“Yes, Saddam.”
“But you still don’t think this war is good.”
“Yes.”
I questioned a Filipino clerk at a photo-developing booth about his decision to come to work.
Me: Some businesses are closed.
Clerk: Sometimes they do not open.
Me: But you’re open. You’re not afraid?
Clerk: Some are a little afraid.
Me: How do you feel about the bombing?
Clerk: (Polite smile.)
Me: The U.S. bombed Baghdad this morning.
Clerk: I did not know about this. (Another polite smile.)
Iraq began firing missiles at Kuwait. Only the first air-raid warning had any effect on the Kuwaitis. When the sirens started, I saw a man in a dishdashah come out of an office building and rush nervously toward his car. Fifteen feet from the vehicle he stopped and pressed the door-lock button on his key-chain remote, and then he went back into the office building.
There was a mannequin wearing a gas mask in a store’s window display, but it turned out that the store sold equipment to the police and military. Plastic sheeting and duct tape were displayed in the hardware souk. “Many sales,” said a fellow at one of the stalls. “But not because of the war—because of good price.”
One of the Kuwaiti soldiers guarding my hotel wanted America to pick up the pace. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow,” he exhorted, and made the motion of a baseball umpire calling a runner safe. “Boom!” he urged.
A tiny old lady wrapped in a black abayah approached me in the vegetable souk. She had the face of Mother Teresa—or, rather, the face that Mother Teresa deserved but didn’t get. “American?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She gave me a beatific grin, a smile of hope and blessing, and drew her finger across her throat. ” Saddam!” she beamed.
There was no sign of fear or patience among the Kuwaitis, any more than there would be among the Iraqis at Safwan. Sermons could be preached about the civilizing benefits and progressive influences of fear and patience.
And I’ve preached all of them to my three- and six-yearold daughters. I suspect I have one or two elements of the Muslim world in my own home.
But only one or two. An article in Kuwait This Month featured the miswak, a twig from the saltbrush tree that is employed as a natural toothbrush. “Muslims use it,” the article said, “on the recommendations of Prophet Muhammad.”
The Prophet is quoted in the text: “Use the miswak, for verily, it purifies the mouth, and it is a pleasure for the Lord.” Not only is there no separation of Church and State in the Muslim world, there is no separation of Church and dental hygiene.
In Arab Times, a Kuwait English-language daily, the law court roundup reported that “S.H.F.” was accused of raping “O.S.M.” He took her to an apartment for a tryst, then invited some other men to have sex with her. She refused and was raped. S.H.F. was acquitted. The court ruled that “the testimony of the victim cannot be taken into account because during earlier interrogation she had said S.H.F. had sex with her three times and later confessed to having sex five times.”
But just when I had decided that the people of the Middle East were as troublesome and confusing as the algebra they invented, there came a glimpse of the brotherhood of mankind, or—apropos of algebra—the brotherhood of sophomoric guykind. I was in a phone store when a young Kuwaiti married couple came in. They were in their late teens. She was a beauty, though cloaked to the soles of her feet and veiled to the eyes. A girl who is really pretty—whether she wraps herself in an abayah, a nun’s habit, or the front hall rug—never wraps herself so that the world can’t tell. The boy was tall and gawky and had a foolish grin. A line of hickeys ran up his neck.
The night I returned from Safwan, a missile hit the Souk Sharq. The Kuwaitis claimed it was a “Seersucker” missile. Who names these things—leftover old preppies at the CIA? Next we’ll have the Madras Cummerbund missile and the Lime Green Pants with Little Trout Flies missile. I went to Souk Sharq in the morning. Kuwaiti police officers were lifting the crime-scene tape so that all the other fellows could have a look at the cool destruction.
The damage wasn’t great. But in one perfume shop every bottle had been exploded by the warhead’s shock wave. The place reeked of Shalimar. A mature adult American with a perfume store would have been on his cell phone screaming at his insurance agent. The Kuwaiti store owner was sitting in a chair sipping a little cup of coffee. I introduced myself. The owner pointed cheerfully to the wet pile of broken glass. “Special price!” he said.
