War! War! Bloodred savage war! Cry havoc and loose the dogs of ditto. Saddam Hussein—he’s worse than Hitler, worse than Stalin, worse than waking up wearing a wedding ring next to Roseanne Barr. He invaded Iran. He invaded Kuwait. He even invaded some parts of the country he already lives in, that’s how crazy Saddam Hussein is. He’s got chemical weapons filled with … with … chemicals. Maybe he’s got the Bomb. And missiles that can reach Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Spokane. Stock up on nonperishable foodstuffs. Grab those Diet Coke cans you were supposed to take to the recycling center and fill them with home heating oil. Bury the Hummel figurines in the yard. We’re all going to die. Details at eleven.
It’s lots of fun being in the panic industry. If you can’t convince the world to love you, then scaring everyone out of their Bart Simpson Under-achiever-and-Proud-of-It T-shirts is the next best way to get attention and feel needed. My fellow members of the news media and I have been pursuing this strategy with zest since August 2. “Horror Show,” “Talk of War,” “Must This Mean War?,” “Should War Come: A Scenario,” read the headlines. Time ran a cover bannered “Is the World Ready for This?,” showing a photo of what looks like a cellular phone wrapped in a table napkin wearing RayBans and a shower cap but which was labeled “U.S. soldier testing chemical warfare gear in Saudi Arabia.” The daily papers and the nightly news are festooned with maps—arrows going every which way, little silhouettes of tanks and planes, and proposed casualty figures that look like long-distance phone numbers.
The U.S. government has also been pretty good at spreading alarm—not to mention money and guns—all over the place. We are sending 250,000 troops, six hundred fighter planes, three naval carrier groups, and twenty-six B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf, a little late to save Kuwait, maybe, but just in time to rescue the U.S. defense budget. One well-placed ICBM and Saddam Hussein would get the message, but that wouldn’t prevent Congress from taking all our Stealth Bomber money and giving it to naked National Endowment for the Arts performance artists to rub on their bodies while denouncing male taxpayers.
Everybody’s been cashing in on Hussein Hysteria. The Soviet Union is accumulating points in the civilized-nation lookalike contest. The UN thinks it might finally have found something to do for a living. My girlfriend plans to make a fortune selling “FUQ IRAQ” bumper stickers. Literary agents are lining up hostage tell-alls and sending faxes to Baghdad instructing trapped Americans to have poignant thoughts and spiritual insights and to get tortured a little, if possible. So many TV camera crews have descended on the Middle East that Arab authorities are rushing to tourist hotels to check the Gideon Bibles—Exodus, chapters 7 through 12—on the subject of plagues: blood, frogs, lice, flies, dead cattle, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, firstborn sons, and, yep, network anchormen. Of course, Jesse Jackson is on hand, warning the world in light verse couplets about a situation “Where the price of oil would go up/And the price of blood would go down.” The occasion being too solemn for rhyme.
So I figured I’d better get over there. I’ve been to the Middle East three whole times before and know several words in Arabic, including la (“no”) and Ayna akrab mal’ab golf? (“Where’s the nearest golf course?”), therefore I’m an expert, too, and can put things into perspective, give you a clearer picture of unfolding events, and maybe relieve some of the unnecessary fears and needless anxieties stirred up by cynical, sensationalistic journalists like me.
I know what you readers are saying to yourselves. You’re saying, “P.J., P.J., how can you possibly tell us what these people are going to do? Here they are gadding about in their mothers’ nightgowns, playing with pop beads and going, ‘Muhammad this’ and ‘Muhammad that,’ when they’ve got to know Ali is pushing fifty and has Parkinson’s disease and couldn’t go half a round with Razor Ruddock.”
Well, that just shows how ignorant of Arabic culture you readers are. Ali could go the distance with Ruddock any day of the week standing on one foot, I don’t care whose disease he’s got. Besides, the Arab peoples possess an ancient and highly developed civilization that is in many ways more sophisticated than our own. For instance, they invented algebra. And this is why we have to go to war with Saddam Hussein this minute and bomb the shish kebab out of him before he invents trig and chemistry and the whole of America flunks high school.
Sending everything we’ve got short of Dan Quayle in a National Guard uniform to the Middle East to keep Saddam Hussein from doing whatever it is that he hasn’t managed to do already is called “being the world’s policeman.” There’s a lot of argument about this, mostly from American newspaper editorial writers who like to begin paragraphs with “America isn’t the world’s policeman.” But you’ll notice that when Kuwait got invaded, nobody called Sweden.
So here we are, running around armed to the eyeballs in the same kind of weather you can get at the laundromat by putting two quarters in the dryer, while our domestic economy deflates like a cheap beach toy. And do we hear any thank-yous?
I hadn’t even gotten out of the Kennedy Airport Royal Jordanian Airline first-class lounge (a windowless room with two bottles of Johnnie Walker, no ice, a bowl of pistachios, and a television permanently tuned to Wheel of Fortune) before a Jordanian started in on me: “When Israel invades Sinai, did America send troops? When Israel invades the West Bank, did America send troops? When Israel invades Lebanon, did America send troops?” Of course he was being very unfair. We didn’t send troops but we did send arms, matériel, and a great deal of financial assistance. Albeit we sent them to Israel.
At the baggage carousel in Amman, a Jordanian-American businessman, when asked where the bureau de change was, answered with an impassioned defense of Saddam Hussein. “Again and again and again Iraq asked Kuwait to quit violating OPEC guidelines. Again and again and …”
I bought a copy of the Jordan Times. They wanted the Cold War restarted:
… it is most unfortunate that the Soviet glasnost and perestroika policy has meant giving the Americans more leeway to do what they want with the smaller countries in the world …
Like, you know, save their butts.
At my hotel an organization called the Child Welfare Committee of the General Union of Voluntary Services was handing out press releases about a “Women’s and Children’s March” to protest the trade embargo on Iraq: “Such a blockade constitutes no less than an act of savagery, unprecedented in recent history …”
The march was organized by the same kind of earnest, whole-grain busybodies we have in the States, wearing Birkenstock sandals and primitive jewelry and arriving at the demo in their husbands’ Volvos. They were trying to get seven or eight hundred kids under twelve to quit dropping, losing, and smacking each other over the head with printed signs reading, “ARAB WORLD IS MY WORLD,” “IRAQI CHILDREN = ARAB CHILDREN,” “HOW MANY KIDS’ LIVES FOR A BARREL OF OIL?” And “DO NOT KILL MOM.”
Do-gooders are always hard to figure, but watching the Women’s and Children’s March was—considering the porky guy with the poison gas who stands to benefit—like being a spectator at an Earth First! spotted owl shoot.
And one more thing I discovered on my first day in Jordan: the Jordanian-American Friendship Society has been dissolved. (Though its president, Mohammad Kamal, admitted, “The organization … has really been dormant since its establishment.”)
America is the world’s policeman, all right—a big, dumb Mick flatfoot in the middle of the one thing cops dread most, a “domestic disturbance.”
To the uninitiated, what Iraq did to Kuwait seems like regular war. Country A whacks Country B, which screams bloody murder, dragging Countries C, D, and E into the fray. But within the large, noisy, and exceedingly fractious family of Arabs, it’s not that simple. Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and so forth are hardly nations as we understand the term. They are quarrels with borders.
Until 1918 the Arabian peninsula was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, so called because it had the same amount of intelligence and energy as a footstool. When the Turks backed the wrong horse in World War I, the French and English divvied up the region in a manner both completely self-serving and unbelievably haphazard, like monkeys at a salad bar. The huge, senseless notch in Jordan’s border with Saudi Arabia, for instance, is known as “Winston’s Hiccup” because the then head of the British Colonial Office, Winston Churchill, is supposed to have drawn this line on a map after a very long lunch.
The British were fans of one Hussein ibn Ali, the Grand Sharif of Mecca, who led the Arab revolt against the Turks that Lawrence of Arabia claimed to be such an important part of. The British wanted to make members of Hussein’s Hashemite family kings of whatall and whichever. They crowned Hussein himself King of the Hejaz, the Red Sea coast of the Arabian peninsula. They put his son Faisal on the throne of Syria. But the French threw a fit, so the Brits moved Faisal to Iraq. And Faisal’s brother Abdullah—grandfather of the King Hussein we’ve got these days—was given the booby prize of Transjordan, an area previously known as “to-hell-and-gone-out-in-the-desert” when it was called anything at all.
In the 1920s, Ibn Saud—the man who put the “Saudi” in Saudi Arabia—chased Hussein ibn Ali out of the Hejaz. This is why the Jordanians hate the Saudis.
The Jordanians should hate the Iraqis, too, because the military government that Saddam Hussein now runs killed every available member of the Iraqi branch of the Hashemite family in 1958. But Jordan and Iraq are both too busy hating Syria for Syria’s attempt to achieve Arab hegemony by allying with Iran, invading Lebanon, and trying to gain control of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The PLO, meanwhile, nearly toppled King Hussein in 1970, whereupon the king, with Iraqi support, exterminated thousands of Palestinians. Thus the Palestinians should hate the Jordanians and vice versa, but since 65 percent of Jordanians are Palestinians, it’s easier for everybody to hate Israel.
Which still doesn’t explain why the people in Jordan are furious at the United States for coming to the aid of Kuwait. Unless it does.
Amman is a pretty dangerous place for an American to go—you wouldn’t believe the traffic. Everybody in Jordan drives everywhere at top speed. They parallel park at sixty miles an hour. And Jordanians never touch the brakes, turn signals, dimmer switch, or even the steering wheel. All driving is done by horn.
Amman’s street layout was designed using the splatter technique popular with action painters of the post–abstract expressionist school. The idea of numbering buildings and naming streets has been taken up, but in a grudging, desultory manner, the way baby boomers practice dental flossing.
There are no major intersections in Amman. Instead there are roundabouts, from which radiate four, six, eight, twelve, or thirty avenues. There’s really no telling because, although it’s possible to enter a roundabout from virtually any street in the city, it’s not possible ever to exit again.
This is why I missed a special Rotary Club of Jordan meeting called to protest America’s unfairness to Iraq. I had been eager to see the results of backslapping Rotarian boosterism applied to Islamic jihad: “Okay, fellows, any member who hasn’t drunk the blood of an infidel dog since the last meeting has to stand on his chair and sing ‘I’m a Little Teapot.’”
Rotary International is just the thing for Amman, a bland, clean, busy, humdrum, commercial city, a kind of Arab Brussels, although perched on spectacular hills.
The buildings are all cement block made to look like limestone, except for some made of the limestone the cement’s supposed to look like. By day the whole town is the color of those afternoons at the beach when you can’t tell where the sea ends and the sky begins, and by night it’s alive with the headlights of drivers lost in roundabouts. All the modest one- and two-floor cement homes have metal rebars left sticking up from their roofs like whiskers—a Third World symbol of hope, meaning the residents are planning to make enough money to add another story to the house. Even the poorest parts of the city are tidy and unodoriferous, thanks, in part, to huge subsidies Jordan receives from the oil-rich Gulf states such as Kuwait.
But subsidies or no, pictures of Saddam Hussein were beginning to appear on the smaller and shabbier storefronts and in the rear windows of taxicabs. Copies of that old anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were stacked next to the cash register in an expensive bookstore. And, according to the Amman Star, University of Jordan students “from all political trends” were condemning “Arab traitors, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait for inviting foreign troops into Arab and Islamic lands,” and calling for “a battle of honor against the United States, the Zionists and all other treacherous forces.”
The students had formed something called the Preparatory Committee for the General Union of Jordanian Students. One of their spokesmen said the Gulf crisis “pushed us to political extremism that hopes for an Arab-American confrontation that will lead to redrawing the map of the Arab world.” In which case I hope they get New Jersey.
I did manage to find—by just leaving my car in a roundabout and walking—the University of Jordan, a handsome, shady campus filled with polite kids. The members of the infelicitously acronymed PCGUJS said, however, that only the head of their Information Sub-Committee was authorized to make statements to the international press. To my relief, they couldn’t find him.
Most of the students at UJ were dressed like students anywhere, or better than that, Jordan being more or less a Mediterranean country and quite stylish. But about a third of the women students were wearing no makeup, scarves covering all their hair, and drab ankle-length dresses. This in adherence to fundamentalist Muslim rules of decorum which mean, basically, dressing the way middle-aged dads with teenage daughters think girls should. To judge by the amount of fiddling, tugging, and adjusting of the scarves, it was a fashion that had just come in. It’s been a long time since I was in college, so maybe I’ve forgotten how these things work, but a campus fad for looking like a Russian cleaning lady and acting like a nun seems odd.
When I got back to my hotel Saddam Hussein was on the English-language TV news, pestering a group of British expats he had stuck somewhere in Baghdad.
“Your presence here and in other places is best to avoid the scourge of war,” said Saddam through a not very competent translator. “Are you having recreational facilities?” Not waiting for an answer, he suggested they take a group photograph “about preserving the memory of this time,” then said, “Let’s put this on TV!” as though struck with a remarkable inspiration having nothing to do with the video cameras, soundmen, and lighting crews in the room. Saddam reached out with a beefy mitt and petted the head of a freckled little English kid later identified as Stewart Lockwood. “Are you playing volleyball with Iraqis?” asked Saddam, pawing the youngster’s face, kneading his cheeks, and playing with his nose. Young Stewart—sturdy chap—bore it all with more disgust than fear. A week later I was in Abu Dhabi, watching English-language news again, this time about Jesse Jackson’s return from putzing around in Iraq. And there was poor Stewart, now gripped by Jesse like a pet being taken to the veterinarian and giving Jackson exactly the same look he’d given Saddam. If we’re serious about achieving world peace, we could start by getting international political leaders to leave Stewart Lockwood alone.
