An SEPW, I remembered from one of the training sessions at Camp Grizzly, was a “suicide enemy prisoner of war.” The Marines had been warned to expect Palestinian-style suicide attacks from insurgents.
“Maybe this is a ambush, Cap’n,” he continued.
Murphy had a point. We were isolated, miles from any kind of support, and a perfect target. We didn’t even have someone on the roof manning the .50-cal. The Iraqis must have known that taking American prisoners, torturing them, and then parading them on television would be the best way to destroy support for the invasion back home. Earlier that morning I’d heard Sa’id al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister (later to become known as “Baghdad Bob” or “Comical Ali”), threaten Danny Pearl–style vengeance on the invaders. “Give yourself up,” he said on the World Service. “It is better for you this way, because if you do not we will cut off your heads, all of you. Curse you, you have put the U.S. people to shame. We will destroy you.”
“Well, we’ll soon find out,” said Buck.
Hustler stopped a few feet in front of the Iraqi, who was wearing a stained gray dishdasha and leaning on a wooden stick. He looked more like a Bedouin shepherd than an insurgent. Not that Bedouins were harmless: They had a history of acting as battlefield surveillance for Iraqi commanders.
“Sir,” shouted Hustler. “Please leave the area. This is a military operation. It is not safe to be here. Please leave the area.”
The man didn’t budge. He continued his rant, pausing only to wipe tears from his face. He looked tortured, beyond reason.
Then I heard the explosion.
Kilo Battery was in good spirits after crossing the border. We were all still alive, for a start, and resistance from the 51st Mechanized Division had been weaker than expected. More important, the intelligence about the Iraqis being armed with chemical shells turned out to be bogus. “We killed a lot of motherfuckers,” reiterated the radio as we passed the burning, smoking hulk of yet another Republican Guard tank. “We keep expecting to see some infantry, but all we’re seeing are body parts.” I wanted to look at the tanks, and the human off-cuts strewn around them. But that way, insanity beckoned. So I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead.
“Hey Cap’n, can we take pictures of the dead people?” asked Murphy.
“No,” said Buck. “That is not cool.”
Iraq wasn’t much to look at. I wasn’t even sure if it was an improvement on the bug-infested sandpit of Kuwait. There were no landmarks or signposts, just endless tank trenches, sand berms, and dirt roads—how the Wild West might have looked in the 1840s. Perhaps, I thought, it would get better.
After crossing more open countryside—which in Iraq means baked scrubland covered with a thin, green weed—we hung a left onto fresh tracks, which I guessed had been made by the infantry in front of us.
Every single muscle and sinew in my body felt stiff, as though fear had given me rigor mortis. I could hardly believe I’d made it over the border. I was excited, in a warped way. I felt like a hero. I also felt like a fool. How would I get out of this? Back in England, I’d promised my grandfather I would leave Iraq if it became too dangerous. “What on earth makes you think you’ll be able to do that?” he replied with a dark chuckle. My grandfather, after all, had spent five years trying to leave Czechoslovakia. The thought of me going to the Middle East made my grandmother cry. She still remembered the single-page telegram sent by the British War Office to my grandfather’s father on November 1, 1940. It informed him that “Dvr. Ross Selkirk Taylor” was missing in action, presumed dead or captured.
We continued heading northeast, toward Basra.
By late morning I became aware of a voice trapped inside my head.
It was a female voice, squeaky and bubbly, with a 1980s backing track. “Borderline,” it sang. “Feels like I’m going to lose my mind / You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline.” So much for war having a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack. My war, it seemed, would be fought to the teenie-bop of early Madonna. Great. I started to zone out, the song still looping interminably in my head. I hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. Perhaps I was becoming delirious. My trance was interrupted, however, by the rhythmic thump of a helicopter overhead, the first aircraft I’d seen since the invasion began. About bloody time, I thought. Where had the air force been? “Look up,” instructed Hustler, lowering himself into the Humvee from the gun turret. “That’s a Marine Huey up there. I’ll bet you General Mattis is in it. Man, he loves the fight.”
This was an understatement.
“Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight,” the general would tell a war conference in California two years later, causing public outrage. “You know, it’s a hell of a hoot; it’s fun to shoot some people. I like brawling.”
Apart from the handful of Bedouins who lived near the border, we didn’t see any Iraqis for miles. The nearest we came was a stray dog, trotting contentedly, and with no urgency, in the direction of Kuwait City.
Murphy, meanwhile, sweated and grunted as he drove. Every so often he seemed to slump in his seat and the Humvee would veer right, causing Buck to shout, “Murphy! Land mines!” I expected the lance corporal to pass out at any second. Even Buck kept giving him worried looks. I wondered who would drive if Murphy had to be medevacked. I hoped it wouldn’t be me.
Eventually we joined a paved road.
The Humvee sped up. Now we were doing 20 miles an hour.
It was a shock when we saw the first Iraqis: about thirty prisoners of war, sitting cross-legged in a roadside ditch, their hands fastened behind their backs with plastic flexicuffs. Their eyes were hard and shiny. Two Marines brandishing M-16s stood over them. The Iraqis looked gaunt and shell-shocked; some of them had traces of blood on their white dishdashas and no-brand jeans. An empty white pickup truck—the Iraqi equivalent of a Humvee—was parked opposite them. I felt as though I’d become trapped inside the television news. It’s easy to ignore the destitute and bleeding when you’re at home on the sofa, dunking donuts into your coffee. It’s easy to avoid asking all those difficult, unanswerable questions about how they got there and whether or not your country had anything to do with it. It’s not so easy when they’re sitting a few yards away, next to their confiscated mortars and AK-47s.
I felt sorry for the Iraqis: They’d been screwed by Saddam Hussein; screwed by the war with Iran; screwed by the first Gulf War; screwed by the sanctions; and now screwed by the 1st Marine Division. They’d also been screwed, of course, by the British, who’d invaded Mesopotamia back in November 1914 and considered introducing the country to mustard gas. “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas,” declared Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, in a memo. “I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes.”
So there the Iraqis were, in their own country, only a few miles from one of the world’s largest oil fields—and barely an hour’s drive from the Rolex retailers of Kuwait City—and they had nothing. I didn’t blame them for hating us. I didn’t blame them for returning fire. I might not have blamed them for using chemicals. Perhaps the invasion would one day be worth it; perhaps one day Iraq would be a rich, democratic republic. But what reason did they have to believe that?
“What do you do with them at night?” I asked Buck.