Being a “unilateral” reporter in Kuwait, rather than a reporter “embedded” with the military, meant that, like everyone else, I watched the war on TV. Except I was too close for comfort—to TV, not war. Cable and broadcast networks had taken over swaths of Kuwait’s hotels. I was walking down the hall in the Sheraton and saw a huddle of serious-faced ABC television producers. They were having an animated discussion. Something was up. I moved closer.
“Do you think we should wake Diane?”
“I don’t want to wake Diane.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t wake Diane.”
I started to keep a notebook of things said by people who were sitting behind desks on television:
CNN, 3/19, Larry King to John Major: “I don’t think the United States has ever started a war.”
CNN, 3/20, several hours after the “decapitation strike” against Saddam Hussein: “It is like a brief intermission in some terrible, but real, movie.”
CNN, 3/23, concerning a 101st Airborne soldier who threw a grenade into an officer’s tent: “We’d like to point out that the soldier is said to have an Arab- or Muslim-sounding last name, but we’d like to point out that at this time this doesn’t mean anything at all.”
But I gave it up. I’m not prejudiced against CNN. It was just the first station on my hotel-room channel changer.
Every so often, the unilateral reporters were sent on official minibus tours, such as the one to Safwan. Thirty-five or forty journalists would pack into the minibus, pressed against the windows like pickles in a jar. The tours were arranged by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information. The MOI falls under the purview of Kuwait’s Department of Moral Guidance and Public Relations, and there is a branch of government that’s a boat with two sterns and a big Evinrude on each.
The minibuses made a lot of unexplained stops in the desert. At each stop a small, bossy man from the Ministry of Information shouted through a bullhorn: “Everybody get back on the buses.”
Nobody got back on the buses.
“We are leaving,” shouted the little bossy man.
We didn’t leave.
I went to Umm Qasr, Iraq’s only deepwater port. I saw Iraq’s least successful looter scurrying down a side street clutching a vacuum cleaner hose, a strip of rubber molding, and the kind of small, dirty throw rug you don’t mind if the dog chews. I saw Umm Qasr’s port facilities. They’d been looted. Umm Qasr was the site of a detention facility for several thousand Iraqi “enemy prisoners of war,” or “EPWs” (“POW” having, apparently, acquired too much political cachet for use on Iraqis). We were driven by the detention facility so fast that we couldn’t see anything, because, we were told, under the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war are not allowed to be exhibited to the press.
I was also going to keep a notebook of my own thoughts about the war:
• Decapitation strike. Cut head off dinosaur. Dinosaurs have brains the size of walnuts. Leaves a lot of thrashing stegosaurus.
• Was U.S. radio reporter on roof of Nagasaki Hilton in 1945 saying, “Civilian casualties are going to cause problems for the U.S. winning the hearts and minds of the Japanese people”?
• Military bans embed satellite phones. Iraqis listening in. Getting toward April 15. Iraqis asking, “Is this H and R bloc a new coalition?”
• Ph.D. dissertation to be written about the relationship of twentyfour-hour war coverage to reality T
V. Glad I’m not in grad school.
• Will Boston Pops give concert featuring TV networks’ “War in Iraq” theme music?
• Geraldo expelled for sketching U.S. positions in sand on live TV. Given Geraldo investigative journalism track record, resulted in Iraqi artillery pounding Damascus.
But I gave that up, too. Geraldo appeared at my hotel, looking dramatically dirty and accompanied by enough equipment and crew to reinvade Iraq. With the Pentagon’s blessing, he soon did. “The troops like him,” an Army public affairs officer explained. And why not? Geraldo is courageous, patriotic, and without him the troops aren’t on TV.
Besides, a reporter didn’t have to be foolishly brave to feel like a fool during the war. Thousands of Kuwaiti citizens and residents were imprisoned in Iraq in 1990 and 1991. Six hundred and five are still unaccounted for. Kuwait’s National Committee for Missing and Prisoner of War Affairs held a reception for POW families and the press. Solemn and formally dressed Kuwaitis presented journalists, who were almost as grubby as Geraldo, with yellow roses, lapel pins, POW/MIA banners, and letters written by family members. One was from “A Daughter of a POW” and was addressed “To the whole world … to everyone who live on our good and blessed earth.”
