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Chapter One

* * *

The day, like most of my days in Iraq, had got off to a bad start. I awoke
that morning, as usual, shivering violently and aching from another night in the
Humvee. Waking up, of course, shouldn’t be a difficult or traumatic process. For
the first twenty-seven years of my life, I had done it every day without even
thinking. Open eyes. Yawn. Scratch balls. Look up at ceiling. Climb out of bed.
Waking up in a Humvee, however, on the front lines of an invasion, is different.
The first thing you notice is the contortion necessary to sleep inside the
vehicle: the head dangles inches from the bare metal floor; the right leg is to
be found somewhere behind the left ear. The spine feels as though it has been
splintered like a cocktail stick. If the war doesn’t kill you, sleeping in the
Humvee might. Look what happened to David Bloom, the newsman from NBC: dead at
thirty-nine from “deep vein thrombosis”-aka Economy Class Syndrome-after
spending one too many nights folded inside his “Bloom-mobile.”

Then comes the mental replay of the night before-the hollers of “Lightning!
Lightning!”; the absurd 3:00 A.M. fumble for the gas mask, Wellington boots, and
rubber gloves; the casualty reports over the radio. And then you remember the
almost hallucinatory dreams: corny, sepia-tinted images of parents, aunts,
uncles, and grandparents. With that comes a gutful of guilt-at what you’re doing
to the little boy they spent years nurturing. And, of course, what you’re doing
to them, as they try to hold down undigested food every time they switch
on the television. Oh yes, the battlefield dreams are best forgotten. Quickly.

From the outside, the gap-toothed Humvee looked as though it belonged on
Sunset Strip: an oversized pleasure wagon with a camouflage paint gimmick and
room in the back for a hot tub and PlayStation. Inside, however, the vehicle was
jammed with radio equipment, ration packs, and a large circular footplate for
the machine gunner, an earnest and aging first sergeant called Frank Hustler,
who could have been a P.E. teacher in a different life. His desert boots danced
to the rhythm of his paranoia somewhere next to my right hip. The gun on the
roof was a .50-caliber-the kind they used in B-17 bombers during World War II. A
single shot to the abdomen would rip you in half like a Christmas cracker.

In front of me sat the young Irish-American driver, “Fightin Dan” Murphy, and
the half-Trinidadian captain of our unit, Rick Rogers, known to everyone but his
mother as “Buck.” Directly behind my head were two filthy olive drab Iraqi
Republican Guard uniforms and a sloppily maintained Kalashnikov, all confiscated
during a violent, terrifying house raid outside al-Nasiriyah. The Humvee’s
narrow seats, stuffed with cheap foam and covered with ripped, muddy canvas,
were an afterthought. After two weeks, my buttocks felt badly bruised.

At one point I could have sworn they had started to bleed.

“Holy shit, look at the size of this scorpion!”

This was Murphy, a few nights earlier. He had just discovered the downside to
sleeping on the desert floor: It glistened and squirmed with an encyclopedia’s
worth of creepy-crawlies. The Marine, who was barely old enough to buy alcohol
and spoke with a profane Irish drawl, stared with incredulity at the creature
that had just disturbed what passed for sleep in an Iraqi kill zone.

He jabbed at the grumpy arachnid with his rifle.

“Cap’n, did you see that? That motherfucker could have crawled into my
sleeping bag. It coulda crawled up my ass!”

Buck was lying on the Humvee’s hood, staring at the gleaming constellation
above. The distant thuds of bombs being dropped on Republican Guard positions
echoed through the infinity of mud and sand.

“Sleep on top of the vehicle, Murphy,” he said, impatiently. “There
ain’t nothin’ gonna crawl up your ass up there.”

“Where’s the media dude?” asked Murphy.

“In the back. First sarge is in the front. Sleep on the roof.”

From the back of the Humvee, I could hear tobacco being spat, a sleeping bag
being unzipped, and a short, tightly wound Marine scaling the side of the
Humvee. With a clatter, Murphy pulled himself onto the Humvee’s roof. Somewhere,
another bomb went off and more Iraqis died, horribly.

“Some fuckin’ stars,” said Murphy.

“Like being on vacation,” muttered Buck.

In front of me, I heard Hustler’s chemical suit rustle. “Personally, I’m
thinkin’ of buying myself an Iraqi retirement home,” he declared. “Either that,
or I’m gonna open the first goddamn Starbucks in Baghdad.”

There was, of course, another downside to sleeping on the ground: The risk of
making an unlucky roll onto a land mine-probably intended for the Iranians, back
when the Americans were on the Iraqis’ side. Getting my legs blown off, I
thought, would really interfere with my morning schedule. And it would ruin the
goose-down sleeping bag I had bought in Beverly Hills-in the days I was supposed
to be writing about celebrity parties and film premieres.

Not that my morning schedule was anything to look forward to. This particular
morning, like most other mornings in Iraq, my first task was to dig a
coffin-sized “foxhole” in the baked mud of the marshlands, the endless
no-man’s-land where the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers meet.

