone?”

I couldn’t help smiling. I knew what was coming. It was almost a relief: Buck Rogers hadn’t been lying to me after all.

“Yeah,” I said.

“We’re gonna have to take it,” he said. “It’s an order, I’m afraid. The phones have been compromised: The Iraqis are using ’em to track our positions. You’re gonna have to give me the phone and the battery. Some sneaky bastards have been giving us their goddamn spare batteries. Write your name, media organization, and address on the handset and we’ll get it back to you whenever we can.”

Yeah, right, I thought. But I wasn’t going to object: It was pointless. And at least my excuse for leaving Iraq was genuine.

I reached into my bag for the phone.

“It’s okay,” said Hotspur. “Give it to me at the camp.”

It was nearly dusk when we reached 1st Marine Division headquarters, a familiar desert metropolis of hooches, trailers, and military vehicles. It seemed as though there were enough Marines at the camp to fill Baghdad. I ended up in a semicovered press area, where an older American reporter, raw from the sun, was talking loudly into an Iridium phone. A few other embeds were hanging around, smoking cigarettes and taking notes in bored longhand. After I surrendered my Thuraya to one of Hotspur’s men, a Marine offered me his camping chair. I gratefully took it. I couldn’t help wishing, however, that I’d managed to get on the damn helicopter. After all, I guessed that I was still 170 miles north of Kuwait City. And although I was scared of flying over the southern war zone, I wanted to get home so badly I didn’t care.

“Who d’you write for?” asked the older American when he was finished dictating a story update to his Washington bureau chief.

“London Times,”I said.

“Did you hear about the Swede?” he asked with gleeful eyes.

“No. I didn’t.”

“He was a unilateral,” said the embed, who sounded like a New Yorker. “Thought he could get into Iraq by driving over the border in a Hertz rental. He ended up being stopped by a couple of Republican Guard at a checkpoint somewhere near Basra. They took his car, stripped him of all his clothes, pointed him in the direction of Kuwait City, and told him to walk back.”

The embed gave a staccato laugh.

“Christ,” I said.

“Apparently the only thing that saved him was his Swedish passport. The Iraqis told him that if he’d been an American, or a Brit, they would have shot him in the head. Gotta love the Swedes, right?”

I imagined the horror of having to walk, naked, back to Kuwait.

“Perhaps the passport was fake,” I said.

“Whatever,” said the embed, laughing. “Now he’s got to put a Ford Taurus on his expenses sheet. Somewhere in Sweden, there’s gonna be one unhappy sonofabitch of an editor. But at least he’s still alive.”

“Did he survive the walk?” I asked.

“I assume from the fact I heard the story that he survived. The army probably picked him up near the DMZ. They must have been laughing their asses off when they saw a naked Swedish unilateral approaching them.”

I looked around me. If I’d been assigned to the 1st Marine Division’s headquarters, I thought, I probably would have lasted the whole war. Then again, the embeds there looked like caged animals. That’s the military’s big secret: It makes you so sick with boredom that fear comes as a relief.

The rest of the day passed slowly, one second at a time.

That night, after managing to eat my first MRE since leaving the front lines, I sat in one of the hooches and watched a DVD of Dr. Strangelove, starring Peter Sellers, on a sergeant’s laptop. I fell asleep before the end.

For the first time since Camp Grizzly, I didn’t dream of anything.

“YOU! AYRES!”

This wasn’t a good way to start Sunday morning. I was sitting on the borrowed camping chair, snoozing, with The Quiet American on my lap. Somewhere behind me, a chaplain in a camouflaged cassock was giving communion. I felt exhausted and depressed. The war was catching up to me.

I opened my eyes to see Hotspur. He was gripping a clipboard and fizzing with barely controlled rage.

“Hi,” I said optimistically.

“I read your story on the Early Bird, Chris,” announced Hotspur. The Early Bird, I vaguely remembered, was the Pentagon’s news clippings service. A daily edition was faxed to senior officers in the field.

“Oh, right,” I said.

My stomach went into freefall: Had I made a factual error?

“Beans, bullets, and Band-Aids in short supply,” quoted Hotspur, spitting out the words as though each one were an insult against his mother. “This is a force of Marines that has run out of energy.”

“That’s my story,” I confirmed.

“You broke the ground rules, Chris,” said Hotspur unexpectedly. “You think it’s okay to give our position away? ‘From Chris Ayres near al-Diwaniyah ’? You know what, Chris, I’m glad you’re leaving, because otherwise I’d be kicking your sorry ass out of here. You’re a pisspoor journalist, Chris.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “Captain Rick Rogers gave me permi—”

“Morale was at an all-time low,” quoted Hotspur. “I don’t understand, Chris. I don’t see what you see. Your story’s bullshit.”

I started to mouth silent objections. How could I have broken the ground rules when Buck was the one who’d told me to say we were near al-Diwaniyah? Besides, my front-page tank ambush story on Friday had also been datelined al-Diwaniyah, and no one had said anything about that. What’s more, my account of the supply line jams had all come from the lieutenant colonel. I felt more depressed than angry. I’d been shocked by the openness of the Marines during the invasion, in spite of Buck’s tendency to ignore my annoying questions. Sometimes I’d even wondered if the openness was in the Marines’ best interest. Perhaps Hotspur had come to the same conclusion. Perhaps the Marines were thinking twice about embedding.

Hotspur curled his lip with disgust and walked away.

