“Where would you rather travel?” asked Buck. “In the Humvee with me, or in one of the seven-tons with the Devil Dogs?”
I turned to look at the Marines perched between the ammunition crates on the back of the truck behind us. I concluded that even Buck’s company would be preferable to sitting on top of several tons of high explosives.
“I’ll go in the Humvee, if that’s okay,” I said.
Buck nodded and tightened his jaw.
“Where are your bags?” he asked.
“Outside the hooch,” I said. “I’ll get them.” Buck nodded, stalked around the Humvee, and climbed into the passenger seat.
A few minutes later I returned, dragging my metal dolly over the sand and gravel. By now one of the casters had fallen off.
“You’re bringing all of this?” asked Buck through his wound-down window as he surveyed my rucksack, laptop carrier, tent bag, travel wallet, toiletries case, and flak jacket holder. He saved his most contemptuous look, however, for my dolly. Before I had a chance to answer, Buck turned to the Marine in the Humvee’s driving seat. “Murphy, will you help the media guy with his shit?” he asked. The driver’s door opened, a mouthful of chewing tobacco was spat, and within a few seconds a short, filthy Marine was standing next to me. He introduced himself as L. Cpl. (Lance Corporal) “Fightin’ Dan” Murphy. His nickname, I was informed, came from his tendency to start nightclub brawls. I suspected he might have made this up. Murphy was twenty-four years old and came from an Irish family that had settled somewhere in upstate New York. He wore his chemical suit extra-baggy, like camouflaged skatewear.
It soon became clear that my bags wouldn’t fit. The Humvee was already overloaded with bullets for the rooftop .50-caliber machine gun, crates of hand grenades, an AT-4 antitank rocket launcher, bottles of Saudi Arabian drinking water, and boxes of MREs. The rest of our water supply, meanwhile, was in a plastic tank on an open luggage rack bolted to the rear bumper. As a conciliatory gesture, I agreed to leave my dolly behind. After all, if my luggage was in the Humvee, I wouldn’t need to carry it—or so I thought. Nevertheless, Murphy still had to unload two boxes of MREs and a few “humanitarian” ration packs to make room for my rucksack. I contemplated dumping my fluorescent Two-Man Xtreme 19 Mountain Adventure Pod, but it seemed too painful after everything we’d been through together. Not, of course, that I had any intention of putting it up anywhere near Buck Rogers. If he was upset about my blue jacket, I didn’t want to think about his reaction to a fluorescent yellow tent.
When the rear hatch of the Humvee was finally closed, I wedged myself onto the tiny, foam-cushioned backseat behind Murphy. The only way I could fit was to jam my knees up against the Kevlar chest-plate of my jacket. That pretty much rendered all of my body, apart from my head, immobile. I stared straight ahead, at the rack for the rifle that I wasn’t allowed to carry, and began to groan.
“Are we ready?” asked Buck. The door opposite me clanked open and a much older Marine—I guessed he was nearly forty—jumped in. “Yeah, we’re ready,” he said, slamming the door behind him. “Frank Hustler,” he added, turning to me and shaking my hand. Before I could ask his rank, age, or where he was from, he said: “If you’re takin’ notes, I’m a first sergeant, thirty-seven years old, from San Diego, California. Back home I have a beautiful Brazilian wife. And when I start shootin’ that 50-cal on the roof, you’re gonna think you’re balls are on fire.” Hustler laughed, then dipped his finger into a tub of Vaseline and smeared it onto his tire-tracked lips. With a grunt, he stood up on his seat, pulled a set of black headphones over his ears, and poked his head through the hole of the machine-gun turret. Then he stepped up onto the metal plate to my right, where my armrest should have been. I couldn’t stop staring at his boot tags, which had his blood type and social security number written on them.
“Okay, Murphy, let’s CSMO,” said Buck.
The Humvee’s V-8 engine rattled and bellowed. I could feel the vibration of the blackened, vertical exhaust pipe behind my door.
We started to lurch forward—toward Iraq; toward fear; toward death.
“What does CSMO mean?” I shouted to the captain.
I could see his shoulders tighten. He really didn’t like questions.
I didn’t blame him, to be honest. He had a war to fight.
“Clear Shit and Move Out,” he said at last.
I didn’t expect to die so quickly. Even with my horror-flick imagination, I thought it would take at least a few days for one of Saddam’s chemical Scuds or diseased mortars to find its way into my foxhole. Part of me even expected to survive the invasion, but get killed on the way home—in a helicopter crash over Baghdad, perhaps, or in a friendly-fire incident in Kuwait. I certainly didn’t expect it to end like this, a whole five minutes and twenty seconds after leaving Camp Grizzly.
We had been driving for only a couple of minutes when Buck realized we were lagging behind the rest of the 1st Marine Division. He began thumping his hand against a GPS device—which could allegedly calculate our position on the battlefield by triangulating our distance from three satellites—and swearing at it using words I’d never even heard before. Spread out over his knees was a map of the DMZ that had been drawn up from spy satellites. It looked about as reliable as the directions on the back of a Chinese takeout menu. “Left, left, go left!” he shouted at Murphy, who promptly swung the Humvee into a ditch, over a three-foot-high sand berm, down a 45-degree rock face, and onto the flat gravel of the wadi. “Jesus Christ, Murphy,” said Buck, “you were supposed to take the track.” I twisted my neck to look at the speedometer over Murphy’s shoulder. It was showing 50 miles an hour. It felt faster.
In a flash of rage, Buck tossed the GPS device over his shoulder, picked up the map, and shook the creases out of it. It was then that he remembered something: “Land mines! Land mines! Murphy, watch out for goddamn land mines!” The muscles in my buttocks clenched so tight I feared I might need surgery to unlock them. “Oh shit,” said Murphy, who started swerving violently to avoid anything that looked vaguely minelike. Unfortunately, every other rock in the chalk-colored desert looked minelike. I winced as I remembered what the Lonely Planet guide had said about the dangers of “wadi-bashing”: People who keep track of these things emphasize that stuff still blows up every month. “Just get back on the track, Murphy,” said Buck, wiping a dirty palm over his face. I noticed he’d hung a crucifix from the Humvees dashboard. He’d also taped a brown prayer booklet, entitled Life & Death, to the inside of the windshield. “Calm down, Murphy, and find the track,” Buck continued. “Ain’t no point in busting the tires for the sake of some rocks.”
Then three things happened simultaneously: Murphy shouted “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”; the Humvee swung so emphatically to the left that it almost flipped over; and the door I was leaning on buckled and popped open. Suddenly my head was a foot from the desert floor and I was looking at the front wheels of the Humvee from an unusual and unwanted vantage point. After the initial shock, I soon worked out that I was being held inside the vehicle only by my legs, which were trapped under Murphy’s seat. My door, meanwhile, kept slamming into my stomach, like a barnyard gate in a storm. I watched helplessly as the contents of my pockets—two notebooks, a pack of cigarettes, and several ballpoint pens—fluttered out into the dawn breeze. It took perhaps thirty seconds for me to realize that no one inside the vehicle had noticed what had happened. Or that they didn’t care. As I hung there, waiting for my legs to give way, forcing me to perform a fatal back-flip under the Humvee’s monster-truck tires, I contemplated the sheer rotten luck of dying in a freak off-roading accident before crossing the Iraq border. The thought made me so angry that I wrestled the flapping door and started to heave my Kevlar-plated torso upright. Eventually, with a bellow of pure animal rage, I threw myself back inside the vehicle and slammed the door shut behind me.