In theory, if you jump into a foxhole during incoming fire, your chance of
survival increases by 80 percent. It was this statistic, rather than any desire
for hard labor, that made me dig foxholes whenever we moved position. But for
anyone who has studied the theory carefully, the foxhole, rather like the
illuminated emergency exit in a Boeing 747, is hard to take seriously. For a
start, unless you’re in it when the mortar or missile hits, it’s probably too
late. And then I remembered what the instructor from the SAS-a squat Northerner
with cruel eyes and a mechanical handshake-had told me back in the journalists’
training camp: “Even if yer in yer foxhole,” he said with a smirk and a hint of
silver-capped enamel, “it’ll protect you only if the shrapnel from the mortar
explodes upward.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “But some mortars are
designed to explode downward.” He frowned. “That’s when yer foxhole
becomes pointless.” It also becomes pointless, of course, if the mortar that
explodes in your camp contains a vial of smallpox, or a canister of poison gas.

If Frommer’s ever gets around to publishing a guide to Iraq, the entry
on the marshlands will be brief. They are, after all, an apocalyptically bleak
part of a country that’s lacking in charm to begin with. After the first Gulf
War, Saddam drained the marshes and sent his henchmen on a murderous purge of
the Ma’dan, or marsh Arabs, who had lived there for five thousand years. The
mustachioed madman considered the peaceful Ma’dan a threat to his Ba’ath Party.

Within less than a decade, the Ma’dan were virtually wiped out, and their
former home became a wasteland of dried mud banks, deserted tank trenches, and
the occasional lonely, malnourished goat. The few surviving Ma’dan look like
apparitions, bones jutting out of their sackcloth robes. We had thrown a few
“humanitarian relief” packages to them as we first rolled into the area. The
irony, of course, is that the ground the Ma’dan owned had enough oil trapped
underneath it to buy Microsoft, leaving enough change for General Electric.
Thanks to the post-Gulf War I sanctions, however, the Iraqi leader couldn’t turn
a profit from his genocide.

On this grim morning, as I started to dig my foxhole, all I cared about was
that the top layer of mud had the consistency of cake batter, while deeper down
it became as hard as frozen toffee. With mud and sunscreen running down my
forehead and into my eyes, I hacked away at the earth for what seemed like a
Sisyphean eternity. It was an excruciating exercise regime: The marshlands had
been freezing cold that night, hardening the tightly packed mud. Iraq has a
reputation for being hot, but as the future Frommer’s guide may
eventually inform more peaceful visitors, the cold is just as extreme: In fact,
one member of the SAS died from hypothermia during the infamously botched
Bravo Two Zero mission into Iraq in 1991.

As the sun rose, the mud still felt like masonry, but the temperature climbed
stoically toward one hundred degrees, forcing me to strip off the layers of
trendy North Face climbing gear I had stuffed inside my ripped chemical suit. I
didn’t dare take off the gas mask strapped to my waist, however, or the sealed
canteen of drinking water on my hip. My heavy blue flak jacket, with the word
PRESS inscribed onto it in large reflective white lettering, also stayed on.

Buck, Murphy, and Hustler would find it amusing to walk up to me, poke me in
the chest, and say, “I’m pressing!” They also enjoyed pointing out that my
jacket was possibly the only blue thing anywhere in the southern Iraqi desert-if
not the entire country-and was therefore guaranteed to draw fire from even the
most junior and inexperienced Iraqi marksman. I could even make the blue target
area bigger by unclipping and lowering a special plate of upholstered Kevlar to
protect my balls. Now that really made the Marines’ day.

At least, they joked, I would be able to find out firsthand whether the
jacket lived up to its promise of being able to stop a round from an AK-47. None
of the Marines, I noticed, stood next to me for very long.

Time passed. I kept hacking at the mud.

I noticed there was an unusually fierce wind, which blew up the dried mud
from the marsh banks, giving the world a surreal orange-brown tint. Just what I
needed, I thought: the world getting more surreal.

As I dug my foxhole, I recalled the gross act of cowardice that had landed me
in Iraq in the first place. I was fast asleep in Los Angeles-where I had been
posted by The Times to write lighthearted and quirky stories about the
West Coast-when the floor underneath my bed began buzzing and shaking. It was
the phone. On the other end of the line was Martin Fletcher, The Times‘s
foreign news editor and my boss. My bedside alarm clock read 6.30 A.M. In
London, however, it was 2.30 P.M. Fletcher had already been up for at least
eight hours and, worse, had just had lunch. Fletcher often had ideas over lunch.
And they usually meant work for me.

“Ayres, do you want to go to war?” Fletcher asked cheerfully, as Alana, my
girlfriend, lay fast asleep beside me, oblivious that the conversation I was
having was about to change everything, forever.

