“That shit’s gonna give you a fat ass unless you’re out diggin’ foxholes in the sand all day,” advised one of the men. On his left jacket pocket was written US MARINES and on the other, TRUX.
Inside the MRE was a random assortment of menu items, each one packaged in the same slippery tan plastic. I had chicken with Thai sauce, pilaf rice, peanut butter, crackers, M&Ms, and a sachet of cappuccino powder. There was also an “accessory pack” that contained a miniature bottle of Tabasco sauce, matches, salt, chewing gum, and a single toilet tissue. Trux showed me how to heat up the chicken by putting it inside a bag of dry chemicals—a “flameless heater”—and adding water. After folding the top of the bag and leaning it at 45 degrees, it began to pop and fizzle, as if by magic. A few minutes later hot steam was wafting out of it.
“The MRE is a marvel of modern technology,” said an older Marine with a silver cross on his lapel. I guessed he was one of the 2nd Battalion chaplains. “It’s waterproof, windproof, vermin-proof, and camel-proof—and it can survive a one-hundred-foot fall without a parachute. You can even leave an MRE out in the stinking heat for three years and it won’t go bad. Ain’t that incredible?”
I nodded, scooping my plastic fork into a sachet of steaming gunk.
“As far as I can tell, there’s only one downside,” the chaplain continued.
The chicken was now in my mouth. I chewed tentatively.
“That is, it tastes like horseshit,” he concluded.
I continued chewing. “It’s not actually that bad,” I said. The Marines had clearly overestimated the quality of British food.
They looked slightly crestfallen.
“Let’s wait and see what you think in a few days,” said the chaplain.
It sounded like a threat.
The Marines told me they’d been at Camp Grizzly since January. Many of them had been deployed straight from a base on Okinawa Island in Japan. It had been months since they’d seen their families or, more important, their girlfriends. The MREs, it was claimed, were pumped full of chemicals to reduce the men’s sex drive, but I doubted it. The only effect the rations had on me was to induce a constipation so stubborn I feared I would never use my bowels again. My normal routine involved at least two evacuations per day, partly a result of war-related nerves. Now there was nothing: just a nagging sensation of growing heavier with every meal.
Camp Grizzly, I learned, was home to the 11th Regiment, which was made up entirely of artillery battalions—these being comprised of monstrous, truck-towed howitzer guns and mobile headquarters units, where mapping experts, radar operators, engineers, and meteorologists worked out where the rounds would land. The headquarters units could also track incoming Iraqi mortars by radar and return fire with dismembering accuracy within a few minutes. During the invasion, the 11th Regiment artillery battalions would be loaned out to infantry units, providing them with an onslaught of cover as they advanced on foot and in tanks. If there was anything positive about all of this, it was that I wasn’t with the infantry, and that the 2/11 Marines were “mechanized,” meaning I wouldn’t have to carry my bags anywhere.
Together, the 11th Regiment and the infantry were known as Regimental Combat Team 5 (RCT-5), which was made up of 7,503 troops and more than 2,000 vehicles. I found it hard to comprehend the scale of the American presence in northern Kuwait. RCT-5 alone had nearly four times as many residents as Wooler, my hometown. One of the more bookish artillerymen had pointed out to me that the total number of coalition troops in Kuwait—at least 150,000—was the equivalent of the entire fighting-age male population of Manhattan. In a matter of weeks the Americans had built one of the world’s largest cities in the desert—a sprawling Deathtropolis, where every last resident was a trained killer. Still, 150,000, which rose to about 250,000 if you included all the forces stationed in the Middle East, was less than half the number of coalition troops deployed in the first Gulf War. And I wondered if it would be enough, especially given that they were advancing from only one direction.
I spent the rest of my first day at Camp Grizzly walking around the hooches in a sun-frazzled daze. Outside one of them, a Marine had built garden furniture out of ammunition crates. He’d also put up a road sign, pointing north, that said: “Baghdad, 325m.” Every so often an inquisitive Marine would stop and ask me what kind of stories I would write, and why the 11th Regiment couldn’t have had a female embed (a “fembed” as they were known) or “the dude from Rolling Stone.” They wanted the latter, I suspected, because they thought he might have some drugs. They were also keen to congratulate me on Tony Blair’s “balls” or tell me jokes about the French. “How do you defend Paris?” asked one. I told him I didn’t know. “Neither does anyone else,” came the punch line. “It’s never been tried before…”
That afternoon I was told grudgingly by a captain that I had been made an “honorary major.” This meant nothing, other than the fact I could use the cold, navy-style showers once a day instead of every four days. (I later found out that one embed, Charlie LeDuff from the New York Times, had tested the limits of his honorary rank by handing out “field promotions.” They weren’t upheld.)
At 9:00 P.M., I repeated my Camp Matilda bathroom routine, hung my camping towel out to dry, then climbed into my sleeping bag. I was surprised by how painfully cold the desert became at night. My sleeping bag felt about as warm as rolled-up newspaper. I wished I’d brought blankets, or a pillow.
I was woken at 2:00 A.M. by a gale of apocalyptic fury—as if the gods themselves were throwing a tantrum about the coming invasion.
Someone flicked on the lights in the hooch, but nothing was visible amid a thick orange mist of sand. “This is Iraq’s El Niño,” a Marine explained, his P.E. instructor’s voice barely carrying over the wind. “It’s called the southern wind change and it happens every spring. This year it’s early. We should have fucking invaded in February.” At 3:00 A.M. some of the Marines formed a human chain to walk the hundred yards to the camp’s Porta-Johns. When they got there, however, they found that most of them had been blown over. I pitied the Marine who would have to clean up the lake of sewage in the morning.
By sunrise, everything in the hooch looked as though it had aged by a thousand years. My blue Sony VAIO laptop had become yellow, with ditches of wet sand between the keys. Every item of clothing in my rucksack, meanwhile, looked as though it had been left on a beach overnight, while the pages of my notebooks had turned the color of parchment. Worst of all, when I walked outside, my hundred-dollar super-absorbent camping towel, which I’d hung on one of the hooch’s support ropes, had disappeared. It had probably crossed the line of departure before me. I sighed at the thought of drying my face with underwear for the rest of the war.
Life at Camp Grizzly was an excruciating combination of boredom and fear, interrupted only by rations and Scud alerts—each one forcing us to go to MOPP-level four in the oppressive heat. The only way to get my gas mask on in nine seconds was to throw my glasses into the sand. Once the mask was on, I could see nothing, just as Captain Hotspur had warned. Blinded, and with my spectacles uncomfortably close to my steel-capped boots, my only option was to remain frozen on the spot until the all-clear was called. Then I would get down on my knees, my body still tight with adrenaline, and pat the ground in an effort to find where they’d landed. The panic of losing my glasses was almost greater than the panic of the chemical alert itself. Not, of course, that I liked wearing them. The fashionable metal frames felt white hot in the sun, burning my already sunburned temples. The glare from the lenses, meanwhile, gave me a spike of pain in my frontal lobe. I was glad I’d bought a pair of Bono-style fly goggles at the Kuwait Hilton in a last-minute bolt of inspiration. The goggles were big enough to fit over my glasses, blacking out the sun and protecting my eyes against the relentless wind. The downside, however, was they made me look like Bono.