No one said a word.
Buck was still lost in his map—literally.
Murphy was still trying to find the gravel track. (I assumed he’d swerved to avoid a real or imagined land mine.)
Hustler’s boots were still shifting nervously on the footplate.
“Bastards,” I muttered.
Then Murphy swerved again, my door popped back open, and once again I found myself staring into death’s familiar face.
By the time we reached the so-called “dispersal area”—the position from which the 1st Marine Division would invade—I felt as though I’d been at war for a year. My skin, white to begin with, had become even paler from the shock of dangling from the Humvee. Any remaining color had been removed by the chalklike dust that had blown into my face as I tried to avoid being crushed to death. “Geez,” remarked Hustler when he ducked down from the gun turret. “You look like you took a sand bath. Did you have the window open or something?”
“No,” I said, testily. “The lock on the door’s broken. It swung open every time Murphy swerved for a land mine.”
“Oh yeah,” said Hustler absentmindedly. “We’ve been meaning to fix that. You just have to keep pulling it closed.”
“Right,” I said, nodding. The Marines, it seemed, had already changed me: I wanted to rip somebody’s head off.
At the dispersal area—another patch of hot, featureless gravel—Murphy and Hustler busied themselves putting camouflaged netting over the Humvee, creating an awning around the vehicle. The netting, I discovered, didn’t actually provide any shade; it just gave me a camouflage-patterned sunburn.
By midmorning the sun was hard at work napalming the desert, forcing me to strip down to my soaked T-shirt and chemical suit trousers. If the sun was bad, however, the bugs were worse. The air was an exotic soup of insects, some of them the size of meatballs. No matter what evasive action I took, they hovered around my face, taking exploratory bites out of my nose, neck, and forehead. I began to feel as though my head had its own buzzing, snapping weather system. For the first time, the Kuwaitis’ headwear began to make sense. I was relieved to remember that I had a can of Xtreme 19 insect repellent in my pocket. But nope, it had fallen out during my near-death experience with the Humvee’s broken door.
“These are big-assed bugs,” said Murphy, who was trying to punch away the insects without giving himself a black eye.
He eventually gave up and decided to talk to me instead.
“Do they do much fightin’ in London?” he asked.
I looked at the lance corporal. I could tell that somewhere underneath all the dirt, his skin was pale and freckled like mine. The brownish color of his hair, meanwhile, could easily have been a result of personal hygiene. If he’d taken a shower and come back a blond, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Murphy squinted back at me.
“There is on Saturday night,” I said, picturing Leicester Square. That was a mistake. I suddenly felt overwhelmingly homesick.
“Do they fight Americans?” probed Murphy.
I wondered for a second if Murphy was trying to start a fight. He was small but looked as though he could bench-press a bungalow. I imagined he could also get quite creative in his Marine-on-embed violence.
“No,” I said emphatically. “We like Americans. They’re our allies. And friends. No one ever fights Americans.”
Murphy looked unconvinced, and slightly disappointed.
“Wanna learn how to fire an M-16?” he asked, unslinging his rifle.
It took me a while to process the question.
“I don’t think that’s, er, ethical,” I said.
Murphy gave me a disgusted look. He was now holding his gun so that it was pointing at me. I swallowed hard.
After my gun tutorial—which basically involved learning how to switch off the M-16’s safety—I quizzed Murphy about the war.
“Do you think this is it?” I asked.
“You mean… the invasion?” he said slowly.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, last time, they bombed the crap out the Iraqis for thirty-nine days before they sent in the ground troops,” he said. “And that was with double the manpower. So I doubt it. Then again, they keep talkin’ about shock and awe, so maybe they’ll just nuke the terrorist motherfuckers and get it over with.”
Murphy, pleased with this analysis, lit one of my cigarettes. I’d grown so tired of him asking for them, I’d given him a pack. That was less than an hour ago. I noticed he was already down to the last three.
Hustler appeared from behind the Humvee carrying a shovel. He was all suntan and rib cage—like a Venice Beach bum. But he had the flatiron head of a military man. This was a Marine whose youth never involved voting Democrat. Hustler’s hair was staging a retreat from his forehead, revealing the trenches of a life spent in foxholes and gun turrets, learning how to kill people.
“You can’t dig a foxhole in this shit,” he said, throwing the shovel onto the gravel. “You’d need a fuckin’ bulldozer.”
Hustler was panting, with inlets of sweat trickling down his neck into the saltwater estuary of his lower back. I felt relieved: The first lieutenant’s failure to dig a foxhole meant I didn’t have to try.
“What do you think, First Lieutenant?” I asked. “Is this it? Are they gonna send the ground troops in this early?”
Hustler scratched the back of his walnut neck.
“Depends,” he said, lighting a full-strength Marlboro. “They’re talkin’ about shock and awe, but I don’t see how they can do that if they’re trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people at the same time.” His nose, I noticed, had been broken in two places. “We need to go in, kill Saddam, and get the fuck out. Shock ’n awe was Hiroshima; it was blitzkrieg. We’re here to liberate.”
“I’ve heard they have this ‘e-bomb,’” I said. “It gives out an electromagnetic pulse that melts the enemy’s electrical circuits. Maybe they’ll use that on Baghdad. Maybe that’s what shock and awe is about.”
Murphy and Hustler considered my theory, which was based entirely on skim-reading one of Glen’s old copies of Newsweek.
Then Hustler said: “It’s not much use if it lands next to a fuckin’ hospital. And everything in Baghdad is next to a hospital.”
It was late afternoon when we got the order to move. This time I held on to the Humvee’s door handle to keep it closed. I also wore my seat belt, just in case. It didn’t take long for me to realize where we were going—in the distance I could make out several gigantic fireballs, with black wreaths of smoke drifting upward until they formed their own thunderous weather front. I assumed the fires were in the Rumeila oil fields on the Iraq side of the border. “Now that is a battlefield,” bellowed Hustler from the Humvee’s roof. He seemed almost boyishly excited. He had, after all, been waiting his entire adult life for this moment of violence.