Tables of food had been set out. Waiters circulated with glasses of fruit juice. The room was decorated with the yellow ribbons that have gone—in good-thief-on-cavalry fashion—from self-pitying refrain in a country-and-western prison song to international symbol of hope and remembrance. There was no tactful way to escape interviewing the families.
I was with a Lebanese journalist friend who offered to translate. He guided me to two sisters wearing yards of stiff, shiny black cloth, Mona and Naaima. “They’re Bedouin women,” my friend said, “from a very humble background. You can tell by how dark they are from the sun. This is the only place you’d see them mix with wealthy Kuwaitis.” Mona and Naaima’s three brothers, ages nineteen to twenty-four, were arrested by the Iraqis in 1990.
“Why were they arrested?” I asked.
“They were in the Kuwait Army,” said Mona. Naaima was arrested, too. She was a nurse. The Iraqis asked her to work in a hospital in Iraq. She refused and was sent to prison for four months, first in Basra, then in Najaf, then in Karbala. Her daughter was seven months old. The girl, now a thirteen-year-old in jeans, was at the reception with her mother and aunt. Naaima hadn’t known that her brothers were held in the same prison she was. She caught a glimpse of them as she was being moved from Basra to Najaf. Three years ago Mona spoke with a former POW who recalled seeing her eldest brother in prison in 1991. That was all they knew.
“I’m the scum of the earth,” I said to my Lebanese friend. “Our business eats these things. We’re maggots in people’s grief. And we can’t even keep a story like this in the news for more than one Oprah episode. There’s nothing I can do. There’s worse than nothing. I’m a beacon of false hope, a Cape Hatteras lighthouse in downtown Raleigh.” Or I said something like that, probably not so carefully thought out.
My friend spoke to the two women. They looked at me with concern and said something in Arabic. “They are firm believers in Allah,” my friend said. “Whatever their brothers’ fate is, they’re willing to accept it, knowing that their brothers served Kuwait and served it well.”
Baghdad fell. Iraqi rioting commenced. Looting was undertaken in earnest. Twenty-four-hour television coverage turned into the Shopping Channel. The war was over—not the killing, dying part but the part in which I was involved. I could tell by a sign on the bulletin board at the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information press center: FOR SALE—HELMET, U.S. ARMY MEDIUM, LIKE NEW, $100. FLAK VEST, CONCEALABLE, WORN ONCE, $350.
Newscasters began mentioning the Laci Peterson murder case. Some attributed the lapsing scrutiny of the war to the short attention span of the American public. But many Americans have given their all—indeed, could be said to have sacrificed their lives—doing their best for people who now hate them. A nation that has teens in the house can’t be expected to focus on Iraq forever.
On April 16 I hitched a ride on an Air Force C-17 cargo plane to the Baghdad airport. Bouncing around in the windowless cargo hold was an Oshkosh fire engine.
“A fire engine?” said the Army public affairs officer who took charge of me in Baghdad, and whom I’ll call Major Bob. “We’ve already got a fire engine. What we need is water to put in it.”
Thousands of troops occupied the airport. Their water was in one-liter plastic bottles. Sometimes there was a little water left over from drinking. Then a shower could be had by poking holes in the bottom of the water bottle, holding it right side up, and unscrewing the cap.
Hot meals were unavailable. The Meals Ready to Eat are less of a death penalty to the digestive system than they were during the Gulf War, and more of a life sentence to the school lunchroom. The weather was hot and windy in the daytime and hot and windy at night.
Troops and supplies were being flown into the airport’s cargo facilities. The passenger terminal, designed by French architects in a “Harrah’s Arabia” style, was being used as a bivouac. The combination of no planes at the gates, dull food, nonfunctioning air-conditioning, and snoring people stretched out on uncomfortable boarding-lounge furniture made for a shock of the familiar to a frequent flyer. Except you could smoke. Except everyone was running out of cigarettes.
There was an ad on the airport wall for the place where Iraq’s information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, used to regale the international press: “Al Rashid—It’s More than a Hotel.”