I drove out to Ruwayshid, the Jordanian checkpoint where the refugees from Iraq and Kuwait were beginning to arrive in large numbers. It’s 250 kilometers through desert waste. Those of us brought up on Disney The Living Desert films expect time-lapse blooming century plants and lizards with funny tongues pursuing bugs all over the place. But in fact this desert looks like house plants do after six months in a bachelor’s apartment. It’s flat and featureless with nothing sentient visible. At noon the temperature is in the hundreds. Dust devils slop back and forth in dirty spirals across the plain. And the whole is bathed in a nasty shimmy of mirage. Mirage being not an optical illusion of a palm-fringed oasis, but the constant glare of hot sunlight reflected by an even hotter layer of air along ground that’s too hot to talk about.
There is one real oasis 100 kilometers from Amman, Al Azraq, a nasty littered collection of concrete-block buildings with a salt marsh and about fifteen half-dead date palms. This was Lawrence of Arabia’s headquarters and, for five dinars, an ancient worthy will tell you, “This was Lawrence of Arabia’s headquarters.”
Beyond Al Azraq the desert gets worse, all covered with small chunks of basalt that absorb and compound the nauseating heat. This is the Black Desert, where even Bedouin caravans wouldn’t go, because the sharp, heated stones destroyed the feet of their camels. After another 75 kilometers the desert gets worse yet. Solid lava flows with the texture of piles of razor blades are interspersed with lumps of basalt now big as chairs and sofas. And if you roll down your car window swarms of tiny flies cover every part of your exposed flesh.
Lawrence called Al Azraq a “luminous silky Eden,” and by the time you get back from Ruwayshid it actually looks that way.
This two-lane asphalt highway across the desert is the only ground link to Iraq, and there was plenty of blockade violating traffic on it. The Iraqis seemed to be running every old tanker truck they could get started, trying to get cash for their oil in Jordan. But the return traffic was not exactly a good-buddy, that’s-a-big-10-4 version of the Berlin airlift. Many of the trucks headed toward Baghdad were empty, very few seemed to be carrying food, and a number of them were loaded with two-by-fours or immense rolls of pulp paper, playing what part in the war effort I’m not sure.
The road is straight and paved in a sort of folk-craft blacktop. The truck drivers go right down the center crown to avoid as many potholes as they can, and nobody dawdles out here. It is a memorable experience to roll head-on with a closing speed of 240 kilometers per hour at a fully loaded eighteen-wheel gasoline truck being driven by somebody dressed like Yasir Arafat.
The rest of the traffic coming toward me was made up of refugees. I guess I’d expected them to be pushing all their belongings in baby carriages or something, the way movie newsreel refugees always were when I was a kid. That type of refugee would sizzle and pop open like a weenie on a grill in this climate. Besides, these were affluent refugees—at least they had been until recently—in Chevrolet Caprice Classics, 200-series Mercedes, Peugeots, and BMWs. And they were very modern refugees, people making a run for it not because Stukas were strafing their villages but because their bank cards wouldn’t work in Kuwaiti cash machines anymore.
Every refugee car carried suitcases tied on the roof, the immense vinyl suitcases of the underdeveloped world, big as folded-up rollaway beds. Each car was more splendidly loaded than the last, bearing huge swollen stacks of luggage, and every moment that these stacks stayed in place was a tribute to Middle Eastern knotwork. But now and then some vast baby-blue portmanteau would pitch loose and go vaulting down the highway berm like a rectangular Olympic gymnast, until it exploded—an underwear bomb.
Less affluent refugees were packed into buses. And refugees less affluent than that were standing in the back of open trucks. You’d see one of these trucks pulled to the side of the road for a piss break, its occupants scattered across acres of featureless landscape, squatting in their dishdasha robes to preserve some modesty during the call of nature.
At the Ruwayshid checkpoint thousands more refugees were arguing with officials and one another, standing in petrified lines, wandering around bedraggled, or patiently hunkering in whatever shade they could find. They were contained in a five-acre barbed-wire space with a dozen smelly cement buildings between two border-guard posts that looked like turnpike tollbooths. The compound was covered with shit and litter and aflutter with the Oriental mania for making copies of documents in triplicate and stamping everything with rubber stamps six or seven times. There seemed to be some food and water available, and a mosque where, when the muezzin made the midday call to prayer, nobody went.
These were the lucky refugees. Out in the desert toward Iraq, beyond the Jordanian border guards who refused to let me pass, were thousands and thousands more people with no shelter at all—thirsty, hungry, and desperate to get into Ruwayshid, the first-class section of hell.
I talked to a Jordanian named Abnan abu Sherke who’d waited two and a half days out there. He owned a store in Kuwait that he had abandoned and had five thousand dinars in a Kuwaiti bank, which were gone forever, and he’d driven 1,750 kilometers so far trying to get back to his family in Jordan.
“We are Arabs,” said Mr. Sherke in a pleasant and conversational tone of voice. “We are very happy because Iraq is face-to-face with the U.S. I have the admiration for Saddam Hussein. I lose everything but I am happy.”
The next day I drove the new four-lane desert highway out to Aqaba, Jordan’s only port and a would-be Red Sea tourist resort that looks like a Bulgarian’s idea of Fort Lauderdale.
This is another crucial chink in the international cordon that’s supposed to convince Saddam Hussein to act like Václav Havel. At the quays I counted two ships loading Jordanian phosphate, one rusty tramp steamer from Bombay, and a grossly overloaded car ferry full of Egyptian refugees headed for Suez. If Saddam is going to feed a nation of eighteen million people by way of Aqaba, they’d better start eating Egyptians and their automobiles.
In an absolutely empty souvenir shop downtown the doddering owner told me, “Jordan is a friend to all nations.” His thirty-year-old son said, “You know almost all the taxes you pay in America go to Israel, eighty percent.” He said he wasn’t anti-Semitic, either, because he’d gone to college in Romania and had a Jewish girlfriend there for six months.
I drove back to Amman by the old mountain route, 360 kilometers of goats in the right-of-way and spectacular cliff-top views of the Dead Sea that will kill you in a second if you take your eyes off the road. I passed through Wadi Musa, a mile of flat sand between cliffs as tall as the Empire State Building. Here are the Springs of Moses, where he struck the rock with his staff and brought forth water. And here are picturesque Bedouins with their flocks and tents and dreams of running a grocery store in Detroit.
I traversed the ancient lands of Ammon and Moab and Edom and viewed the sites of King Solomon’s Mines and the Palace of Herod where Salome danced for the head of John the Baptist. The mountain highway follows the same path that the Roman road took two thousand years ago, beside the ruined line of Crusader castles with remains of Byzantine, Ottoman, and British forts in between. It’s a kind of Grayline Tour of failed foreign policy initiatives.
These heights above the Jordan valley, along the great rift that runs from Africa almost to Europe, are the home and hearth of the entire world’s culture. The oldest remains of fixed human habitations—houses from eleven thousand years ago—have been found here in Beida and Jericho. These people buried dead children in jars under their living room floors. No kidding. I checked up on it at the Archaeological Museum in Amman—evidence that not only the Arab world but our entire civilization was founded by crazy people.
Near Wadi Musa, about 95 kilometers north of Aqaba, I stopped for a few hours to look at the ruins of Petra. This was the great stronghold of the Nabataean Arabs who flourished from the fourth century BC until the first century of the Christian era by straddling the caravan route from Arabia Felix to the Tigris-Euphrates valley. They made their money by helping themselves to some of everything that went by—a previous example of vast, unearned wealth in the Middle East.
The Nabataeans used their swag to build Petra, which can be reached only by traveling down the floor of an unnerving canyon called the Siq—three hundred feet deep and barely wide enough for three people to walk abreast. At the end of this passage is a two-square-mile city of tombs, temples, houses, and public buildings all carved into the face of living rock in the most elaborate Greek and Roman styles. It is a monumental hidey-hole, a thing done by mad children with unlimited resources.
Trade routes shifted. Petra lost its livelihood. The very location of the place was forgotten, and it wasn’t rediscovered until the early nineteenth century. Bedouins were still building their cooking fires in the palaces of Petra until a few years ago, when the Jordanian government’s Department of Antiquities shooed them out. They come back to water their flocks and lead tourists around. A kid of about fourteen was showing me a spectacular Doric cavern with a strong smell inside. “Is here was the great temple,” I said in profound and solemn pigdin, “and now is used to pen goats.” The Bedouin kid looked at me like I was a big dope. I had some better idea what to use it for?
The situation down in the Gulf States is, of course, very different from that in Jordan. For one thing, the guy who stamped my passport at the Abu Dhabi airport was wearing a wristwatch worth more than my car. Also, we’ve got a quarter of a million troops around here keeping the locals from being pounded like cheap veal, so they’re very pro-American. Well, sort of pro-American. “The foreign forces will leave the area as soon as the reasons for which they came are ended,” said the United Arab Emirates defense minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Tashid in an interview with the UAE Khaleej Times, which also ran an editorial blaming the whole Gulf crisis on “big powers.”
The big powers have only themselves to blame for what is happening now. Greedy for money they and unscrupulous arms dealers in Western countries have supplied Iraq with all the weapons now being pointed at themselves.
So maybe they’re not very pro-American, but they’re very pro–not getting pounded like cheap veal. The exiled defense minister of Kuwait told the Gulf Times that he’d order an immediate attack on Iraq if he were commanding the U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, and as I got into the elevator to go to my room at the Abu Dhabi Sheraton, a Kuwaiti in a perfectly pressed dishdasha and carefully draped ghutra headdress began to speak to me in high-speed Arabic: “America something-something-something-something.” I shrugged and he held up an admonishing index finger. “Quickly! Quickly!” he said.
The Gulf is a place that does not surrender itself easily to mere description. The weather, to begin with, is so bad in September that people long for the interior of Saudi Arabia. When I was there the temperature was over 110 degrees every day, but with a dampness that can’t be possible under skies as blue as a vinyl swimming-pool liner. The windows of my hotel room were frosted like an iced-tea pitcher. One afternoon the humidity was actually 100 percent, at which point air isn’t even vapor. I was breathing soup. A poison gas attack would be wholly redundant here.
Everything is air-conditioned, but not for comfort. An air-conditioned car is like a space suit. Step outside it for more than a few seconds at midday and you get dizzy, sick, and as wet as if you’d been flushed down a toilet.
And there’s the architecture. Abu Dhabi is new, really new, with a half million people packed into an unrelenting pre-post-modernism worse than Epcot Center. I’ve seen a photograph of old Abu Dhabi. There was a mud fort, of exactly the kind used as the set of Beau Geste. There was a mud mosque. There was the home of the British colonial officer and a few Bedouin tents. That was it. That was the whole town. The picture was taken in 1966.
Now buildings tower, ooze, and mushroom in every shape that concrete can be poured. Some are trimmed in chrome and smoked glass like the coffee tables in time-share condos, and others make a daffy nod to Islamic tradition with pointless pointed arches opening to nowhere or senseless spreads of mosaics on ceilings instead of floors. My hotel was supposed to evoke, with rounded crenelations and brown tints, the mud fort in the center of town. But it only succeeded in looking like a grain elevator.
The city is laid out in an uncompromised grid which should make it easy to get around in even during the twilight 500SEL Benz-lock. But, instead of a few numbered addresses like Amman, there are none, and no concept that a street, once named, should keep that name for any length of its existence. Thus in a downtown as simple as a tic-tac-toe board, I lost the whole Saudi embassy, and two street maps, the concierges at three hotels, the Avis rent-a-car girl, the marines on duty at the U.S. embassy, several shopkeepers, an imam at a mosque, and the guards at the ambassador of Saudi Arabia’s own residence were unable to direct me there.
When I did find the Saudi embassy, two days later, it was a big and obviously expensive building with not only no style but no discernible front. The reception room was bare except for chrome and Naugahyde conference-room chairs, one dusty Formica-topped table, and a standing ashtray. The floor was cheap terrazzo, the walls shabby stucco, but the ceiling was covered with rococo plasterwork painted in pink and aqua and highlighted with gold leaf. On the wall was an official Saudi government map of the Arabian peninsula, which—in case you think the Kuwait fracas is the last we’re going to hear from this neck of the woods—indicated disputed borders with the UAE, Oman, Qatar, and Yemen.
There is no charm in Abu Dhabi. As the Economist Business Traveler’s Guide to the Arabian Peninsula puts it, “There are virtually no ‘sights’ as such.” And the only place I’ve ever seen with worse aesthetics or a greater taste for flash and fake was Jim and Tammy Bakker’s Heritage Village USA. To which place the UAE bears other similarities as well. “Oil wealth has also reinforced the religious basis of society in the Emirates,” says a locally printed tourist booklet. “Today, in the cities, no one need walk further than half a kilometer to the mosque.”
