At some point Hotspur strode into the room holding a clipboard. He looked at my glasses, squinted, then nodded approvingly. I could see my red British passport still poking out of the top of his trouser pocket.
“Okay, folks,” he said. “The NBC training’s over. We have an important visitor for you now. You might want to take notes.”
The embeds stopped short in the middle of their MOPP-suit anecdotes. For a brief, giddy second, I expected President Bush to jump out from behind a tent pole. Instead, I turned to see an older man in a stiff uniform push through the tent’s opening. His gray hair had been shaved into a crew cut of mathematical precision and there were two silver stars on his lapel. He made his way around the chairs with all the speed and purpose of a man with an invasion to organize.
“Please welcome Major General James N. Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division,” said Hotspur.
By now, Mattis was standing at ease in front of the sweating reporters. If it weren’t for the “digital cammies”—the latest style of pixelated camouflage—he would have looked almost grandfatherly. The general didn’t so much have bags under his eyes as two heavy, matching black suitcases.
He offered us a busy smile. Then he said: “If you’re crazy enough to be here, ladies and gentlemen, you’re welcome.”
Great, I thought, even the two-star general thinks we’re idiots. I wondered if he knew what the Republican Guard had in store for us over the border. I wondered if he had already estimated media casualties.
“At times,” he continued, “you will hate being with us. You will stink like a billy goat. The comforts of life will all go downhill from here, folks. In short, this will be like the worst camping trip of your life. And if we cross the line of departure together, you’ll be taking the same chances as us.”
I wondered what the general would do if he knew it was the first camping trip of my life, never mind the worst.
I took a sip of the vile coffee.
We were being embedded, said the general, to witness the heroism of the Marines and to prove that America’s military could be “opened up to the scrutiny of the world.” If it weren’t for a war photographer, Mattis told us, there would be no monument to the Marines who raised the flag above the Japanese island of Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945. The scene was captured by Joe Rosenthal, an Associated Press combat photographer; he won a Pulitzer Prize for it.
“Unsung,” the general quoted, “the noblest deed will die.” He caught my eye. “And we’re going to do a noble deed here.”
I felt an elbow between my ribs.
“Is that Pindar?” whispered the embed sitting next to me, his pen aloft.
“No,” I said, slightly baffled. “It’s Major General Mattis.”
The embed scowled at me. “I meant the Greek poet,” he hissed. “The noblest deed, etcetera.” He raised his eyes to the canvas ceiling, which was billowing in the wind.
“Oh, right,” I said. “I’ve no idea.”
The embed gave me a look that said “clearly.”
I looked up to see Hotspur watching me and fingering his gun.
“We have no fight with Muslims,” the general was saying. “I have Muslims in my own ranks. We have no problem with the Iraqi people. There will be an abundance of innocent people on the battlefield. Last time, if we saw a guy with a gun, we shot him. Now, moving up into Mesopotamia will require a lot more discrimination.” He folded his camouflaged arms. “The whole concept of a clean open desert, with two armies coming together, is completely gone,” he said. “We’d much rather go around a city if we can, even if the main road goes right through it.”
I wondered if this was Mattis’s plan or the secretary of defense’s. I wondered if, in a few years’ time, we would all find out that Mattis privately thought this plan was insane. It certainly sounded insane to me. A war without taking cities? Wasn’t that like playing Monopoly without buying properties?
“We can move very, very quickly,” said the general. “These boys were brought up in Southern California. They’re fast on the freeways.”
A couple of embeds laughed. I wondered how much death I would see in Iraq. I wondered what the charred bodies would look like.
“Okay, time’s up,” said Hotspur. “Any questions?”
The Canadian’s hand was first to rise.
“Are we gonna get slimed, sir?”
“Chemical warfare is going to kill more Iraqis than Americans, given the poor protective gear they have,” said the general. “If you’re a real man, you can fight without that crap. But if Saddam wants to use it, we can do that, too. I’m not in the least bit concerned about whippin’ the Iraqis.”
I wondered if Saddam would be in the least bit concerned about whether the general considered him a “real” man.
The wind rattled the poles that held up the hooch.
The general looked at his watch. “These Marines are very young men,” he told us. “But it’s going to be their Battle of Guadalcanal when they go in. We’ve come out here to do a noble deed.”
I scrawled in my notebook: “Guadalcanal??”
The embed beside me put up his hand.
“What about the weather?” he asked. “Won’t it make it harder to fight?”
“Absolutely not,” shrugged the general as another gust assaulted the hooch. “We’re an all-weather fighting force.”
With that, the general nodded thank you and left.
Later, I called Alana on my satellite phone. It was 9:00 A.M. on the West Coast. I asked her to look up the Battle of Guadalcanal on the Internet. There was a ten-dollar-per-minute pause as she went downstairs and loaded up the Google home page. I heard her fingers clatter on the computer keyboard in my office, eighty-five hundred miles away. I wished I were back in California. “One of the most important battles of World War II,” she read out loud from an online encyclopedia. “The 1st Marine Division landed east of the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal island in the South Pacific. The Japanese defeat was so bad the commander committed hara-kiri.” She made an “eew” sound as she pictured the disgraced Japanese warrior committing suicide by ritual disembowelment.
“How long did the battle last?” I asked.
Alana paused. I began to feel uneasy.
“Six months,” she said before realizing what it meant.
Six months?
“Christ,” I said. “Mattis probably thinks that’s how long it’ll take to invade Iraq. How many American casualties were there?”
Alana paused again.
“Just tell me,” I snapped.
“It says six thousand.”
There was an awkward silence.
I wondered if the general had mentioned Guadalcanal on purpose: to prepare the embeds for a mass slaughter. The thought made me nauseous. I contemplated taking a swig out of my Diazepam auto-injector.
“What else did the general tell you?” asked Alana.
“He said that after we cross the line of departure into Iraq, we’ll take the same chances the Marines will.”
Alana’s chilly laugh beamed its way from Los Angeles into space and then back to my handset in the Kuwaiti desert.