I felt something tug at my back. I looked around to see the Marine who’d lent me his chair. His neck was taut with anger.

“Gimme my fuckin’ chair back,” he said, pulling the chair harder. This time I fell onto the mud. I couldn’t believe this was happening. “You can sit in the fuckin’ dirt,” he muttered. “I ought to shoot you in the head.”

What could I say? I just sat there, feeling tired and miserable. This made everything so much worse.

After dinner, as dusk turned the sand an unmanly shade of pink, Hotspur returned. I was sitting in the same spot, staring into the disappearing sun, and willing Monday morning to arrive. The captain crouched down and looked me dead in the eyes. “I was pretty hard on you earlier, Chris,” he said. “You’re a good guy. I’ve been reading your stuff. I shouldn’t have gone at you like that.”

“It’s okay,” I said, and I meant it. “It’s been pretty tense around here.”

Hotspur gave a quiet laugh and nodded.

“So are we cool?” he asked, offering a raw, blistered hand.

“Yeah, we’re cool,” I said, shaking it.

“Good,” said Hotspur, slapping my blue shoulder. “I’m gonna try and get you a ride outta here ASAP. Hold tight. I’ll be back.”

At 3:00 A.M. on Monday, March 31—day twelve of the war—Hotspur, my unlikely savior, delivered on his promise. “We got you a helicopter,” he said, shaking me awake in my Beverly Hills sleeping bag. “Get your shit together. You’re leaving in five mikes.” I almost didn’t want to believe it was true, after what had happened the last time with my promised flight back to Kuwait. Still, I knelt on the floor and rolled up my ground mat and sleeping bag as fast as I could, hands shaking with anticipation.

By the time Hotspur returned, I was ready. I prepared myself for another physical ordeal. “Follow me,” said the captain, picking up my laptop case. I jogged on numb legs after him, leaning forward to spread the weight of my flak jacket and rucksack. I kept thinking my knees would give out, throwing me down into the mud. But they held fast, using some secret reserve of strength. When we finally reached the takeoff site, I realized that my ride wasn’t just a helicopter: It was a massive, twin-rotor CH-46 Sea Knight, the kind that used to send American teenagers to their death in Vietnam. The twin turbines shrieked as the blades created their own extreme weather system. “Holy shit,” I shouted, looking up at the enormous blacked-out war machine, almost invisible against the night sky.

“This is the package,” shouted Hotspur to one of the Sea Knight’s copilots, who was wearing a green flight suit, helmet, and night-vision goggles. “He’s going to Kuwait. Take him as far south as you can tonight.”

The copilot handed me a pair of black earmuffs, then used his M-16 to usher me to the back of the helicopter, where there was an open metal hatch. Still wearing my rucksack, I hiked up the ramp, flinging the rest of my bags in front of me. I sat on one of the wooden benches that ran down either side of the cargo area and pulled the earmuffs over my head. I felt as though I was watching a television newsreel with the sound turned down and an industrial-size vacuum cleaner next to my head. My eardrums were buzzing so violently I almost expected them to bleed.

It was dark in the helicopter, with only a fuzzy green glow coming from the cockpit. I could see the outlines of the pilots, backlit by the instruments. My only fellow passenger was a major, who sat on the bench opposite. He said something, but I couldn’t hear. So I just smiled and nodded dumbly.

Eventually the pitch of the turbines changed and I felt the strange vertical thrust of the rotors. The rear hatch, I noticed, was still open. I thought about how much easier this was than the twenty-hour convoy from Basra into the marshlands. I also thought about Fletcher, who was probably in bed somewhere in London. I hoped he wouldn’t be too angry about me leaving Iraq. He would probably regret ever asking me if I wanted to go to war. And then I pictured Kilo Battery, still taking mortar fire somewhere near al-Diwaniyah. Should I have stayed? For now, I didn’t care. I just wanted to get home. I wanted my parents and grandparents to see me alive. I wanted the fear to be over. We gathered speed. I remembered reading that Sea Knight helicopters were vulnerable to attack because they flew lower than ten thousand feet, with a relatively slow top speed of 166 miles per hour—not to mention the noise. I looked out of the open hatch at the infinity of darkness below. There were no streetlamps, no car headlights, no stars, and no moon. Just a terrible, empty blackness. If you see light after sundown in Iraq you’re about to either kill or be killed. I thought about all the pain and death of the past twelve days. How could this wrecked and tortured country ever recover? Would the Americans ever leave? I wondered how many Marines would be flown out of Mesopotamia in plastic bags, and how many Iraqis would be killed by their liberators. Was the war right? I wished I had a stronger opinion. I just wanted to go home. I looked at the major in front of me. His head was slumped back and his eyes were shut.

I can’t remember what came first: the orange flash on the ground, the popping sound, or the stink of cordite carried over the cold night breeze. But I remember a delay before the fear and the sickness took hold.

“What the hell was that?” I shouted silently to the sleeping major. The turbines thrummed inside my head. I looked right, through the glass screen of the cockpit, and saw cyborg outlines against a green background. The aircraft shook and banked. I wondered if I was already dead. An orange flash. The Iraqis must have aimed at the noise coming out of the clouds. A popping sound. The bastards must have fired a rocket-propelled grenade. I imagined the fate I avoided by a few lucky yards: the mangled blades, the fiery hulk, the blackened human shapes. War is so random, I thought. In war, no one is special. In war, you always die for someone else’s cause.

And so we continued, thrashing south through the darkness.

Toward the border. Toward the lights.