There are beautiful gardens, however, along all the streets and in every open space, all brought to blooming, verdant life by that thing which, in the desert, is more precious than gold—money. Even the superhighways have gardens. The road that runs 130 kilometers to the oasis of Al Ain in the mountains on the Oman border is irrigated and landscaped the entire way, sleeved in date palms and tamarisk trees and flowering shrubs, the plants tended by brown, sweating people from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Egypt. Only here and there can you see what’s behind the mask of greenery, which is nothing, the true, complete nothing of the sand desert. There are not only no plants or animals but not even any objects, just creeping, blowing, red-blond sand in dunes that rise as high as three hundred feet.
I went, in the early mornings when I could almost stand the heat, to the suqs, the open-air markets in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Though almost nothing is manufactured in the Emirates, or, really, anywhere in the Arabian Peninsula, shops were stuffed with goods, a barbaric splendor of merchandise—truly barbaric. That is, synthetic fabrics of astonishing ugliness, shoddy housewares, bad appliances, every kind of electronic gimcrack known to East Asia, a million overpriced Rolexes, garish nylon carpets in lampoons of Persian designs, gold necklaces with medallions bigger than salad plates, gems cut and set like carnival prizes, furniture to make a Mafia wife wince, and table lamps Liberace wouldn’t have owned.
We think of a barbarian as somebody with a bone in his nose. But, in fact, a barbarian is more likely to have his nose full of a Hong Kong Shalimar knockoff. I wonder if all the polyester and highway beautification will weather as well as the ruins of Petra.
But, never mind. World peace and international order must prevail, so we’re going to sacrifice ourselves and our treasure … Well, not actually our own personal selves. More like eighteen- to twenty-year-old selves who couldn’t find worthwhile civilian jobs. And the treasure is borrowed, like the rest of the national debt. But you know what we mean. We’re going to make the same brave, selfless sacrifices to save the Arabs from Saddam Hussein’s crazed aggression that we made to save the Jews from Hitler’s death camps, the Cambodians from Pol Pot’s massacres, and the Poles, Hungarians, and Czechoslovaks from Stalin’s terror … That is, the same brave, selfless sacrifice that we were going to make as soon as the Jews, Cambodians, Poles, Hungarians, and Czechoslovaks struck oil.
This is the first globally broadcast, real-time, live, on-camera, televised war. It’s so televised, in fact, that increasing CNN’s Nielsen share seems to be an allied war aim only slightly less important than degrading Saddam Hussein’s command-and-control capability. However, what you’re reading is, as you may have noticed, print. My report is not electronic, maybe not even electric. To judge by the sound of this rented typewriter, I’ve got one of the early IBM diesel models. These words are thus as out-of-date as the U.S. State Department’s tilt toward Iraq in the last Gulf war. By the time you read this we may be up to our Kevlar underpants in the kind of bloody trench warfare not seen since the French got their crepes folded at the Somme. Or we may be drinking Saudi near-beer out of the open-toed slippers of Saddam Hussein’s harem concubines in liberated Baghdad. Who knows? Truth is the first casualty of war, but, in this particular conflict, print journalism took the second hit.
What you’re reading is not only out-of-date, it’s hastily written and disorganized, too. This is war, for chrissake. At least that’s my excuse. Actually, the best thing about this war has been all the new excuses generated by the Pentagon briefing officers. These will doubtless prove handy to Americans in all walks of life, especially schoolkids who haven’t done their homework.
“My book report impacted harmlessly in an unpopulated area.”
“I can’t tell you what happened in 1812, we’re waiting on the bomb-damage-assessment reports.”
“I’m sorry but units of elite Republican Guards were dispersed and dug in around my algebra problem.”
I arrived in Saudi Arabia thirty-two hours after the war began having taken a sixteen-hour flight in the cargo hold of an Air Force C-141 Starlifter. There were 126 other journalists on the trip. Now that Twisted Sister has disbanded, the C-141 Starlifter is the single noisiest thing on earth. The journalists couldn’t hear themselves think. Of course there’s nothing unusual about 127 journalists not thinking, but the Starlifter was so loud that the journalists couldn’t talk. And 127 journalists silent for sixteen hours is another first for this war.
We had a brief stop in Frankfurt, where we received what the air force called “a hot Italian food meal” followed by everybody’s last Scotch until the war is over. We landed “somewhere in eastern Saudi Arabia,” which means the port area of Dhahran on the Persian Gulf about 180 miles south of the Kuwaiti border—as Saddam Hussein has surely figured out by now. Then we were herded into a U.S. military briefing where it was explained to us that we could do absolutely nothing as journalists without U.S. military permission to do it, and whatever it was that we got permission to do, we might not be able to do that either.
In fact—as of this writing—the military has been reasonably helpful in dragging journalists out to places of moderate discomfort and/or mild danger and letting those journalists ask Oprah Winfrey–quality interview questions. But the military press office—the Joint Information Bureau, or JIB—has a strictly grade-school field-trip mentality with much posting of rules, schedules, and little lists of things reporters are expected to bring along. The JIB will be requiring notes from our parents next.
Reporters used to covering “low-intensity conflicts”—where we took taxis to the fighting and it was the U.S. military advisers who weren’t supposed to be there—are, in a word, bored. But, in an un-low-intensity conflict, bored is the way to be. It means you’re still alive. Besides, what’s really hurting journalism around here isn’t military censorship, it’s military jargon. Spend more than an hour at the JIB and you begin calling the staircase “a foot-impelled bi-directional vertical transport asset.”
I haven’t been to the front yet. There are more than seven hundred journalists here—far more newsmen than there is news—and there’s only room for about one hundred of them on the military “pools” covering the troops. Also, I’m here as a radio journalist but am not even sure which part of a tape recorder takes the pictures.
I’d been trying to get a Saudi Arabia visa since Iraq invaded Kuwait last August, but when the name of your magazine means “a large rock that moves around” and its pages are filled with pictures of Madonna wearing cookie tins on her chest, you don’t get taken as seriously as the guys from Time. John Lyons, an old friend of mine at ABC radio, got me a slot as an emergency incompetent broadcast correspondent, and I’m left in the rear manning the phones and explaining the Gulf crisis to Blitzo Bob and Rocket Jaw Jim on the WONK Morning Drive-Time Zoo.
That’s all right. The rear is where the action’s been. We call it “Club Scud.” We’ve had missile attacks almost every night. When the first attack came, ABC-TV producer Derwin Johnson and I got in a car and began driving around Dhahran looking for missile damage. We heard sirens and saw flashing lights on one of the main roads. We rushed to the scene and discovered a car wreck. Then we heard more sirens and saw other flashing lights. We rushed to that scene and discovered another car wreck. We saw four or five smashups that night, including one involving a police car. When the air-raid sirens go off everybody starts looking at the sky instead of the road, and Saddam Hussein’s most fearsome weapon of the war’s first week was the unguided Chevrolet Caprice Classic sedan.
The first sign of a Scud attack is a deep, vibrant whoosh from the Patriot antimissile missile being fired. Then there’s a crack when the Patriot breaks the sound barrier, followed by a light in the sky and a huge boom from the Scud being destroyed. After that there’s a brief pause followed by an incredibly loud air-raid siren, which our hotel sets off to let us know that the Scud attack that has just happened is expected soon. This sends the Filipino waiters and Indian busboys into a panic. They go running down the stairs to the air-raid shelter, colliding, on the way, with journalists running up the stairs to see the Scud fireworks from the hotel roof. Getting out on the roof is the third most dangerous thing about the Scuds—after car wrecks and falls on the staircase. You have to go through the blacked-out kitchen of the Chinese restaurant on the top floor, and there’s considerable danger of falling into a big pot of stewed cat.
A Scud only carries about 250 pounds of explosives which—assuming the Patriots don’t get it first—would create a blast a hundred yards wide at the most. These missiles are being lobbed into an area of eastern Saudi Arabia that’s roughly fifty miles long and thirty miles wide. That’s 4,626,400,000 square yards. The actual chance of taking a direct Scud hit is two in a million. Don’t tell CNN this, however. Its nightly Scud watch—called the “Range-Finder Show” for its comments on where the missiles seem to be headed—is about all we have in the way of entertainment here.
Not only is this the first live televised war, it’s also the first war ever covered by sober journalists. There is nothing available in Saudi Arabia with more “command-and-control capability” than O’Doul’s. Which explains why a lot of the coverage from here seems a bit, well, sober. (Some of us journalists have discovered, by the way, that what we’d thought for years was the pain of genius was, in fact, a hangover.)
Coverage from here has been sober and—as sobriety often is—uninformative. After five months of the United States being about as involved with another country as it’s possible to get, most folks back home still don’t know what Saudi Arabia looks like. Sand and camels, they think. Sand and Marlboros and Pepsi would be more like it. Eastern Saudi Arabia looks like Arizona would if Arizona had beautiful beaches. There’s the same big sky, the same sparse vegetation, and the same modern architecture—most of it ugly, just like in Phoenix.
Local mores do not, however, allow for much in the way of beach blanket bingo or Sports Illustrated swimsuit-edition photo ops. And there are no movie theaters, nightclubs, discos, or rock concerts either. And no Victoria’s Secret catalogs or even lingerie ads from the New York Times Magazine. But there are superhighways, supermarkets, and malls. Most of the power shoppers are men. What few women you see are all in black, veiled up past the forehead and draped down to the ground. When the women want a better look at things in the market, they pull the hems of their veils out and over the merchandise like nineteenth-century photographers taking tintypes.
Saudi Arabia is perhaps the richest country on earth, and there are some big houses here and some Mercedes-Benzes that aren’t much smaller. But it’s not an ostentatious nation. Saudi men all dress the same no matter their wealth or importance. They wear sandals and a long nightshirt of a dishdasha or thobe, in white cotton or brown wool according to the season. They wear white or red-checked gutra headdresses held in place by the igal headband, a cord that was once used by Bedouins to hobble their camels. Status is told by the details—a Rolex watch, a Mont Blanc pen, a gold Dunhill lighter.
Saudi mansions are built close to each other. The two- or three-story houses are always plastered white and usually roofed in red tile. The architecture is grand in scale but austere in form—a sort of large, dull cousin of the Spanish colonial style. Each home is enclosed in a small garden. You don’t see the slew of leisure toys with which rich Americans clutter their yards. There are no ski boats, ATVs, dirt bikes, camper vehicles, ultra-light airplanes, hang gliders, or whatnot. The desert comes right up to the garden walls.
Not that Saudi Arabia is all desert. There are large oases along the Persian Gulf coast. These contain thousands of date palms in a landscape so ripe, wet, and buggy that it could come out of central Florida. Except that these groves of palm trees have been occupied by the same clans of strict and pious Arabs for fourteen centuries. Imagine Disney World without the Disney and without the world.
Most native Saudi Arabians are adherents of the orthodox Sunni Muslim Wahabi sect. Wahabis are strict like old-fashioned American Baptists—no drinking, dating, mixed dancing, or movie going. But the Wahabis are not looney televangelist-with-a-gun fanatics of the Ayatollah Khomeini stripe. The religious practices and attitudes of Saudi Arabia are no more peculiar than those of Billy Graham. A churchgoing, small-town American from forty years ago would be perfectly familiar with the public morality here. Only the absolute segregation of the sexes would seem strange. And I’m not so sure about that. At O’Rourke family Thanksgiving dinners in the fifties all the men were in the living room watching bowl games and the women were in the kitchen washing dishes.
During the nine days that I’ve been here I have, of course, spent most of my time watching CNN to see what’s happening to me. But I’ve also managed to visit the markets, or suqs, in the various towns along the Gulf coast—Dammam, Al Khubar, Qatif, Tarout. It’s nice for an American to be someplace where people love the country they come from—a big change from being in America.
I’ve tried to get some “man in the suq” radio interviews but without much success. People are shy of the tape recorder. But they’re eager to shake hands, say Marhaba (“Hello”), buy me a cup of coffee, and ask about the war. “You are the journalist but now we will interview you,” said a wholesaler in the Dammam fruit and vegetable market. I asked why he wanted to do that. “Because you have talked to too many people”—an accurate solecism if ever I’ve heard one. The people in the market wanted to know how dangerous the Scuds were, how the air war was going, when the ground war would start. They said they didn’t trust the information they were getting. They wanted to talk to a newsman and hear the real story. I asked where they were getting this information that they didn’t trust. “From the news,” they said.
People in eastern Saudi Arabia are still worried about poison-gas attacks. Nobody here goes anyplace without a gas mask. The masks come in imitation leather shoulder bags. Every man on the street has one. Dhahran looks like it’s hosting an international convention of purse snatchers. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is virtually no crime in Saudi Arabia. You can leave the key in your car ignition here and leave your wallet and watch on the car roof. This is one of the most honest places on earth and for good reason. Under Shari’ah religious law murder is considered a mere civil matter, involving monetary compensation of some kind, but theft can be punished by amputation of a hand. There’s also no begging or importuning or wheedling of any kind. I don’t know what they amputate for this offense, but whatever it is, I suggest we start cutting it off in New York City.
The Dhahran area seems a bit empty and, at the same time, overpopulated with foreigners—sort of like Paris in August. Many local residents have decided that Scud month is a good time to visit relatives down around Yemen somewhere. But other than light traffic and ever-present gas masks, life is normal. Food prices have actually gone down and the only notable shortage is of AA batteries. This tells us that the U.S. troops are moving up to the front. As the troops leave, they empty the battery racks, stocking up to keep their Walkmans running. This is—one more first—the first war where everybody gets to pick his or her own theme music.
