We stopped just short of the razor-wire fence of the DMZ. Buck handed out painter’s face masks, to protect us from the fumes. The sun hadn’t set but the sky was already black. Since leaving Camp Grizzly, I’d learned that the best way to keep track of what was happening was to listen to the radio in the Humvee’s dashboard instead of asking Buck questions, most of which he just ignored, feigning deafness. The radio was now saying something about “twelve wellheads” having been destroyed. “Saddam either set fire to them or blew them up,” it reported.
That night I forced down an MRE and listened to the World Service. Saddam, it seemed, had rejected the option of going into exile. Another headline said that Iraq’s 51st Mechanized Division had been armed with chemical shells. I also learned the most likely reason for the order to grow mustaches: Saddam had apparently equipped the Republican Guard with lookalike American uniforms and was plotting to have Iraqi soldiers commit war crimes while wearing them. Saddam’s Marine impersonators, however, would be clean-shaven. If all the Marines grew mustaches, therefore, his plan would be thwarted. It made perfect sense.
There was only an hour of light left—shortened by the oil fires—when I realized something awfuclass="underline" I had to use the lavatory: urgently. After a week of gut-clogging MREs, my aching bowels had finally surrendered.
The problem was, I didn’t know where, or how, to go.
In the end, I just came out and said it.
“First Sergeant,” I ventured. “How do you use the bathroom out here?”
“Say again?” Hustler was busy trying to get his flameless heater to work.
“How do you, er, take a shit?”
“Did you bring an e-tool?” he asked, trying to contain a smirk.
“What’s that?”
“An entrenching tool,” he explained unhelpfully. Then he ducked inside the Humvee and pulled out his shovel.
“One of these,” he said.
“Oh, right,” I said, still not understanding what I had to do.
Hustler sighed.
“You dig a hole, take a shit in it, and cover it up again. Just think of it as getting back to nature. The great outdoors.”
It seemed simple enough. I looked around for a bush to hide behind. There wasn’t one. There was only sand and gravel.
“Watch out for the scorpions,” said Murphy, who was aiming his M-16 at a vulture sitting on an abandoned propane tank next to a tumble-weed of razor wire. “There’s nine different species of ’em in Kuwait. All killers. They like coming out at night. So do the tarantulas and black widows.”
I was tired of being pestered, so I just grunted, took the shovel, and trudged off into the infinity of sand. I’d got about twenty feet away when I heard Murphy shout: “And watch for fucking land mines, man!”
How much worse could the war get? I remembered my grand-father’s diary entry in 1940 after driving to Boulogne: “Not very impressed by France at present, although it may get better.” France, of course, got a lot worse for my grandfather. I wondered how much worse the Middle East would get for me. Or perhaps, I thought, I would get used to all this discomfort, and it would get better.
Now hyperaware of land mines, I froze on the spot and, after hesitating for a second, plunged the shovel into a soft-looking piece of ground. Eventually I’d made a small, shallow hole. I wondered if the weight of my evacuation would be enough to trigger any 1991-vintage antipersonnel devices. I imagined the humiliation of dying from a land mine exploding in my buttocks.
In the end, nothing happened. But as I was covering up my mess, I noticed several finger-sized holes, like animal burrows, all around me. Then I saw something glint in the reflected light from the fires. It looked like silk. I bent down. All of a sudden I was winded with adrenaline: It was a spider’s web! I swore I could see a black, hairy leg behind it, climbing out of one of the holes.
Before I knew it, I was running back toward the Humvee, no longer caring about buried explosives. “Jesus, stay in your tracks, Chris!” I heard Hustler shout. But I wasn’t listening. Murphy hadn’t been kidding. There were killer spiders out here. And I’d just squatted over a tarantula’s nest.
What with the cold, the wind, the fear, and the cramped rear quarters of the Humvee, sleep was almost impossible. Work was also out of the question: Buck had lectured me on the importance of “light discipline,” which meant I couldn’t use anything that glowed, including my laptop, satellite phone, or digital watch, after sundown. “At night, when the enemy sees a light, he shoots at it,” the captain explained. “If you switch on that laptop screen at night, you might as well put up a goddamn billboard and light it up with pink neon.” It was a long night. Still, I managed to pass out once or twice, a result of years of practice in economy-class seating. The dreams were the worst: wrenching hallucinations of home and family. I wanted to talk to the people in my dreams—my parents, my sister, Alana—but they couldn’t hear me. They just stood around in a silent circle, looking down at me. “I’m sorry,” I kept saying. “I’m sorry.”
The next day—Wednesday, March 19—was a marathon of tense boredom. We just smoked cigarettes and fiddled with our MOPP gear, waiting for President Bush’s forty-eight-hour deadline to pass. I worried about chemical weapons. I worried about the northern front, or the lack of it. I worried about being captured. I wondered what it would feel like to be blown up, or beheaded like Daniel Pearl. Before sundown Buck handed me a printed sheet of 8½ ×11 with the 1st Marine Division’s blue, star-spangled logo on it. It was vaguely dated March 2003. At the top it said: “Commanding General’s Message To All Hands.” I knew it wouldn’t be good news.
It continued:
When I give you the word, together we will cross the line of departure, close with those forces that choose to fight, and destroy them. Chemical attack, treachery, and use of the innocent as human shields can be expected, as can other unethical tactics. Take it all in stride. Be the hunter, not the hunted… fight with a happy heart and strong spirit. For the mission’s sake, our country’s sake, and the sake of the men who carried the Division’s colors in past battles… carry out your mission and keep your honor clean. Demonstrate to the world there is “No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy” than a U.S. Marine.
It was signed: J. N. Mattis, Major General, U.S. Marines. I wondered if it was possible to wage war with “a happy heart.”
The next morning, at 4:00 A.M., the deadline passed.
At 5:43 A.M., local time, a Baghdad correspondent for BBC World Service reported hearing explosions near his hotel. The story was confirmed at 6:15 A.M., when President Bush announced that he had ordered an “attack of opportunity,” using thirty-six satellite-guided Tomahawk missiles and two F-117-launched GBU-27 bombs in an attempt to “decapitate” the Iraqi leadership. “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war,” the president declared over the radio. “These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.”
At 10:38 A.M., as I was trying to eat some MRE peanut butter, Saddam fired back. Flying low under the radar, a Seersucker missile streaked toward us. The president’s decapitation strike, it seemed, had failed.