I began to suffer another Cub Scout flashback.
“Show me your boots,” said the captain.
I lifted up my left foot and he examined it. I had scrawled my Social Security number onto the sole with a marker pen.
“I can see your Social Security number, but where’s your blood type?”
“I don’t, er, know my blood type,” I admitted. It was one of the few things I had forgotten to do before leaving Los Angeles.
Hotspur looked as though he was trying very hard not to pick me up and throw me through the Blue Elephant’s screen doors.
“Let’s hope you don’t get injured then,” he said, slapping me on the back.
Then he said, “Let me see your passport.”
I produced it. I didn’t expect this to go well, either.
Hotspur was shaking his sunburned head again. I was starting to worry about the loaded 9mm pistol strapped to his chest.
“Your visa’s valid for only thirty days,” he pointed out. “That might not be long enough.” He slipped the passport into his trouser pocket and said, “I’ll keep hold of it. We’ll apply for a Kuwait residency permit and get your passport back out to you in the field. Should only take a few weeks.”
A few weeks? I had hoped to be home in a fortnight.
Hotspur began to stride away on muscular, camouflaged legs.
“Captain,” I called out.
He turned to face me, walking backward.
“How dangerous is this going to be?”
“Don’t worry,” he said with a straight face. “People think artillery is boring. But we kill more people than anyone else.”
It was done. There was no way out. Even my passport was gone. I hauled my dolly with its heavy load of war reporting equipment to the east side of the vast, deserted Hilton parking lot, where an unmarked white bus was waiting. It would drive us north, to the other Kuwait: the land of unexploded mines, tank trenches, and camel-herding Bedouins, where 150,000 troops from a foreign superpower were living in camps named after New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Soon I would also be living in one of those camps. Soon I would become a Marine.
It was only when I stopped and turned that I saw it: a desert mirage, to the far right of the hotel, partly hidden by a row of dancing palms. It was unmistakable—the crowned siren, her long hair falling over naked breasts. She was peering seductively out of a dark green circle decorated with two stars and white lettering. It made me think of happier times; of safe, sunny mornings sitting on Sunset Boulevard with the Los Angeles Times. I pictured Alana, saying good-bye at the airport. I thought of my parents. I dropped my bags and ran. I could make it to the other side of the parking lot and back. The bus wouldn’t leave without me. There was still time before the war began. There was still time for my last Starbucks before Baghdad.
12
“THE WORST CAMPING TRIP OF YOUR LIFE”
I immediately regretted getting on the bus. I wished the damn Starbucks had swallowed me into a wormhole and spat me out somewhere on a beach in Malibu. I felt as though I’d been suckered: by the Marines; Fletcher; the Kuwaitis; even the other embeds. What the hell was I doing here? The reality of the chemical drill on the Hilton tennis court was only just beginning to sink in. The Marines, it seemed, were preparing for the worst. That made me wonder about the real reason for the embedding scheme. President Bush hadn’t shown much concern for world opinion so far in his campaign against Iraq; so why was he now lavishing so much money and attention on journalists—especially foreign ones? One of the embeds at the gas mask tutorial had been from Agence France-Presse, for God’s sake. As if Bush cared about him. After the tutorial, I’d asked Lt. Tiffany Powers for her theory on embedding. “If Saddam uses chemicals, no one’s gonna believe it unless they see it on CNN or read it in the newspapers,” she told me. “They’ll only believe it when it comes from you guys.” But how could we tell anyone about it if we were too busy coughing up our own lungs?
The bus headed north for about an hour on Kuwait’s pristine, four-lane Highway 80, otherwise known as the “Highway of Death” after the U.S. Air Force bombed the Iraqi convoys on it fleeing toward Basra in 1991. After passing a billboard near Mutlaa Ridge that read “God Bless U.S. Troops,” the bus swerved off the highway and onto a rocky dirt track. Soon we came across a signpost made from a wooden ammunition crate that read: “Camp Matilda: 10 miles.” This, apparently, was where we would spend our first night as honorary Marines. I unleashed an internal tirade at myself: You’re doing this because you’re too scared to say no; you’re going to die for a stupid news story; you’re going to ruin your parents’ lives; you’re going to ruin Alana’s life; you’re being used as bait to prove a political point. Another voice, which sounded worryingly like Fletcher’s, defended me against myself: Other journalists have been to war and survived; it’ll be a character-forming experience; the Americans won’t let you anywhere near the front lines; the Iraqis will surrender immediately; Saddam’s chemical arsenal is all a gigantic bluff; it’ll be something to tell your grandchildren.
I scoffed at the last line: I had already been told this by several friends.
“How am I going to have any grandchildren if I’m dead?” I said out loud, lost in thought. Luckily the diesel grunt of the engine drowned it out and only the Canadian, who was sitting next to me, looked up.
“Did you say something,” he asked through a warm garlic breeze.
“No,” I growled.
I stared at the luggage rack in front of me. I noticed that one of the embeds had brought with him an Old Glory flag—on a collapsible pole—to stick in the Iraqi mud. So much for us being “independent” observers. I started to whistle Tom Waits’s “Waltzing Matilda” for lack of anything better to do.
How was I supposed to feel at this point? Glad that Saddam was going to get his comeuppance and excited by the professional challenge ahead? Or should I have felt moral outrage at the imperial violence about to be visited on Iraq, and proud of my role in exposing the horror of twenty-first-century warfare?
To be honest, I didn’t feel any of those things.
All I felt was an overwhelming concern about my personal safety. And, of course, a tug of guilt over my selfishness.
To my right, a man was smiling at me. I recognized him as a reporter for National Public Radio. “Hey,” he stage-whispered. “Ever get the feeling we’re cheerleaders on the team bus?” He continued smiling.
I nodded and continued sipping the dregs of my cappuccino.
Eventually we arrived at Camp Matilda, a city of “hooches” in a hot gravel wasteland. The hooches were yellow, Bedouin-style tents put up by Kuwaiti contractors. The name came from a combination of the words “hut” and “uchi”—Japanese for “interior.” Each hooch was about the size of a tennis court and looked as though it belonged at a circus: a terrible, military circus, where the lions eat the clowns. The embeds—I counted ninety-five, including myself—were led inside one of them and offered an unappetizing selection of what the Marines called “chow”: bruised fruit, boxes of breakfast cereal, stale white bread, and a warm liquid that tasted like twenty gallons of water mixed with one spoonful of freeze-dried Nescafé. As feared, the contrast with the Marriott’s room service menu was brutal. We were invited to sit on white plastic chairs. Then came another miserable chemical attack drill. I got the feeling the Marines were now shouting “GAS! GAS! GAS!” for kicks. Still, I needed all the practice I could get. After my conversation with Captain Hotspur, I had taken out my contact lenses and put on my rectangular, wire-framed Dolce & Gabbana glasses. I couldn’t work out a way to take them off while putting my gas mask on in anything less than forty-five heart-pounding seconds. I had now been told about half a dozen times that I was “totally fucked up.”