In case you’re wondering, a gallon of premium gasoline costs 58 cents, and, no, you don’t get your windshield washed. The gas stations are just like ours, including the bathrooms. Most bathrooms in this part of the world are Turkish style—you put a foot on either side of a hole in the floor and hunker down. But Saudi Arabian gas stations are equipped with American facilities. Some of the local people are unaccustomed to using these, however, which leads to footprints on the toilet seats.
U.S. troop morale seems to be ridiculously good. I ran into some members of the 101st Airborne Division buying art supplies in downtown Al Khubar. I’d say that indicates confidence (not to mention a previously little-suspected creative bent among our nation’s paratroopers). The soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, coast guarders, and whatever in Dhahran are cheerful. Maybe they’re cheerful because they’re not off in hell’s outhouse somewhere sleeping in sand holes and eating MREs (Meals Ready to Eat or, as they’re called, “Meals Refused by Ethiopians”). But from what we’ve been seeing in the “pool” reports and hearing from the reporters who’ve been to forward positions, the troops up there are in a pretty good mood, too.
It’s important to remember that the 1991 U.S. military is not made up of Oliver Stone and his hootch-torching platoon of hopheads. These young men and women were barely born then. They’re the Reagan Kids. They took one look at the sixties leftovers which littered their childhoods and said, “Give me a haircut and a job.” They’ve got skills, training, education, and if they’d just quit calling me “sir” and telling me, “You’re the same age as my mom,” they’d be the salt of the earth.
One more thing about this generation of soldiers—they grew up in video arcades. It’s no coincidence that watching the Gulf War’s high-tech weapons on our TV screens is so much like watching computer games. This war is the daddy of all Mario Brothers, the Gog and Magog of hacker networks, the devil’s own personal core dump. And our soldiers have an absolutely intuitive, Donkey Kong–honed, gut-level understanding of the technology behind it. Thank God they do. It’s why we’re winning. So here’s what you folks back home can do to help with the war effort. If you happen to have any kids and they’re outdoors exercising in the fresh air and sunshine, give them hell: “YOU GET IN HERE RIGHT NOW AND PLAY NINTENDO!” The future of our nation may depend on it.
January 28 through February 8, 1991
Monday, January 28, Dammam Suq
It’s supposed to be a male-dominated society in Saudi Arabia, but I’m not so sure. There are amazing dresses for sale in the stores here—loud-colored silks and violently patterned satins with gold embroidery and gem-stone trimmings. Under those black abayas Saudi women are wearing important fashion statements. There are also a lot of jewelry stores with big gold necklaces and big ruby bracelets and diamond rings so large that you’d practically have to wear them on both hands at once just to lift them. I’m a married man. If this were really a male-dominated society, the jewelry stores would be stocked with plastic pop beads and the only thing the dress shops would sell is aprons. Plus the prices would be easier to read.
Since the time of the Crusades we in the West have been using “Arabic numerals.” But the numerals actually used in Arabia are different. The 1 is the same, but an Arabic 2 looks like a backward 7. A 4 is a backward 3. A 7 is a 6. A zero is a 5. And a little dot is a zero. I don’t know why the numbers are different, but I can guess. I’ll bet if we went back and examined the Crusaders’ expense-accounts, we’d find out that Richard the Lionheart got skinned.
Tuesday, January 29, Half Moon Bay
Oil is so important in Saudi Arabia that thoughts of “Liquid MasterCard” seem to pervade everything. The U.S. Consulate in Dhahran hands out a pamphlet to visiting Americans. The pamphlet gives tips on tourism and recreational activities. A suggested picnic outing: “The beaches nearby are open to the general public and afford a good view of the oil terminal.”
Wednesday, January 30, Al Khubar
One of the pleasures of going someplace where people don’t speak English is making fun of the English the people don’t speak. Many of the commercial signs in Saudi Arabia are printed in English—more or less. I’ve seen the “Decent Barber Shop” and the “Meat Cow Fresh Butcher Shop,” also “Wow” brand toilet paper, a fast-food restaurant advertising “humburgers” (ham being illegal), and a fancy model of running shoe called, in all innocence, “Crack.”
Of course, when it comes to truly not speaking English, it’s impossible to top the U.S. Department of Defense. The DOD calls a metal nut—the metal nut that goes on a bolt—I’m not kidding about this—a “hexaform rotatable surface compression unit.”
A more peculiar feature of Saudi Arabia is intersection art. There are lots of traffic circles, and in the middle of each traffic circle is … something. Devout Muslims don’t approve of statues of people, so there aren’t any of those. But, just in the Al Khubar area alone, there is a giant cement Arab coffeepot (a symbol of hospitality), a scale model of the Space Shuttle (because a Saudi prince was a crew member on one mission), a real twenty-foot-long fishing boat mounted on a concrete plinth, a large jet airplane engine in a glass case, and an entire mosque, utterly isolated and unreachable on its island in the highway. There’s also a lot of abstract stuff, such as a huge metal spiral (representing oil prices?) and two immense stucco triangles flanking what appears to be the robot vacuum cleaner from The Jetsons. What I have not seen in a traffic circle—and don’t think I will see—is a monument to the first Saudi Arabian who learns how to signal a turn.
Thursday, January 31, International Press Headquarters, Dhahran
There don’t seem to be a lot of celebrities protesting against this war. New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg did wear a “War Sucks” T-shirt at the Grammy awards, but that’s about it. In fact, I’ve heard that Jane Fonda has decided to maintain public silence on the subject of Desert Storm. Getting Jane Fonda to be quiet—this alone makes fighting Iraq worthwhile.
The Saudi Arabian beach resort of Khafji has been retaken. Which leaves us with the question: What do Saudi Arabians do at a beach resort? The women are dressed in tents, you can’t get a beer to save your life, and it’s hard to play beach volleyball when you trip over your dishdasha every time you serve. As much as I can figure, the only amusement that’s available in Khafji is the one we’ve just witnessed—shooting Iraqis.
You may wonder what the job of being a Gulf War journalist is like. Well, we spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening over here. And we learn what’s happening over here by spending all day monitoring the radio and TV broadcasts from back home. You may also wonder how any actual information ever gets into this loop. If you find out, please call.
Friday, February 1, International Press Headquarters, Dhahran
Dogs are considered “unclean” in Saudi Arabia. Which, if you think about it, is true so far as it goes. Sport does like to get mud on the bedspread and roll in stuff on the lawn. But camels are not considered unclean in Saudi Arabia. This leads me to believe that the Saudi Arabians know something about house training animals that we do not.
Members of the press corps have been trying to figure out what the U.S. military means when it talks about “air supremacy.” We think it means that American air force pilots bombing Iraq are the only people in the world who can take a long trip by air and not have to change planes in Atlanta.
The so-called pool system of reporting the war is causing a lot of frustration. The U.S. military puts together groups, or pools, of reporters—one reporter from each kind of media. Then the military takes these pools on little trips to see things. This is like not being able to go to a football game unless Joe Montana invites you personally. If the pool system were used in dating, two hundred people would … well, it would be the 1960s all over again. If we got our news at home the way we’re getting it here, the only time you’d know about a fire would be when kids playing with matches phoned the local newspaper before they lit the living room drapes.
Sunday, February 3, Dhahran Air Base
I was interviewing some British Tornado pilots who’ve been flying missions deep into Iraq—missions that sometimes take four or five hours. And I asked them the question that was foremost in my mind: “Isn’t that a long time to go without taking a leak?”
It turns out the pilots do have “relief sacs.” But they’re wearing so much clothing—flight suits, G-suits, chemical-weapon-protection suits—that it takes them ten minutes just to get ready to use these aerial bedpans. So they avoid liquids for a couple of hours before they fly, and, so far, only one Tornado pilot has actually relieved himself over Iraq. And, no, he did not target civilian areas.
Monday, February 4, the Road to Abqaiq
Out in the Saudi desert I came across one of the strangest road-hazard signs I’ve ever seen. I was driving through a region of huge sand dunes, and every mile or so there would be a triangular sign—the kind that says SLOW, CHILDREN or DEER CROSSING in the States. But these signs said SAND DUNES. Sand dunes drift at a rate of about thirty feet a year. Saudi Arabians are fabulously bad drivers, but even they should be able to avoid something that’s moving at less than one millionth of a mile per hour.
Wednesday, February 6, King Fahd Air Base
I was with a couple of U.S. Air Force officers, and they were complaining how everything has to be shipped in here—food, water, even the most primitive construction materials. While they were grousing I was looking around at all the bunkers, gun emplacements, and air-raid shelters built out of sand bags—thousands and thousands of sand bags. “Well,” I said, “I bet there’s one thing you guys can get locally …”
“You’re wrong,” said the air force officers. “We know what you’re going to say, but the sand here isn’t the right kind of sand to make sand bags—too powdery.” So the U.S. military is shipping sand to Saudi Arabia.
Because of the time difference, we get the late-night TV talk shows here early in the morning. Arsenio Hall by himself is alarming enough at 8:00 a.m. but this morning he had Sandra Bernhard on and, whoa, talk about something that doesn’t go with breakfast. At least she makes the troops feel a little better about there being no USO shows here.
We’ve been having an informal competition to come up with the worst movie idea based on this war so far. Here’s a strong contender: A group of American war correspondents somehow gets trapped behind enemy lines, and they have to complain and exaggerate their way out of Iraq.
Thursday, February 7, Hofuf
This is an ancient oasis town a hundred miles off into the Saudi desert, and it’s one of the few places in this country that retains any character or visual charm. It has narrow-roofed streets in the suq. There’s a bit of Ottoman Empire architecture left mid the concrete-block modernism. And Hofuf has one of the world’s largest mud forts, a place that looks like … one of the world’s largest mud forts.
It must have been interesting to live here. I guess when you grow up in a mud fort, Mom yells, “You kids take your shoes off before you leave—I don’t want you tracking our house all over the outdoors.”
Friday, February 8, International Press Headquarters, Dhahran
I watched Secretary of State Baker’s speech to the House Foreign Relations Subcommittee the night before last, and I actually heard the secretary say that America will help rebuild the economy of Iraq after this war. Mr. Secretary, I just can’t tell you what enthusiasm your plan has inspired here in Saudi Arabia. First, let’s give the Iraqis Michael Milken so he can set up a Baghdad junk-bond market. Then we’ll send in Michael Dukakis for a repeat performance of his Massachusetts Miracle.
As everyone knows, the U.S. military censors our “news pool reports.” We’re not supposed to tell specific locations—cities, military bases, etc. We’re only allowed to name the country or, at most, the general region of that country.
One of my radio pool-report tapes came back from the censors with a so-called red flag and a note saying, “You cannot mention ‘Thumerate’ in Oman.” I’d never heard of Thumerate. In vain I searched the map of Oman for Thumerate. Finally I played the tape back. What the military censors were sure was a city or vital base—Thumerate—was an air force colonel from North Carolina saying, “The emirate of Oman.”
We keep hearing about Iraq’s “elite Republican Guard.” Well, if they’re so elite why don’t they have better jobs than sitting around getting the stuffing bombed out of them in Kuwait? And what are they guarding anyway—big charred wrecks of buildings and blown-up bridges? And one more thing—how many of these elite Republican guards are really Republicans?
At the Front, Early February 1991
Halfway through a ninety-minute flight to the front lines aboard a C-130 Hercules cargo plane, Colonel Clay Bailey, commander of the U.S. Air Force’s 317th Tactical Airlift Wing, said, “The crew calls this plane the ‘Franken-Herc.’”
I asked why.
“Because it was patched together from two other C-130s that crashed,” said the colonel with the large smile that military men get when they’re scaring civilians.
The inside of a Hercules is like an airborne basement, with wires, pipes, and ductwork covering whatever you call an airplane’s walls and ceiling. There’s room for 42,000 pounds of cargo. Colonel Bailey wouldn’t tell me what this cargo was, a secret which made me sincerely hope his crew would avoid air turbulence, let alone enemy antiaircraft fire.
The cargo was in wooden boxes held in place by what looked like oversized women’s hairnets. Each net-full rested on a metal plate as wide as the plane, and the plates sat on a wheel-covered deck—a kind of reverse skateboard or roller floor that allows the cargo to be rapidly shoved out the back when the plane lands or even when it doesn’t land, if parachutes are used.
We were flying at 6,000 feet with fighter planes somewhere above and below us so that we were the tuna fish in a giant airlift sandwich. There was nothing to see from the cockpit except winter desert haze—endless murky gray-brown ground and murky gray-blue sky with a smudge of horizon in between. We seemed to be inside a bad Mark Rothko painting. But if I looked straight below us and concentrated, I could pick things out, things that looked like random scatterings of runes or Arabic letters—wiggles and dots in the sand. The wiggles were berms—bulldozed ridges of sand pushed up around the tents, tanks, guns, and trucks, which were the dots. Berms are this war’s trenches. You get dug in, but first you get bermed up. There was nothing actually random about the wiggles. This was a modern front with soldiers and weapons carefully spread around thousands of square miles. It is to the front lines of past wars as today’s pro football defense is to the way football was played in the 1950s. The troops don’t just line up and crouch anymore.
