Generation Kill - Evan Wright [7]
I arrive at about noon on March 11, on a bus from Kuwait City provided by the Marine Corps. I’m the only reporter slated to embed with First Recon. Another was supposed to come as well, but he dropped out after going through mandatory chemical warfare training provided by the Marine Corps in Kuwait City. Marine instructors had scared everyone by talking about nerve gases that, as they put it, will “make you dance the funky chicken until you die”; blistering agents that will make your skin “burst up like Jiffy Pop”; and the risks of suffocating in your gas mask if you vomit. “If it’s chunky,” an instructor had said, “you won’t be able to clear it through the drain tube of your mask. You’ll have to swallow it or risk choking on it.” It was this last point that got to the other reporter. He suffered an acute attack of sanity in our hotel a few hours later and left the embed program to fly back home.
War fever, at least among reporters, has been running pretty high. Before coming to Kuwait, while staying at the main media hangout hotel by the Navy’s port in Bahrain, I’d witnessed two colleagues get into a smackdown in the lobby over the issue of war and peace. A Canadian wire-service reporter, bitterly opposed to the war, knocked down a loudly patriotic American photographer in favor of it. While stunned Arab security guards looked on, the Canadian peacenik clenched the American patriot into a sort of LAPD chokehold and repeatedly slammed his head into the back of a chair. The American was saved from further humiliation only after several tough women from Reuters and AFP waded in and broke apart the one-sided combat.
When I watched the broadcast of Colin Powell making the case for war to the UN, I was aboard a Navy ship in the Gulf with a group of American reporters who cheered whenever Powell enumerated another point building the case for the invasion. They booed when European diplomats presented their rebuttals. Being among reporters here has sometimes felt like the buildup to a big game, Team USA versus The World.
The first Marines I encounter have other issues on their minds. I meet them in a dingy mess tent, a few guys in their late teens or early twenties killing time in the shade before dinner. As soon as I enter, one of them asks me if it’s true that J.Lo is dead. Rumors of her death have been circulating through the camp for more than a week. The commanders told the men the story is not true, but one of the Marines I talk to, a twenty-year-old in an infantry unit, pesters me. “Maybe she really did die, but they’re not telling us to keep our morale up.”
When I tell him the rumor is false, he shakes his head, not quite believing me. You get the idea he’s clinging to this drama as something to enliven an otherwise bleak existence. Despite the fact that these Marines are poised to be at the epicenter of a world-changing event, here in the desert without phones or TVs or Internet connections, they seem a million miles away from it.
Everyone is covered in dust. When you walk through the camp, it whooshes up around your boots in clouds like moon dust. Even on days when the wind isn’t blowing, it hangs in the air the way dampness does in San Francisco.
Several weeks earlier, the military brought in hundreds of pigeons and chickens, which they placed in cages between the tents to serve as early-warning detectors for gas attacks, as coal miners have used them for centuries. But the desert dust overwhelmed the birds’ fragile respiratory systems, killing nearly all of them. The only fauna