“It’s a target,” an Army captain said.
I camped in the airport’s administration building, in an office with bookshelves full of Reagan-era Boeing manuals and out-of-date Jeppeson guides to takeoff and landing patterns at international airports. I did not find one for La Guardia with the World Trade Center towers circled in red. What I found instead was culture, or evidence of it.
Looting by Americans was strictly forbidden. But scrounging was okay, and we didn’t have coffee cups. The Iraqi airport administrators had a wall of personal lockers, all carefully locked but with doors subject to persuasion by a Leatherman tool. I found a cup in one locker and—along with a bag of loose tea, a sliver of soap, and a spare pair of socks—the crudely printed cover of an English-language Iraqi edition of Waiting for Godot
Artistic genius, arguably including Samuel Beckett’s, has limned the extraordinary experiences of war—terror, desperation, suffering, bravery. Banal discomforts, however, need less brilliant insights to convey them. For example, “sandstorm.” The word is too beach, too playground. And Iraq doesn’t have sand. It has fine-ground goat droppings and minute particles of gluey clay. When the wind whips up, it’s small-craft warnings in the lizard terrarium, a horizontal dirt blizzard. Then the drizzle that comes with spring sandstorms in the Persian Gulf begins, and with every breath the soldiers are fed a slime pie. Months of that and the food and the water, plus those extraordinary experiences of war, such as getting shot at, are wearing.
The lavatory facilities at the airport administration building consisted of one plastic stacking conference room chair with a hole cut out of the seat. It was placed over a bucket behind the TO BAGHDAD sign on the departure ramp.
The soldiers guarding a presidential palace near the airport had been in the gulf since the previous July. Their lieutenant had been killed in the war. A sergeant said that his wife, unable to get a babysitter, had taken their five-year-old daughter to the lieutenant’s funeral in the United States. “One of Daddy’s soldiers is on his way to heaven,” his wife explained.
“You mean he died,” said the little girl. When they got home, the girl took a tablet and pencil and went into her bedroom. The sergeant often receives elaborate scribbles in the mail. Half an hour later his daughter came out and said, “Usually I write Daddy, but you’ll have to write this so he can understand it: ‘Daddy, be safe. Come home in one piece.’”
Another soldier was
carrying a chrome-plated Winged Victory in his pocket. His thirteen-year-old son’s soccer team had won the league championship. His son broke the “angel” off the top of the trophy and sent it with a note: “This will protect you.”
Sergeant Luis Cubera was a New York City emergency medical technician. Major Bob said, “He was in Tower One when Tower Two got hit.”
“It gave me a reason to come back in the Army,” said Sergeant Cubera.
The palace was called, I think, Abu Griab, but Iraq’s presidential palaces are marked with barbed wire and watchtowers, not park service signs or historical plaques. The palace was built on an artificial island in a fishpond big enough for waterskiing. There was a swamped speedboat in the shallows. Some soldiers had removed whip antennas from Humvees and rigged the antennas with communication wire and safety pins. A fish fry was planned.
The palace architecture hinted that Iraq had a heritage. There was a dome and a bunch of pointy arches and some elaborate scribbles in Arabic around the front door, which was three stories high. Scale, proportion, and ornamental detail were those of the Ritz-Carlton Tomb of Hammurabi or the Great Mosque in Disney World’s Muslimland.
The palace was badly built. Shoddy rubble-wall construction was skimmed with a thin layer of concrete. Lines were scored in the cement, faking the seams of quarried stone. A missile had blown off the back of the palace, exposing its crawl spaces and utility rooms. The PVC plumbing and lowgrade electrical wiring looked like things strewn around by a trailer-park tornado.
Inside, materials were marble, alabaster, mahogany, teak, and mother-of-pearl, elaborately handcrafted by badly skilled workmen. The main reception room was four floors high. A crystal chandelier hung down past two tiers of balconies. I paced off the shadow it cast on the floor. The chandelier was the size of a two-car garage. If a reason to invade Iraq was wanted, felony interior decorating would have done. Imagine Liberace as an inner-city high school basketball star who’d just signed an NBA contract and converted to Islam.