At first a modern front didn’t seem impressive, and then I realized how long I’d been looking at wiggles and dots while flying by at 300 miles an hour. This is a big, but uncrowded, war. The sky isn’t black with airplanes. The ground isn’t honeycombed with bunkers. Everything in this war is so powerful, so fast, and has so much range and reach that a roomy bloodbath is required.
The C-130 landed on a mile-long blocked-off section of a two-lane highway about fifteen miles from the Iraqi border. The plane came in at the same angle that’s used for bobsled runs. The pavement was only twenty feet wider than the landing-gear track. This is not a large margin of error when crosswinds are blowing, and they always are. Outside the scenery was similar to that photographed on Mars by the Viking spacecraft—so similar as to be identical and I think a NASA audit is called for.
The land was hard-packed grit the color of blood and diarrhea. It was strewn with mud-pie-looking rocks and was so awful in its perfect flatness that I thought I could see the curvature of the earth. Anywhere I stood I seemed to be standing on high ground. The horizon fell away in every direction. I got dizzy when I stared into the distance.
A cold and arid wind seemed to come from every direction at once. A few tents had been pitched. They had grit all over them and drifts of grit coming in under the tent flaps. A few soldiers were there, grit all over them too. One of the air force officers had just come back from a yearlong tour of duty in Greenland. “When I got off the airplane in Greenland,” he said, “I thought, ‘I’ve found the end of the earth.’” I asked him what he thought now. “I’ve found the other end.”
Army Specialists Forest Chester of Aberdeen, Washington, Michael Lindstrom of Reno, Nevada, and Sherrie Murry of Lyons, Georgia, were using a tent pole to scratch a map of the United States into the dirt, making the outline as nearly life-size as they could. They’d been five months in Saudi Arabia without leave, and they’d been a month in this particular Satan’s parking lot. The fact that I was writing for Rolling Stone magazine was the most interesting thing they’d heard in days, although that wasn’t saying much. They wanted me to please tell country/folk singer John Prine to do another album, quick.
Listening to Walkmans is about the only fun American troops are having in a place where there’s no booze and most of the women either are covered with the front-hall rug or they outrank you. By now every American soldier has listened to every cassette and CD in Saudi Arabia at least twice. I was talking to a sergeant in a Dhahran record store, a black woman from Chicago. She said, “Who’s that girl who’s got the song that goes ‘da-da-da-da-da’ forever?”
I said, “Suzanne Vega?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m even going to listen to her.”
Peacenik types say there would be no war if people truly understood how horrible war is. They’re wrong. People don’t mind a little horror. They can even be enthusiastic about it if the horror is happening to somebody else. But everybody hates to be bored and uncomfortable. If people truly understood how much sleeping on rocks, how much eating things rejected by high school cafeterias, how much washing one body part at a time in cold water, and how much sheer sitting around in the dirt war entails, we’d have world peace.
The, speaking of dirt, dirty little secret of this war is that we all privately hoped the Israelis would get fed up with being Scud-whipped and break down, drop the big one, and fuse the sands of Iraq into one vast sheet of glass so we could go in there and finish this thing with Windex. That isn’t going to happen. And so the war drags on—a whole three weeks now. Jeez, this thing is turning out to be longer than the Ken Burns Civil War miniseries on PBS.
Boredom aside, U.S. troop morale seems to be fine, whatever that means. You’ll notice that the term “morale” is never used except in reference to soldiers or people in analogous positions, such as employees of large corporations or prison inmates. Even educational institutions have “school spirit” or “the mood on campus” rather than “morale.” Nobody ever talks about the morale of participants in a passionate love affair, nor does the word come up in discussions of wild drinking sprees, marathon poker games, or visits to whorehouses in Bangkok.
“Morale” apparently means “how well people are doing when they’re not doing well at all.” In that sense, U.S. troop morale is, as I said, fine. Nobody has painted a peace symbol on his helmet. And nobody—except journalists dealing with the military’s Joint Information Bureau—has threatened to frag an officer. Everybody has a pretty good idea why he’s here. And just about any pfc can articulate it better than President Bush: A whole bunch of U.S. citizens are facing a tinpot dictator with the fourth-largest army in the world so that the tinpot dictators with the fifth-, sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-largest armies in the world won’t dis Uncle. Or anybody else. One of the war’s favorite T-shirts bears a Ghostbusters logo with Saddam Hussein in place of the ghost. “Who Ya Gonna Call?” it says, and below that are the numbers 001, the international telephone access code for the United States.
Morale is particularly fine in the air. Air forces own the franchise for this war so far. Even the crews from the British Tornado fighter-bomber wing which has had four of its planes shot down were full of smiles and sangfroid. A half dozen Tornado fliers were trotted out to endure the press. When asked the inevitable age-of-sensitivity “How does it feel?” question, the crew members gave answers better suited to a gardening column than the Phil Donahue show.
“One of the things that obviously you can’t train for and get used to is the amount of flak and missiles coming up,” said pilot Richard Goodwin. “It does look very, very spectacular.”
“I’m still amazed at the sort of sparkling lights of the antiaircraft fire and the missiles and so forth,” said Goodwin’s navigator Dave Chatterson, “and I stupidly enough still find them quite pretty.”
A lieutenant colonel in the Kuwaiti Air Force—who’d managed to escape to Saudi Arabia in his A-4 Skyhawk last August—was even more cheerful. “It’s, kind of, happy feelings to get into Kuwait,” he said. “After six months we didn’t see Kuwait. And then we fly inside Kuwait. You see the country. At the same time, you know, we bomb our country.” Though this didn’t seem to upset him. “But we try to avoid to bomb which is populated areas,” he added.
Morale is fine and boredom is preferable to getting shot, but Saudi Arabia is off the hit parade. Very few people who came here for Desert Storm will be coming back on vacation. It’s not that the Saudis aren’t fighting. Saudi troops—uncouth-looking fellows who seem to be from the boonies of Asir and the Yemen border—fought well if not wisely at the battle of Khafji. (The Saudi brass have explained to everyone who will listen that they didn’t allow the Iraqis to slip into Khafji and they won’t do it again, also it wasn’t their fault and furthermore it was part of a plan.) But the drab sanctimoniousness of Saudi Arabia is getting on everybody’s nerves. There’s no noise, no fun, no movies, no Christmas, and our military chaplains have to be called—that word again—“morale officers.”
Our Father, who art in … um … the gym at the base … Give us this day our daily hobby and leisure-time activities … And forgive us if we get in a bad mood.
And civilian Saudis themselves aren’t acting much like American civilians would if the fourth-largest army in the world were massed on the Canadian border. Nobody is up in the master-bedroom window with his duck-hunting shotgun or out fixing punji sticks in the lawn shrubbery. The Saudis aren’t doing much of anything, which is par. They pray five times a day and everything shuts down for about five hours at every prayertime—you figure it out. All real work in Saudi Arabia is done by dark-skinned poor people—from India, Egypt, Thailand, and the Philippines. (Of course, you could make a somewhat similar argument about the U.S. military, but don’t make it in front of General Powell.) There’s a standing wager in the press corps, a free bottle of postwar champagne to the first person who sees a Saudi lift anything heavier than money.
The entire Saudi civilian war effort in Dhahran has consisted of half the Saudis leaving town, even though Dhahran is separated from the front by 180 miles of desert and the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Marines. I talked to an Indian who was managing a Dhahran sportswear store. About two-thirds of the shops on the block were closed. I asked when they’d shut. “From the beginning of the war,” he said.
“Was it the Scud missiles that scared the shopkeepers away?”
“Oh, no,” said the Indian. “Just the war. They never know what is going to happen.”
“Maybe some went to Jiddah. Maybe some are sleeping at home. All the stores open here, they are open by Indians and Filipinos.”
I said, “I guess it’s too far for you to go back home?”
He frowned and shook his head and said it wasn’t too far at all. “My sponsor has my passport.” He couldn’t leave.
So far no pejorative term has been coined for Iraqis. There’s no “Gook” or “Kraut” or “Nip” for this war. And the only Iraqi jokes I’ve heard, I’ve heard on the telephone from back home. As a matter of fact there’s only one war joke going around in Saudi Arabia.
What’s the name of the Saudi national anthem?
“Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
February 11 through February 25, 1991
Monday, February 11, Dhahran
One thing all of us here sincerely regret is that John Tower was not confirmed by the Senate as U.S. secretary of defense. You can bet we’d be able to get a drink in Saudi if Good-Time Johnny Tower were in charge of Desert Storm. Either that or we’d be fighting this war someplace where we could—New Orleans during Mardi Gras, for instance.
Tuesday, February 12, Dhahran Air Base
Ever since bombs were invented it’s been customary to personalize them with messages written on the shells: “Stick this in your mustache, Saddam,” that sort of thing. We’ve been trying, however, to improve the quality of bomb graffiti, make it a little more clever. Not that we’ve had much success so far.
STEALTH PILOTS DO IT IN THE PLACE WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT THEM TO DO IT
IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE DEAD
MY OTHER BOMB IS ATOMIC
Anyway, we’re open to suggestions.
An Iraqi air-raid shelter was hit by American bombers. Initial estimates from Baghdad of the casualty figures ranged from 40 to 1,500. This illustrates a persistent problem in the Middle East. The zero was invented by the Arabs, but so were the next six or eight zeros after that. Americans should be warned that you will hear a lot of numbers coming out of this part of the world, but don’t count on them.
Thursday, February 14, Dhahran
It’s Valentine’s Day, time for romance. And what could be more romantic than sex toys? We’ve been trying to figure out what Saudi Arabian sex toys would be … edible veils? Inflatable plastic airline tickets to Europe? But in a country where a man may have as many as four wives, the most popular marital aid is probably ear plugs.
Have you noticed Saddam Hussein’s furniture? You can see it in the background in his CNN interview or when he’s having a photo opportunity with international peace-pest diplomats—Cosa Nostra Rococo. Now we know why the Iraqi Air Force disappeared—they didn’t want to get the white velvet upholstery in their MiG cockpits messed up flying combat missions.
If we want to demoralize the population of Iraq and sap their will to fight, we ought to show them videotapes of the South Bronx, Detroit City, and the West Side of Chicago. Take a look, Iraqis—this is what we do to our own cities in peacetime. Just think what we’re going to do to yours in a war.
Friday, February 15, Dhahran
Maybe Kuwait really was a threat to Iraq. I talked to a Kuwaiti Air Force colonel who thought it had been. He explained that Kuwait was using all its oil money to buy things for its citizens while Iraq was using all its oil money for military hardware. “Iraq,” the colonel said, “either had to bring its citizens up to the Kuwaiti level or bring Kuwaiti citizens down to the Iraqi level.” In other words, Kuwait caused the war by shopping too much. This leaves us with little hope for world peace as long as wives are allowed to hold credit cards in their own names.
I passed a Saudi bus on the highway last night. U.S. soldiers had written in the dust on the back and sides. “Iraq sucks,” said one message, but most of the graffiti was hometowns—Mobile, El Paso, Detroit, Des Moines. And way up in the corner of the bus’s back window one soldier had written the name of that quintessential hometown of almost all us Americans—“Suburbia.”
Sunday, February 17, Riyadh
I drove to the Saudi capital to attend a couple of the military briefings in person. The only road map I had was in Arabic. I had a little trouble finding my hotel, just off Squiggle Street at the corner of Long Squiggle and Tall Squiggle.
The journalists in Riyadh are more earnest, whiney, and weenie-like than the journalists with the troops in Dhahran. One long-haired worrywart who was with either the Village Voice or National Public Radio was concerned that we were bombing every one of the government buildings in Baghdad. “Are we going to leave Iraq without any government departments?” he asked the briefing officer indignantly.
Not all the reporters in Riyadh are like that, of course; the British newspaperman sitting next to me said, “We’ll leave them the Department of Tourism—‘See the Ruins.’”
We’re used to not getting much information during the question-and-answer periods at the military briefings. But today a reporter asked a Saudi general, “What’s the weather like in Saudi Arabia in March?”
“I will try to find this out for you,” the Saudi general said.
Monday, February 18, Wadi as Sahba
I got stuck out in the desert. I pulled off the road to take a leak and my car went down in the sand like the Lusitania. I didn’t have a shovel. I tried to dig the car out with a hubcap—the car went in deeper. I tried to put brush and rocks under the wheels—the car went in deeper. I had the car in the sand up past the doorsills by the time the Saudi police happened by. They almost got their car stuck in the sand, too. They didn’t have any rope so they flagged down a trucker. He didn’t have any rope either so we used one of the canvas straps from his freight load. We got my car out, but the canvas strap became completely snarled in my front bumper and tangled in the police car’s back axle and none of us had a knife. We spent the next half hour sawing at the cargo strap with the edge of a flattened soft-drink can.
America has all the guns and Saudi Arabia has all the money, but it’s no wonder the Japanese are ruling the world.
Wednesday, February 20, Dhahran
I read today on the AP wire that our loyal NATO ally Turkey is sending two generals and three colonels to Saudi Arabia. No soldiers or anything, just generals and colonels. “Forward, me!” “About my face!” “I am hereby recommending that a medal for heroism be awarded to me for saving the life of everyone under my command by sitting in a Riyadh hotel room.”
Between 350 and 400 Iraqi soldiers just surrendered to U.S. helicopters flying hundreds of feet in the air. Not long before, another group of Iraqi soldiers had surrendered to three Life photographers. The Iraqis seem willing to surrender to anything. The Saudis have promised that all prisoners of war will be given adequate food and shelter, kept away from the fighting, and released when the war is over. Adequate food and shelter? Kept away from the fighting? Released when the war is over? The press corps must have surrendered months ago.
