Gradually I picked up Marine jargon. I learned that “the head” was the lavatory, with a “head call” being a miserable trek out to one of the Porta-Johns (positioned as far away from the hooches as possible, for obvious reasons). My actual head, bizarrely, was my “grape.” The Marines, meanwhile, called each other “Devil Dog”—or just “Dawg,” for short—after the Germans’ nickname for them during World War I (the German translation was Teufelhunde). Morale was boosted by bellowing “Ooh-rah!” or “Semper Fi!” at any opportunity. The latter was a shortened version of the Marine Corps motto Semper Fidelis, meaning “Always faithful.”
I dealt with the tedium of the long, hot days by using the kidnap survival technique that David Silver had taught me at the SAS course in Herefordshire. I split each hour into segments, creating routines for each one. Every time I successfully completed a routine—brushing my teeth, for example, or taking a cold shower—I considered it a small victory for Ayres’s morale.
Every morning I’d walk to the “chow hall,” where I’d eat a plateful of hard, green scrambled eggs (MREs were for lunch) and talk to my fellow embeds—Nelson from the Boston Globe and David Willis from the BBC. Willis had turned up in the camp in a desert-colored Land Rover Discovery, of which I was intensely jealous. He had with him a cameraman and a bodyguard. I wondered why Fletcher hadn’t given me a bodyguard. Willis and Nelson looked almost as incongruous at Camp Grizzly as I did. We all had fair hair, pale skin, and bad eyesight. It was as though the Marines had looked at a selection of passport photographs and deliberately picked out the wimpiest-looking reporters, for the sheer comedy value. When Willis went on camera, however, he would take off his spectacles, don an Afghan scarf, and lower his voice by an octave. All this gave him the presence of a kind of ginger Lawrence of Arabia. Off camera, Willis refused to take Camp Grizzly too seriously. In fact, if it hadn’t been for his rowdy, backslap-ping laughter, I might have gone insane.
The rest of the morning would be spent snoozing in the chaplain’s fold-down camping chair. Then I’d listen to BBC World Service on my shortwave radio, call the office, open an MRE, and, in the afternoon, try and write a story. I could send text files to London by plugging my satellite phone into my laptop and loading up a software program called Copymaster. The process felt antiquated—like something from a 1980s science fiction film. A blue box would open on my desktop, with DOS-style text scrolling down inside it. After logging on, a message would pop up saying, “Welcome to Wapping. Waiting to connect.” After an agonizing $250 wait, it would finally tell me how many words had been sent to London. Sometimes, Copymaster would simply hang up, beep, and tell me that the “attempt failed.” Then my laptop would freeze, forcing me to reboot. I hoped that wouldn’t happen in Iraq.
There was very little to write about, apart from the sandstorms, or the lost camels that would occasionally tiptoe grumpily between the hooches and gun trucks. I wondered how many of the poor beasts had been turned into exotic steak by stray artillery rounds. Their owners, the nomadic Bedouin tribesmen, must have been furious. The only other newsworthy event came when the Marines were handed two pocket-sized laminated cards, the first outlining the rules of the 1929 and 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the second offering a phonetic pronunciation guide to basic Arabic phrases. On the first card, in bold type, was written: “Marines do not attack medical personnel, equipment or facilities; Marines do not harm those who surrender; Marines do not kill or torture prisoners.” It was the second card, however, that provoked the most interest. The Marines were particularly pleased with the unlikely phrase “And Upon You Be Peace” [Wass-alamu Alay-kum] and the translation of “What’s up?,” which appeared as “Shoe-koo, McKoo.” For hours after the cards arrived, Camp Grizzly echoed with Marines bellowing it at each other, then high-fiving.
Every so often I would try to think of way to get medevacked out of Camp Grizzly before the war began. I considered deliberately losing my glasses; breaking my wrist; or simply taking one of the Marine’s rifles and shooting myself in the foot. I even contemplated sabotaging my laptop or satellite phone. I was convinced, however, that anything other than being hit directly with a weapon of mass destruction would be considered wimping out by Fletcher. It was too late now for lame excuses. To save my career, I had to spend at least a few days under enemy fire in Iraq. Only then, perhaps, could I try to work out a way to go home.
Before going to Kuwait, I hadn’t been much of smoker. Nicotine, however, was the only drug available at Camp Grizzly, and I suspected I would need more of it once the war started. So, on a whim, I asked the BBC cameraman to buy me a pack of 200 Marlboro Lights on his next trip to Kuwait City. He brought back 400. After every Scud alert, I’d rip off my gas mask, locate my glasses, then immediately light up, sucking the carcinogenic fumes, along with all the airborne mud and filth, deep into my lungs. And I’d pray that Saddam wouldn’t use chemicals.
The main source of entertainment in my hooch was Joe Trux, the first lieutenant I’d met on my first day at Camp Grizzly. With his smart East Coast accent, French fiancée, and exhaustive knowledge of English trip-hop, Trux struck me as an unlikely warrior. In fact, I often wondered what kind of trauma had inspired him to sign up for boot camp. When I was first introduced to Trux, I’d assumed he was my age or younger. It was only when he pulled off his floppy camouflaged sun hat to reveal a bald skull shaven down to the pink, flaking skin that he suddenly looked much older. “What happened to Portishead, man?” he asked me once. “Are they making another album? Did you hear Dummy? That was outstanding, wasn’t it?” Before arriving at Camp Grizzly, Trux said he’d been on extended leave in Europe. Now, like everyone else, he spent his days sitting around and waiting for his chance to kill.
Trux’s first big project had been to build a Monopoly board out of the brown cardboard boxes in which the MREs were packed. With a felt-tip pen, he branded it the RCT-5 Monopoly: 2003 Kuwait Edition. Boardwalk, inevitably, was replaced with Baghdad, while Park Place became France. (This made me wonder how the poor bugger from Agence France-Presse was faring in the camp opposite.) Instead of being sent to jail, players were directed to Camp Grizzly. Trux had even gone to the effort of writing out Chance and Community Chest cards.
The Chance cards included the following:
1. Clean the shitter. Miss a turn.
2. You are guilty of negligent discharge [accidentally firing an M-16]. Go back five steps.
3. Skittles in MRE. Collect $10.
4. Media rep falls into foxhole. Collect $500.
I was slightly concerned that No. 4 was rewarded with cash. Trux reassured me, however, that it was a joke. The only other entertainment at Camp Grizzly came from fake news, most of which was blamed on the Marine Corps’ internal online news service. The biggest commotion was caused by a report that Osama bin Laden had been captured. For hours cheering could be heard around the camp. Marines slapped each other on the back and yelled “Shoe-koo, McKoo!” Then came news of Julia Roberts’s death in a car crash, and a gory account of Britney Spears’s facial disfigurement, also at the wheel of a car. My short-wave radio, however, had an unpopular habit of contradicting these sensational headlines. Trux, therefore, felt personally obliged to come up with another scheme to entertain the unhappy campers.