I tried to summon blood to the brain cells that dealt with Fletcher’s often
baffling requests. The hangover from the previous night, however, and the
chronic lack of espresso, were working against me. “Yes!” I blurted. “Love to!”
My brain, unable to process the incoming data, had automatically called up a
standard response, like an Internet browser calling up a home page from its
memory when it’s not online. Respond in the positive, my brain remembered. Be
enthusiastic. Foreign correspondents are supposed to love wars, after all.
What kind of journalist would prefer to lie by the pool in West Hollywood,
drinking cappuccinos from Urth Caf茅 and writing about post-Oscar parties with
Donald Trump and Elton John? And didn’t Homer write in The Iliad that
every man should experience war, because war, like love, is one of the central
mysteries of life? Or was that Hemingway? Hang on, didn’t Hemingway say that in
war “you’ll die like a dog for no good reason” …?

Now I was awake. Fletcher continued. “The Americans seem to have some kind of
scheme … Make sure you get on it, Ayres. Good.” I reflexively made another
positive noise and Fletcher hung up. Shit, I thought to myself, and went
back to sleep. I dreamt of Sunset Boulevard, the Hollywood sign, Mulholland
Drive. When I awoke again, I realized what I had done. Was Fletcher serious?
Probably not, I reasoned. Why would he send a twenty-seven-year-old Hollywood
correspondent with no combat experience to war? The very idea was absurd. No
doubt I would end up writing a “color piece” from Qatar about an army chef
preparing scrambled eggs for the troops. That would be my contribution to the
paper’s war effort. Just in case Fletcher was serious, however, I came up
with an ingenious escape plan-it would make me look enthusiastic, heroic
even, and yet would also keep me far away from any live bullets. I would get
assigned to an aircraft carrier. I didn’t care what Homer or Hemingway said. No
one ever died like a dog for no good reason on an American aircraft carrier.

It was hard to concentrate on the digging, out there in the Iraqi marshlands.
Even though I had been at war for nearly a fortnight, I still hadn’t become
acclimatized to the man-made thunder sending pressure waves through the mud
banks every few minutes. The tremors were so violent they would surely have
registered on the Richter scale. I was, however, beginning to learn the
difference between them: The distant rumbles were bombs dropped by F-15 fighter
jets; the face-slapping pops were rounds from our own unit’s 155mm howitzer
cannons; the pfut-pfut-pfuts, meanwhile, were incoming Iraqi mortars. Of
all the noises, that one was the worst.

Naturally, I tried to react with a mixture of machismo and nonchalance. It
didn’t work. Nearly every blast made me drop my shovel and involuntarily scream,
“What the luck was that?” The Marines would turn to look at me, squint into the
weak, dusty sun, and explain: “Someone’s gettin’ some.” Then they would shake
their heads, possibly out of frustration with the “media dude,” or more likely
out of awe for the sheer force of the firepower around them.

“Boy, would I not like to be gettin’ some of that,” they would add
thoughtfully, with another head shake.

“That shit would suck.”

It was hard not to agree. “Yes,” I would offer, “that would certainly be
unpleasant.” I mentally pictured the bloodbath going on a few miles away, as
rounds the size of gasoline cans from our howitzers whooshed overhead and
separated into scores of mini-bomblets, raining down pure misery on those below.
“Good work, Marines,” I had heard a major say the day before. “The tanks up
front had nothing to fight but body parts.” It was no surprise that the Marines
to whom I had been assigned proudly called themselves the Long Distance Death
Dealers. They were as efficient as factory workers; a disassembly line, churning
out Iraqi body parts.

There’s no doubt about it: I should have just said no to Fletcher. But my
competitive instincts got the better of me. In other words, I didn’t have the
guts. Fletcher is an old-school Times man. Tall and marathon-runner lean,
with tousled dark hair, a billion-gigabyte brain, and inscrutable smile, he is
an English foreign correspondent from central casting. Although he is
technically an executive, he turns up to the office on a bicycle and never wears
a tie. He is, needless to say, irritatingly dashing for a man entering his fifth
decade with a wife and three teenage children (“Fletcher’s yummy,” a female
colleague once confided in me). His career, meanwhile, has been relentlessly
brilliant: Educated in Edinburgh and Pennsylvania, he spent the best part of a
decade as The Times‘s Washington bureau chief and American editor-the
journalistic equivalent of being the lead singer of the Rolling Stones-before
reporting from Belfast and publishing a best-seller about his U.S. travels
called Almost Heaven. It’s no secret in London that Fletcher hates being
wedged behind a desk. As he towers over his computer terminal, he makes it look
like some trivial toy. Fletcher belongs out in the field. Preferably an exotic
and dangerous field.

Fletcher could barely suppress the envy in his voice when he sent me on
assignments in far-flung corners of the U.S. “Go! Enjoy!” he would cry. “It’ll
be great fun! And think of us poor souls back here on the desk … Okay?
Good.” Fletcher ended almost all his sentences with “Good,” delivered so
quickly and sharply the double-o became almost redundant. It was as though he
was so busy he had to abbreviate his speech, like a hastily written e-mail:
“Gd.” I desperately wanted Fletcher to respect me. And if I turned Fletcher
down, I thought, he would no longer consider me a “proper” foreign correspondent
and send someone else-making a mental note to recall me from Los Angeles as soon
as possible.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS by CHRIS
AYRES Copyright 漏 2005 by Chris Ayres. Excerpted by permission.
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