Thursday, February 21, Dhahran
Personally, I’m coming back to the United States as a big supporter of nuclear power plants. It’s worth the risk just to make sure that this part of the world never has any political, strategic, or economic significance again. That done, we can use the Middle East for the purpose to which it is so ideally suited—dumping nuclear waste. Watch out for the nine-legged camels.
Every time I look at American TV I see these “defense experts”—former generals now being paid large fees to go on Nightline and talk about the Gulf War. Well, I’m a former hippie. Maybe I can get a job as a “protest expert.”
Ted Koppel will say: “P.J., does your expertise as a retired long-haired butt-head lead you to think that the protesters will continue to beat drums outside the White House or will they begin chanting ‘No Blood for Oil’?”
And I’ll say, “Well, Ted, I believe that we will see continuation of a primarily drum-focused activity here although we cannot rule out the possibility that the protesters may eventually utilize ‘Draft Neil Bush’ signs. We know they have the capability.”
Friday, February 22, Dammam
I’ve mentioned before that Saudi Arabia is an incredibly honest country—as well it might be, since they cut your hand off if you’re caught stealing. But although there seems to be no theft here, there are enormous padlocks on all the shops and offices—sometimes four or five of them on a single door. Maybe there’s a side to Saudi Arabia I don’t know about. Whatever, I’ve decided to stay out of neighborhoods full of one-handed men.
Monday, February 25, Dhahran
One terrible problem confronting Iraqi troops is finding something white to wave when surrendering. They’ve run out of pocket hankies. The Iraqi army doesn’t issue bedsheets. And, since the Iraqi soldiers have been at the front lines for a long time without adequate supplies, their underwear is, frankly, not white anymore. If antiwar organizations want to stop the fighting in the Gulf, they should send Clorox to Iraq.
We hear the Iraqi army is systematically blowing up buildings in downtown Kuwait City. If the architecture in Kuwait resembles the architecture in Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi army will have done one good deed, anyway. As soon as the Iraqis have all surrendered, let’s send them to New York and let them take a whack at Trump Tower.
Riyadh and the Desert, Late February 1991
Certain of the ancient moral philosophers—Norman Mailer comes to mind—hold that every man should experience war because war, like love, is one of the central mysteries of life.
Central? Let’s hope not. Mysterious? And how. Even the most modern and baffling romances, with their diseases, divorces, custody battles over the dog, and years spent afterward in therapy and Woody Allen movies are not more mysterious than combat. For example, during the past week and a half we’ve been facing the worst threat of this war so far—peace. Giving the Iraqi armed forces a chance to go home, simonize their tanks, and think up new ways to amaze the world is the most terrifying imaginable outcome to the Gulf conflict.
But we were reasonably confident that bloody, murderous peace wouldn’t break out. We’d managed to survive Saddam Hussein’s first call for a cease-fire, “The Dog Ate Kuwait” peace initiative, which he presented last week. Then there was the Soviet-brokered “I’ll Pull Out in Time, Honey, Honest” peace plan. We endured that. So we figured we could get through George Bush’s noon on February 23 deadline. And, indeed, as I write this, on Sunday, the twenty-fourth, word comes that the ground war has started. Word also comes that we’re going to learn nothing about that ground war. The secretary of defense tells us we are entering a period of “media blackout.” Thus war grows more mysterious still. And so does war reporting. Here I sit scribbling trivia while the most serious events of a generation take place so close that I can see the haze from the oil-well fires in Kuwait.
War is mysterious but never more so than when it involves two of life’s other big mysteries, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. military mind.
Nothing about the U.S. military—except killing bad guys—makes sense. The military mind is unfathomable even in the most minute and specific details of its operation. Inside each MRE field-ration kit there’s a pouch containing salt and pepper, gum, napkins, other odds and ends, and a pack of matches. The matchbook cover is plain olive drab and bears the message: “These matches are designed especially for damp climates but they will not light when wet.”
As for Saudi Arabia, the English-language newspaper here, Arab News, has an Islamic agony column where readers can write in with the kind of questions Ann Landers would get if she were a Muslim scholar.
Q. What lesson do we draw from knowing that a certain person died in the toilet?
The answer being no particular lesson. But some of the replies in the Arab News leave a Westerner feeling that he has encountered a mentality almost as foreign as the one which produced the MRE matchbook:
A. The rule is that when you put your socks on in the morning you should have a full ablution, washing your feet. Then before that ablution is invalidated, you put on your socks … If you need to do ablution again that day, you need not take off your socks. You simply wet your hand and, using your fingers, you pass them over the top of your feet.
Simply as a physical locale Saudi Arabia is incomprehensible. It’s not a matter of “What are we doing in this place?” It’s a matter of “What is this place doing in existence?” The two-hundred-mile stretch of desert between the Persian Gulf and the Saudi capital Riyadh is so scruffy, flattened-looking, and devoid of physical features that it hardly seems to be part of nature. The land appears to have been cleared by a bulldozer the size of the Hoover Dam. It’s God’s Vacant Lot. There’s a whole section of Saudi Arabia called the Rub al Khali, the “Empty Quarter,” and the frightening thing is, this isn’t it. The Rub al Khali is somehow emptier yet.
An ugly four-lane highway runs through the ugly desert from Dhahran to Riyadh. Junk is strewn all along it—rusted mufflers, empty water bottles, waste paper, lengths of cable, old truck tires, construction detritus, and a thousand bright pink and yellow plastic shopping bags floating like jellyfish on the breeze.
We Americans are long trained in highway citizenship. It’s been thirty-five years since I threw something out a car window without guilt. I’d forgotten the pure exhilaration of littering and found myself heaving Coke cans and half-eaten sandwiches into the ether at every opportunity.
The other signs of human life along the Riyadh road are oil wells and oil storage tanks, a few plumber’s nightmare petrochemical factories, and an occasional gas station.
The view in Saudi Arabia, when there’s anything to view, is utilitarian, industrial, and dumpy—grimly practical stuff. But what is the practical result of all this practicality? There’s no clue in Riyadh. It is a city with two million people and uncountable wealth, and there is no reason on earth to go there. A large, glossy picture book, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, commissioned by the Saudi government itself, says of Riyadh: “With its flyovers and tree-lined boulevards, its first-class hotels and …”
Here is a glowing official description of a nation’s capital, and the first thing that the first sentence mentions is highway overpasses.
Rightly so. Riyadh is almost all new, with the worst kind of urban newness—a grid of lifeless streets in a cage of freeways, and every little rectangle is filled with modern architecture. There are miles of the usual high-rise concrete and steel self-storage-in-the-sky buildings. But the Saudis can afford the creative kind of modern architecture, too. You can always tell when modern architecture is being creative—the rest of the thing looks like the same old curtain-wall rabbit hutch but the roof is nutty. Lumpy roofs, wavy roofs, roofs in curlicues, and roofs puckered in the middle like assholes—Riyadh has them. Also, like Abu Dhabi and Dubai, it has modernism that gives a nudge and a wink to Arab traditions—giant cement Bedouin tent shapes serving no purpose and enormous onion-shaped arches in the middle of nowhere. And there are all the other varieties of contemporary design Habitrail Modern, Brobdingnagian Lego Block, Behemoth Tinker Toy, Cheese Grater of the Titans, plus some of those buildings that are—who knows why—wider at the top than they are at the bottom.
The Saudis are guaranteeing the safety of surrendering Iraqi troops, and they’re also providing asylum to everybody who ever got kicked out of architecture school.
Only a few of the traditional mud houses of the Najd, or central Arabian highlands, are left in Riyadh, and the Saudis are tearing these down as fast as they can. The flat-roofed buildings are reddish-beige, the color of a frostbitten nose. More vertical and austere than American adobe homes, each is a sort of private tower keep with only a few small, deep-set, and shuttered windows. The floors are made of palm-trunk beams covered in layers of thatch. Simple pie-crust and pinking-shear patterns are traced around the edges of the roofs. By watching the demolition work I acquired a sort of X-ray vision. Where walls were toppled, I could look inside the houses and see the steep switchback staircases with their mud steps leading to snug whitewashed rooms with borders around the windows and doors painted in brilliant blues and greens.
Near the demolition site I found several dozen Filipino construction workers shoveling wet dirt and straw into a cement mixer. They were building a brand-new mud structure. This, I was given to understand, would be ready for tours in a month—the traditional architecture of Old Riyadh painstakingly reconstructed within two hundred yards of Old Riyadh being torn down.
I drove southeast out of the capital, following a line of oasis towns in the riverless riverbed of the Wadi as Sahba. Each town was a miniature of Riyadh in its up-to-date ugliness and sat in a nasty little tangle of date palms that looked like the cat had gotten into the potted plants.
The road was two-lane here and the driving was, as it is everywhere in Saudi Arabia, horrific—conducted at absolute top speed with no thought for consequences. Though there were plenty of consequences to be observed. Amazing car wrecks lay beside the road, sometimes a dozen of them in a mile, things you would never know had been cars if a couple of car wheels weren’t sticking up out of them. Whole Chevrolets were crumpled like gum wrappers. And these wrecks had taken place without collision on a perfectly straight and level road that is absolutely free of obstructions. Cars just somehow go blooey and wind up in a wad beside the highway.
Running parallel to the road was a railroad track that was also perfectly straight and level and absolutely free of obstructions. And—sure enough—amazing train wrecks lay beside the rails, things that you would never know had been trains if a couple of train wheels weren’t sticking up out of them.
I stopped in one of the oasis towns to get gas and some more Coke cans to throw out the window. There was a Bedouin kid, about fifteen, at the little store. Most Saudis are—whether they take their socks off during ablution or not—fastidiously clean, and they are polite to the point of cold formality. But this kid was pesky and dirty and determined to practice his nonexistent English. “Riyadh? Riyadh? Riyadh?” he said. Yes, I’d come from Riyadh. “Is seeing George Bush?! George Bush?! George Bush?!” George Bush is a president. Riyadh is a capital. So naturally I’d seen him there. Then the kid tried to sell me something. It was a photograph of a girl—with her veil off. I’ve been here so long I blushed.
Turning back toward the Persian Gulf, I drove northwest through the 150-mile-long Ghawar oil field. The whole way I could see an immense natural gas burnoff flaring on the horizon like the pillar of fire that guided the Hebrew tribes by night when they were fleeing from Egypt. Above the flame was a huge vertical cloud like the pillar of smoke that guided the Hebrew tribes by day. But the Hebrew tribes wound up in Israel and the oil wound up here. God let the Hebrews take a serious wrong turn.
Is this empty, dusty, cheerless, oily, fun-free place making the American military crazy? Here’s another mystery of war—no. Even being in the American military isn’t making the American military crazy. I visited an army motor pool where the soldiers had—with the exception of a few forays into the shockingly dull local town—been confined for five months to one vast expanse of asphalt surrounded by razor wire. Specialist Hefner of St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and Specialist Jonas of Bay City, Texas, both streaked with grease like zebras, were happily wrenching on a large truck. “She’s our best mechanic,” said Specialist Hefner of Specialist Jonas, who had left a baby behind in the States to come do this. Specialist Jonas gave a shy smile of nondenial. “We don’t like it here too much—nothing to do,” said Specialist Hefner. But that was all I could get out of them in the way of complaints, although Specialist Hefner did allow that the Saudis “drive like fools.”
At Saudi Arabia’s main Persian Gulf port facilities in Dammam, I talked to Captain Johnny L. Sawyer from Detroit, Michigan, commander of the 551st Transportation Company. His job is to unload boats. Captain Sawyer said, “When we initially arrived here, we worked the soldiers eighteen hours a day, gave them four to six hours rest, at most, and put them back to work. There weren’t any complaints whatsoever. That’s seven days a week, and we’ve been doing that for the past six months. They’re down to a twelve-hour schedule now but we still have soldiers that are willing to work extra hours without being told. They stay behind just to finish a job.” Captain Sawyer had been in the army for thirteen years and had come up through the ranks. “The quality of the soldiers, from then to now,” he said, “has improved drastically. I don’t think that a soldier that we would have called standard then would be allowed to join the army today.”
I talked to a medical officer at one of the British field hospitals. He’d been in Vietnam and this was his first contact with the American military since. “I was astonished when I got here,” he said. “Every American soldier I met was tidy, cheerful, eager to help, glad to be here—well, not precisely glad, but you know what I mean. This had not been my experience in Vietnam. It is as if the American soldiers here come from a different nation.”
And that is one last mystery of war—where did the addled, sniveling, pointless America of the past quarter century go? There’s no trace of it in these parts. The catchphrases of this war are “I’ll make it happen,” “not a problem,” “good to go,” and “hoo-ah!,” a sort of all-purpose noise of enthusiasm. When the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visited here, the soldiers asked him for his autograph. A sense of doing something worthwhile and important has even infected a few members of the press corps. Some reporters were ready to check into the local clinic after experiencing a strange and frightening choked-up feeling when looking at the American flag.
At the King Fahd Air Base, west of Dhahran, there’s a small sign posted in one of the buildings taken over by the U.S. Air Force:
GIVE WAR A CHANCE
Missile Attack on Dhahran, February 25, 1991
We couldn’t go to war, but war came to us. Two days into the ground assault on Iraq the majority of the press corps was stuck, as usual, in the press headquarters at the Dhahran International Hotel. There was a Scud missile attack on Monday night, one of dozens since the war began. We didn’t think much about it. Some of the technicians on the outdoor TV platforms—where you see correspondents stand with the silly blue-domed roof of the hotel’s pool cabana in the background—watched the Scud go down. They thought it hit near the local shopping center and we joked that Saddam Hussein was targeting Dhahran’s only decent record store. Then we went back to the work of pretending we knew more about this war than people watching television in Cleveland.
The missile had, indeed, struck right behind the record store, going through the roof of a warehouse that had been converted to a billet for U.S. troops. We heard nothing about this at the press headquarters. Almost two hours later I was driving to Dammam and I saw hundreds of blue police lights blinking in clusters around the shopping center. A half dozen helicopters hung in the sky with their searchlights moving back and forth like blackboard pointers. And ambulances were rolling away in long and frighteningly silent convoys.
Saudi police blocked the road. I parked and followed a crowd of robed Saudi onlookers, some of them holding hands, most of them speaking in whispers. They moved across a half mile of open fields toward the shopping center. It didn’t seem like a disaster scene. What had been the warehouse with more than one hundred Americans inside didn’t look like a building that had been blown up. I thought I was staring at a construction site. The framework of steel girders was mostly still standing. Some of the I-beams were twisted or collapsed, but the ventilation ducts and the electrical conduits remained in place. What I didn’t understand was that there had been a roof and walls. And these were utterly blown away.
There was really nothing else to see except slightly panicky Saudi police and very serious American troops. Twenty-eight soldiers were killed and ninety-nine were wounded—more American casualties caused by one unlucky Scud strike two hundred miles behind the lines than had been suffered in the whole rest of the war to date.
Kuwait City, March 1991
As befits a short war, it didn’t take me long to readjust to peace—three minutes and forty seconds to be exact, the length of one Billy Idol music video. I was drunk and lying on a hotel bed in Rome. In the previous forty-eight hours I had managed to get myself out of the reeking, scrambled mess of Kuwait, back to the ugly, sterile, unwelcoming Saudi capital of Riyadh. From there I’d driven across hundreds of miles of stupid desert in a disposable diaper of a Korean rental car and finagled a ride out of Dhahran on an airliner chartered by an English TV company to take its people and gear to the next place foreigners decide to get killed.
It didn’t seem like it had been a short war at that particular moment, not after two months with the arrogant, lazy Saudi Arabians and nothing to drink. We charter passengers were into the Johnnie Walker miniatures before the plane cleared the runway, and grown men, adult broadcasting executives with serious jobs in a large corporation, were kneeling in their seats, trying to swill from three or four little Scotch bottles at once and screaming out the windows at the diminishing landscape, “FUCK YOU, YOU MOVING TEA TOWELS!”
Anyway, as I was saying, I was lying on a hotel bed in Rome, and I flicked on the television, and there was MTV showing a Billy Idol video. Billy was really going at it, running around the stage in a most histrionic way, thrusting his fist into the air, stamping his feet, and making violent and emphatic faces at the camera. It was a dramatic performance but confusing to my woozy intellect. What, I wondered, was Billy Idol being dramatic about? I’d just spent the past week in a burned-up, blown-up, looted city where there was no food or water, seeing mangled bodies and hearing stories of murder, rape, abduction, etc. It made me get drunk and lie on the bed without taking my shoes off. But Billy Idol seemed to have experienced something much more dramatic, so much more dramatic that it made him strip half-naked, dye his hair platinum, wear a bunch of jewelry, and jump around like an ape.
“Billy Idol concerts are,” I thought, “obviously worse than war.”
Kuwait did have a better light show. There is nothing else in the world (I’m glad to say) quite like four or five hundred burning oil wells casting a lambent glow upon a nighttime desert landscape. The flames come up out of the wellheads in soft, thick, billowing shapes like clouds or turds or cake batter. The fires are scary when you glance at them but terrifying if you keep looking. That is, the fires seem to be big and close. Then you stare into the perspectiveless desert and realize they are fifteen or twenty miles away and are therefore enormous beyond comprehension. You can hear them across all that distance. There’s no reassuring, ordinary crackle and roar in the noise the fires make, and no blast of heat. Instead the sound is a steady, sucking rumble of the whole atmosphere being dragged toward the conflagrations. And beyond the fires that you see are the fires you can’t see, brightening the horizon on all sides like a dozen simultaneous dawns breaking on one very bad day.
I had a lot of time to look at the oil-well fires because on the third night of the ground war I spent six hours with forty-five other journalists and a half dozen British army officers being held at gunpoint in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert.
Not by Iraqis, of course. The Iraqi army was in high-speed rewind. We were under arrest by a Saudi colonel who was furious that the British didn’t have the correct paperwork for escorting a convoy.
Our mission to bring pool journalists from Dhahran to Kuwait City was not moving with the same efficiency and precision as the rest of the allied Gulf War operations. The British military escort was made up of retired officers who had volunteered to aid the Gulf War effort and had come to do so at their own expense. They were an affable lot but, well, retired. They were armed with Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles of a vintage suitable for port wine, and they didn’t have two-way radios or even maps. They put the eighteen-vehicle convoy together with the slowest things at the back so that the trucks all lost sight of the cars within minutes. The main purpose of the convoy was to get the British Independent Television Network’s satellite dish into Kuwait. The first thing the British officers did was leave that dish behind. The second thing they did was take a wrong turn leaving Dhahran and head south toward Qatar instead of north toward Kuwait City. It took us eight hours to reach the Kuwaiti border, a three-hour drive.
It was dark by the time we passed through the well-shelled town of Khafji and its abandoned Saudi customs post. We could hear artillery fire in the distance now, and every few hundred feet we’d pass a burned Iraqi tank or personnel carrier.
Shrapnel was scattered everywhere on the road, causing a half dozen blowouts. And more time was wasted when young journalists—members of that generation so handy with keyboards, modems, and electronic what all—had their first encounters with screw jacks and lug wrenches. Then we got arrested.
The Saudi colonel, who looked like a cross between Omar Sharif and Mr. Potato Head, had a platoon of soldiers line up across the road and level their rifles at us. “YOU DO NOT HAVE THE PERMISSIONS! HOW CAN YOU BE COMING HERE WITHOUT THE PERMISSIONS WHEN I AM THE PERSON WHO IS MAKING THE PERMISSIONS FOR YOU TO COME HERE?! YOU MUST GO BACK TO DHAHRAN AND GET THE PERMISSIONS FROM ME THERE TO COME HERE AND GIVE ME PERMISSIONS!!!” shouted the Saudi colonel.
In vain it was explained to the colonel that this was an official British military convoy, that the British were Saudi Arabia’s allies, that this was Kuwait and not Saudi Arabia anyway, and that we could hardly go back and get permission from him in Dhahran when he was here.
The electronic-minded young journalists fetched a satellite phone and its bulky antenna dish out of their car, set it up in the middle of the road, and phoned the Kuwaiti minister of information at his exile home in Tarif. The minister told the colonel the convoy could proceed, whereupon the colonel hung up on the minister of information and threatened to shoot the satellite phone with his submachine gun.
In the midst of this argument a metallic-blue Ferrari 328 came humming through our convoy, its thousand dollars’ worth of tires and its three inches of ground clearance apparently immune to jagged metal fragments. This was just a couple of Kuwaiti refugees determined to get home before the liberation rush. They didn’t even slow down for the gun-pointing soldiers, who jumped to get out of the Ferrari’s way.
In the end it turned out what the Saudi colonel wanted was a sufficiently abject and humble apology from the British officers for, I guess, failing to fill out, in triplicate, the Request for Permission to Help Keep the King of Saudi Arabia from Getting the Holy Kaaba Stuffed up His Butt.
Apology delivered, the Brits led our convoy directly into downtown Kuwait before realizing that the city had not actually been reconquered.
Iraqi jeeps, trucks, armor, and artillery pieces were lying on their tops and sides all along the Kuwait City expressways as though somebody had spilled Saddam’s toy box. The Iraqis who’d been inside all seemed to be gone, in one sense of the word or the other. In place of the Fourth-Largest Army in the World we saw cruising teens. This was the Kuwaiti Resistance. One group of five pulled up in a Buick Park Avenue, happily brandishing AK-47s out the windows of Dad’s car. They were dressed just like teenagers would dress if the cool kids at the high school got to form their own partisan army—one guy favored the Rambo look, another was dressed like Little Steven, two others were got up in Mutant Ninja Turtle garb, and one fellow, who wasn’t quite with the program, seemed to have stepped out of a J. Crew catalog. They were hunting for Iraqis or people who looked like they might be Iraqis or people who had collaborated with Iraqis or had thought about collaborating. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also keeping an eye out for the algebra teacher who gave too many pop quizzes. Small arms fire could be heard coming from various places in the lightless city. It was a teenage dream come true: bad guys invade your neighborhood and you and your best friends get to stay out late, kill them, skip school, and impress girls. The Kuwaiti Resistance fighters welcomed us effusively.
The Brits decided we should go to the International Airport even though we’d been hearing on the shortwave radio about a tank battle there. Fortunately, this was over but lots of jumpy U.S. Marines were patrolling the airport perimeter, and it was a shock to their systems when they came across us, totally lost, in eighteen civilian vehicles packed with camping gear, foodstuffs, bottled water, and people in Banana Republic clothes. It must have looked like the Adventure Tour travel business had gotten completely out of hand.
Going back into the city at 6:00 a.m., we could see that the Iraqis had left in brainless panic. All their wrecked military equipment was pointed in the same, Baghdad-ward, direction. Allied air strikes had caused some of the destruction but traffic accidents had caused more. Jeeps had smashed into tanks. Tanks had rammed bridge abutments. Armored personnel carriers had rear-ended ambulances. A truck towing a howitzer had jackknifed and collided with itself. And a T-55 Soviet tank came a cropper on a highway divider and wound up high-centered, three and a half feet in the air.
Iraqi defenses had been abandoned with the same comic haste. Guns, ammunition, canteens, helmets, even shoes were left behind. Tea kettles were still sitting on paraffin burners. I found somebody’s uneaten dinner—a pot full of chicken and rice, or rice and cat maybe, white meat anyway. The defenses themselves were pathetic. The Iraqis had built miles of low dirt berms across the main road from Saudi Arabia. These were little more than speed bumps, and were supposed to … to what? … signal allied armor, “Slow, War Zone”?
Every highway overpass had a little pillbox built on it—four feet square and three feet high with no roof or back wall. These tiny redoubts were made of crumbly local bricks pasted together with a few dabs of mortar. Hundreds of them pimpled the city in places the Iraqis had, by some mysterious thought process, decided were strategically important. Thus the roofs of all the hotels had pillboxes but the roofs of other tall buildings didn’t, and while expressways were defended, roads with two-way traffic were not.
Iraqi soldiers had made sad little nests in these emplacements—lined them with stolen blankets, chunks of foam rubber, old clothes, canned goods taken from local homes, pictures of pretty women torn from magazines, and other bits of unmilitary junk. The local soccer stadiums and Kuwait’s only ice-skating rink had also been fortified, the fortifications consisting of one row of sandbags placed in front of each principal entrance.
Members of the Kuwait Resistance showed me a twenty- by thirty-foot model of Kuwait City in the basement rec room of a mansion that had been occupied by Iraqi staff officers. The model was made of sand with blue-dyed sawdust from the Persian Gulf. Roads were indicated with gift-wrap ribbon, and the principal buildings and military installations were represented by Lego blocks. Handsome navy-blue construction-paper arrows showed U.S. forces coming ashore into conveniently located minefields, while much larger and more festively lettered red arrows showed Iraq’s reinforcements arriving from somewhere in the direction of the rec room’s projection TV. It seemed Saddam Hussein had let the defense of Kuwait be planned by the prom decorations committee.
The Iraqis were better at destroying Kuwait City than they were at keeping hold of it. But they weren’t really good at this either. Again their first concern was with the hotels, as if allied forces would never be able to effect a real conquest without room service. The Iraqis tried to set all the hotels on fire, but in many cases they used diesel oil, which is not the best arson accelerant. The hotel where I found a room had survived pretty much intact except that a thick layer of greasy and insoluble oil soot had settled on every chair, table, towel, bedsheet, and toilet seat. After a couple of days, all the reporters staying there looked like they had passed out in a tanning booth.
Downtown had experienced plentiful random artillery fire, as if children had had tantrums with tanks and mortars. But the big triple cocktail onion–looking pointy water-tower things that are the symbol of Kuwait City proved too sturdy for Iraqi gunfire, or maybe just too hard to hit when whole sides of city blocks offered themselves as targets. The suqs with their flammable jumbles of shops had been successfully torched. And anything complex and vulnerable, such as the power stations, the desalinization plants, and the main telephone switchboard, was thoroughly ruined.
But what the Iraqis were really good at was looting. Every store and office and an enormous number of homes had been sucked clean of all possessions. Nothing was left behind except the trash of deliberate vandalism and, in some cases, piles of human shit. The Hilton Hotel had been taken to pieces room by room. It looked like all the rock bands in the world had stayed there at the same time.
The city was not, however, extensively booby-trapped. The Iraqi soldiers were evidently so stupid and eager to leave that it was hard to imagine them having the forethought to wire up surprises. “All boobies, no traps,” was the consensus. And most of us quit worrying about dirty tricks. Besides, there was so much untricky dangerous stuff lying around the city—live bullets and artillery shells, loose mortar rounds, unexploded American cluster bombs, and so forth. An NBC camera-crew member lost some fingers fondling a land-mine detonating cap he’d picked up as a souvenir. And mines were going off on the city beaches with fair regularity, turning some unwary Kuwaitis into what the GIs call “pink mist.” I was helping dismantle one of the small pillboxes on the Hilton’s roof, getting bricks to level a satellite dish. There was a wooden carton sitting in the pillbox. I lifted the lid and found enough RPG—rocket-propelled grenade—rounds to put me, bricks, and satellite dish in permanent earth orbit. I closed the lid carefully and extinguished my cigar.
The Hilton is next door to the American embassy, and a couple days later U.S. Special Forces came and “swept” the hotel to make sure a small thermonuclear device wasn’t hidden in the basement or anything. I saw one of the Special Forces guys later in the hotel lobby. “Hey, we found a booby trap!” he said in the perky, enthusiastic, pumped-up way nineteen-year-old Special Forces guys have of saying these things.
“Good for you,” I said. “Where was it?”
“In a big box of RPGs, in that first gun emplacement on the edge of the roof. You know, the one with some bricks missing off it. There was a hand grenade with the pin out in there. Man, if anybody had jiggled that box …”
I briefly got religion. “God spared me for a special reason,” I thought and felt very good about myself. “I must be going to accomplish something very important in life, something that will benefit all mankind.”
My ABC producer friend Derwin Johnson said, “There were two fucking dozen other people on that roof! It’s probably one of us who’s going to invent a vaccine to prevent Jim Morrison revivals.”
On Thursday afternoon, February 28, about six hours after the U.S. declared a cease-fire, the victorious armies began to roll into Kuwait City. The Arab contingents were firing their guns in the air and the Kuwaiti Resistance fighters responded by firing their guns in the air and then the other Kuwaitis picked up all the leftover Iraqi guns and started firing these in the air, too. People were singing, dancing, clapping their hands, and beating on car horns. The women began ululation, that fluttering liquid animal sound made somewhere in the back of the throat, and the women’s kids joined in with a more familiar plain screaming of heads off.
An impromptu parade was begun past the American embassy, but there wasn’t anyplace that the crowd wanted to parade to, so the parade turned in ever tightening circles in front of the embassy and finally just stopped and became a crowd. The crowd yelled, “George Push! George Push! George Push!” Someone had already spray-painted “Thank you for George Push” across the American embassy wall, and the “P” had been carefully crossed out and the spelling corrected. A donkey was led down the street with an Iraqi helmet tied on its head and “Saddam Hussein” painted on its flanks. The first American soldiers showed up and everyone had to kiss them and shove babies into their arms and get the soldiers to autograph Kuwaiti flags. Kuwaiti flags were everywhere and at least a dozen little girls wore Kuwaiti-flag dresses—one red sleeve, one green sleeve, white down the middle, and a black triangular yoke at the neck. Their mothers must have been stitching these all through the war. There were plenty of American flags, too, one with a picture of Marilyn Monroe sewn over the stripes. And across an intersection downtown a thirty-foot banner had been strung, reading—in answer to the U.S. and European antiwar protesters’ “No blood for oil” slogan—BLOOD FOR FREEDOM.
Then there was a great noise and wind, and descending from the sky into this melee came a huge American army helicopter down onto the roof of the U.S. embassy. The helicopter disgorged a squad of Army Rangers to roaring, stentorious cheers. It was the fall of Saigon with the film run backward.
A lot of people were crying, and I was one of them. A young Kuwaiti came out of the crowd, and he was crying, and he grabbed me by my notebook and, with that immense earnestness that you only have an excuse for a few times in your life, he said, “You write we would like to thank every man in the allied force. Until one hundred years we cannot thank them. What they do is … is …”—words failed him—“… is America.”
Not everything was quite so saccharine as that in Kuwait City, of course. Earlier in the day, on the other side of the Hilton Hotel, some scores had been settled. Kuwaiti Resistance kids shot up an apartment building that was supposed to be full of Iraqi collaborators. The Kuwaitis dragged out three ordinary-looking middle-aged men, one howling for mercy and two looking grim. “They are Sudanese Intelligence,” said one Resistance kid. Though any review of Sudan’s recent history would render that phrase oxymoronic. The suspects were shoved into a Toyota Supra and taken off to I’d-rather-not-think-where. Later I saw another alleged collaborator arrested at bazooka-point. That was a quick giveup.
Palestinian guest workers, many of whom had had the bad taste to chortle over the Iraqi conquest of their Kuwaiti employers, were a particular target of the Resistance. Roadblocks were set up all over town to ferret out the Pals. The roadblocks were manned—boyed, to be exact—by nervous kids with automatic weapons. It was like being back in Beirut except these militants wanted to hug you for being American instead of shoot you for it. Considering that the Kuwaitis were as bad as the Lebanese about gun safety, getting hugged was probably as dangerous.
Some of the Palestinians weren’t playing things smart. I found one of them standing in line with a jerrycan at a gas station. He was being insulted by the Kuwaitis on either side of him. Instead of making excuses or becoming suddenly Syrian, he jumped out of line and started shouting at me: “Why you Americans come here and do this, why you don’t come to the West Bank as we have been waiting for since 1962?!” I presume he meant ‘67 but, whatever, it didn’t seem like the most politic tack to be taking at the moment. The Kuwaitis apologized to me and pulled the Palestinian back into the gas line so they could insult him some more.
As joyful as the Kuwaitis were, they were just that furious. It was a difficult frame of mind to understand at first, though happy anger is probably more common and less contradictory than it sounds. Every Kuwaiti I spoke to had had members of his or her family beaten, killed, or simply taken away. The hospital morgues were filled with the remains of tortured Kuwaitis, many unidentifiable. Every cemetery had a swath of new graves, mostly filled with men, the birth dates on the tombstones painfully contemporary, and the death dates beginning August 2, 1990.
I visited a mass grave where two hundred some Kuwaitis were interred and these were only the bodies that family members had been able to retrieve and bury by stealth. In another cemetery I found a man tending the graves of his uncle and his uncle’s son-in-law. Each tomb had an improvised wooden marker and a bottle stuck neckdown into the dirt with a verse of the Koran rolled inside. The man stood between the bare-earth mounds with his hands at his sides and spoke very quietly. His expression was of enormous, almost hysterical resignation, a kind of smile of grief. He said his uncle’s body had burns from a clothes iron and from cigarettes. There were marks of electrical wires. His fingers had been chopped off. His eyes gouged out. Finally he had been shot in the head. The son-in-law had been tortured with an electric drill, then scalped, then shot in each eye.
“They were taken away on January 17,” said the man in the cemetery. That was the day the air war began. “The bodies were left at hospitals on January 19,” he said. “These people were not Resistance.” He paused and then said in the same quiet voice, “Iraqi occupying soldiers should be given back to the Kuwaiti people.”
When the Iraqis tried to leave Kuwait City, early on the second day of the ground war, they headed en masse up the road to Basra using both sides of the six-lane highway. About thirty-five miles north of the city, near a low rise called the Mutlaa Ridge, this bugout was spotted by U.S. Navy A-6 attack planes. These navy pilots must fly New York City traffic helicopters in civilian life, because they knew exactly what to do. They went right to the spot on the crest of the ridge where the road narrows from six lanes to four and plugged that bottleneck with cluster bombs.
The panicked Iraqis tried to drive around the burning wreckage and became bogged down in the sand. The traffic jam spread out and backed up until it was nearly a half mile wide, more than a mile long and contained at least fifteen hundred vehicles. Then all the airplanes that the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Air Force could muster came in and let loose with everything they had. One navy pilot called it “shooting fish in a barrel,” but it was more like sticking a 12-gauge shotgun into a goldfish bowl.
The wreckage was still smoldering four days later. It didn’t look like a battlefield. There were some Iraqi army vehicles in the mess—tanks opened up like bean cans and armored personnel carriers turned into giant hibachis. But most of the transport had been stolen, stolen in a perfectly indiscriminate frenzy of theft that left the ground covered with an improbable mixture of school buses, delivery vans, sports coupes, station wagons, tank trucks, luxury sedans, fire engines, civilian ambulances, and semi-tractor trailers. I saw a motor scooter, a Geo Tracker, and—the vehicle that would be my personal last pick for something to escape in—a cherry-picker crane. It looked like a bad holiday traffic jam in the States except charred and blown up, as though everybody in hell had tried to go to the Hamptons on the same weekend.
Allied burial details were moving through the wreckage, but some bodies were still lying crispy and twisted in agony. I felt sorry for the poor dead bastards, but it was a reasonable, detached kind of sympathy that came from the went-to-college part of the brain. I was intellectually obligated to feel sorry for them, but after seeing what they’d done in Kuwait City, I had more of an Old Testament feeling in my heart.
Then did I beat them as small as the dust of the earth, I did stamp them as the mire of the street, and did spread them abroad.—II Samuel 22:43
Of course I didn’t do this personally, but my tax dollars helped. I caught myself giggling in the carnage. This supposedly formidable and certainly ruthless army had not only run from a fight like a flock of hens, it had also tried to carry with it every item of portable swag in the emirate. The killing field was littered not so much with corpses as with TVs, VCRs, Seiko watches, cartons of cigarettes, box lots of shampoo and hair conditioner, cameras, videotapes, and household appliances. School desks, tea sets, stuffed animals, silverware, an accordion, and a Kuwaiti family’s photo album were all being dragged back to Iraq. I saw a pickup-truck bed full of women’s ball gowns and another truck stacked with Pampers. A hot-wired camper van sat with two cans of club soda resting in the dash-mounted drink gimbals. The camper bunks were filled with men’s boxer shorts, the price tags still on them, and the whole—camper van, club sodas, underpants, and all—was punched full of tiny holes like a cheese grater from cluster-bomb shrapnel.
Six days after the liberation of Kuwait the Kuwaitis were still celebrating outside the U.S. embassy, firing every available weapon in the air, including the .50-caliber dual-mount machine guns on the Saudi and Qatari personnel carriers. It’s one thing to get plinked on the head by a falling pistol bullet, but a .50-caliber slug plummeting from the sky at terminal velocity could go right through you to the soles of your feet. One American marine told me that sixteen people had been killed by “happy fire” so far, but a U.S. Army officer said it was more like 150. All the press corps’ telephone and television satellite uplinks were on the roof of the Hilton and rounds were beginning to land up there. One bullet came down between the feet of ABC executive Neil Patterson, who started handing out helmets and battle gear to everybody on the ABC payroll. The most dangerous thing I did during the entire war was cook spaghetti sauce on a camp stove on the Hilton roof without wearing my flak jacket.
Finally, one of the ABC satellite technicians—a Brit and a veteran of the Special Air Services—could stand it no more and leaned over the roof parapet and bellowed at the trigger-crazed Kuwaiti merrymakers, “STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT! PUT THOSE FUCKING GUNS AWAY AND GO GET A MOP AND A BROOM AND CLEAN THIS COUNTRY UP!”
I went out to the Kuwait International Airport, or what was left of it, to try to get home. While I was sitting out there next to the burned ruins of the International Terminal, a Saudi business jet arrived guarded on all sides by U.S. Cobra and Apache helicopters. The crown prince of Kuwait was returning home after a comfy exile in Tarif.
The next thing I knew the tarmac was covered with sleek Kuwaitis in perfectly draped dishdashas. They were shaved and scrubbed and their gold wristwatches sparkled in the sun. A U.S. Air Force enlisted man, sitting next to me on a broken couch that had been dragged out of the rubble of the first-class lounge, said, “When the fat guys in the bathrobes come back, you know the war is over.”
I hitched a ride to Saudi Arabia on a New Zealand Air Force C-130. The members of the flight crew were all in their twenties and filled with leftover joy of combat. They let me stand on the flight deck as they brought their 132-foot wingspan, 100,000-pound airplane down to a hundred feet and began chasing camels and goats across the desert at 300 miles an hour. The scattered tamarisk bushes were coming at us like uncountable fastballs in a batting cage. The camels gave out pretty quick but the billies and nannies and kids were inspired to remarkable sprints of goat turbo-terror. The vast destitution of the Dahna Sands spread out in an infinity around us. “Wall-to-wall fuck-all, eh?” shouted the Kiwi pilot. He and his crewmates had smiles as wide as their skulls. This was the stuff that made it all worth while, to be in absolute charge of 17,200 horsepower, to have, gripped in your fists, the whole might of science, of industry, of civilization’s mastery of the world—our civilization’s mastery of this world. “HOOOOO-AH!!!” as the Gulf troops say.
We popped over the top of a little ridge, and there was a Bedouin camp on the other side. I watched a boy about nine or ten years old come running out from one of the goat-hair tents. We were so close I could see his expression—thrill and fear and awe and wonder combined. His whole life he’ll remember the moment that sky-blackening, air-mauling, thunder-engined steel firmament of war crossed his face. And I hope all his bellicose, fanatical, senseless, quarrel-mongering neighbors—from Tel Aviv to Khartoum, from Tripoli to Tehran—remember it too.