The soldiers were excited about firing the guns for real. The only time they had fired them before was in training. You should check out inside the gun when it’s firing, they said, everybody nodding that was a great idea. We can put you right inside a gun, they promised.
Stupidly, I agreed.
The 155mm howitzers were shaped like tanks with extra-long barrels. Thick as bank vaults, they were set up aiming at Iraq, and we stood around the heavy rear doors waiting for the signal to fire. A sergeant started telling me about the imminent ground attack. He knew I was a reporter, and that this information was highly classified, but I apparently had passed some unwritten test. He dragged his boot across the ground, and pointing with his toes, said, “This is us here, and this is the border.” He made more lines in the sand that showed an uppercut punch straight into Kuwait, but the main force, including us, would move up to the west of Kuwait and make a sharp turn to the right to surprise the Iraqis. Looked smart to me, and confirmed what I had heard. I also realized that if I stayed with the artillery, I would be in a good position to cover the action. Then everybody started yelling, “Fire mission! Fire mission!”
A soldier pushed me inside the howitzer’s small chamber that held the crew, and I scrunched down to fit onto a bench, bulky in my flak vest and half-blind from the helmet falling in my eyes. I looked up in time to see Spc. Ricardo Moyardo pull the lanyard, just a piece of rope connected to the firing mechanism. The breech slid back in a whumping concussion that boxed my ears. A few inches closer to my head, and I would have become the first journalistic casualty of Operation Desert Storm.
Somebody tossed me into a corner like a duffle bag, and I shoved my fingers into my ears. Wham! Moyardo fired off another round and the blast filled the close metal compartment with noise and pressure and dirt that knocked loose from every joint and crack. Wham! Each time Moyardo grabbed the lanyard, I braced and closed my eyes. Wham! After a few rounds I was covered with dirt and shaking all over. I shut my eyes earlier each time, but my nerve endings were snapping. The crew stopped firing only to swab the steaming barrel, releasing a chemical cloud that smelled of hot ammonia.
After twelve rounds, I sensed a break in the action and bolted out the back, just about falling on my face onto the sand. “Where are you going?” they laughed after me. Very funny. Outside I could see eight guns spitting fire and lobbing one-hundred-pound Joes, as in projos or projectiles, into Iraq. I stopped shaking but was still buzzing. As the soldiers said, it was high speed.
If I had asked, the soldiers probably would have let me pull the lanyard to fire a round, but that would have crossed the line between reporter and combatant. Being that close to the fighting helped me understand the experience of soldiers, but my job was not nearly as committed or dangerous as theirs. If I got hurt, it would be by accident or because I was near soldiers when they were attacked. I didn’t have to kill anyone, and I could leave at anytime. If this were baseball, I would not be a player but a spectator, although one standing on the field.
The most challenging part of my job was figuring out what was happening on the battlefield around me, and in the rest of Saudi Arabia, in Iraq, and even at the United Nations and in Washington. I needed to see the big picture, or develop what the military people called “situational awareness.” The first time I heard the phrase, it struck me that situational awareness was what I had sought during my entire career as a reporter. How do you figure out—and then describe—what is happening around you? That is the simple, lifelong challenge for a reporter.
I suppose situational awareness also was a good metaphor for understanding my own life and how I fit into the world. I always found it easier, safer, and more interesting, to figure out what other people were doing than to decipher the noise in my own head. I liked reporting because I could observe other people and let their experiences fill my life, instead of doing a lot of introspection or dwelling on my feelings. Maybe I had become addicted to Other People’s Drama. Was there an OPD Syndrome? I didn’t worry about it.
I briefly went back to the rear to call the office to say I would be out of touch. I asked Dale to call Maru occasionally. I did not tell my editor the ground war was about to start, despite the misleading news stories about peace talks, nor did I tell him the battle plan. I had made a promise of secrecy, I felt loyalty to the soldiers I was with, and I wasn’t going to reveal information that could call in an Iraqi counterattack on my own head.
Maru was in Mexico with her family. I managed to get her on the phone and told her I would not be able to call for a few days, but to check with the office if she needed anything. If I only was able to make one call from the desert, it would be to file a story. I knew the desk would get in touch with Maru if something happened to me. Maru said coverage of the war was all over Mexican television, and she was worried I would be hurt. She and her family had lighted candles for me.
I still wasn’t convinced there would be a ground attack, so I told her to relax and have fun with her family. Although I didn’t realize it, this was a time that my lack of introspection caused a problem for the woman I loved. I ignored my own fear, so I assumed Maru would not be afraid, either. I was wrong.
The guns of the Forty-Second Field Artillery Brigade continued firing steadily on enemy positions, the final preparation for the ground attack. I was told to drop my gear with the brigade surgeon, Capt. David Lawhorn, thirty-four, of Chattanooga. His tent was stacked with junk food—M&Ms, Snickers, and lots of chocolate chip cookies. Most of the food came from well-meaning people back home. The soldiers lived on junk food, which they called “pogey bait” and was a major army food group. I hadn’t had a Pop Tart since elementary school, but they were pretty good.
At 10 p.m., Doc Lawhorn ordered everyone, me included, to start taking little white pills to protect us from nerve agents. He passed out foil packets that resembled birth control pills. All through the night, soldiers came by asking for more pills because they had lost theirs or mistakenly had taken all the doses at once.
I mentioned to the Doc that I already had been given an anthrax vaccination. The military worried that Saddam had weaponized the common barnyard bacteria, so I had lined up for a shot with a bunch of soldiers outside a tarp. We were told to roll up one sleeve and walk single file through a gauntlet of medical people standing next to crates of vaccines and needles. I got in the line—I can’t say I thought about it one way or another; I just did it—and one of the medical people jabbed me in the arm. Someone else handed me a piece of yellow notebook paper with the date and information about the vaccine, the batch number or something. I threw it into the trash.
Doc Lawhorn said the vaccine probably was a good precaution, but I also needed to take the pyridostigmine bromide pills to protect me from more dangerous nerve agents. I wasn’t so sure about that. I didn’t think Saddam was going to use chemical weapons, and while I understood the need to protect the troops, I figured I was just observing. The whole chemical thing seemed a little overblown. I had been lugging around a chemical suit and my gas mask, but the longer I carried the gear, the more I took it for granted.
Along with everyone else, I carried a pouch with an injector of atropine, a nerve blocker. The idea was to jab the injector into your thigh if you were gassed. At night I used the stiff little pouch for a pillow, until I heard about a sleeping soldier who accidentally triggered the atropine and injected himself in the head. It was the kind of story that probably was not true, but was much repeated.
The Doc was patient with me. You know the Lincoln Memorial on the back of a penny? You know those little columns? Doc asked. Two of those columns worth of nerve agent are enough to kill you.
I started taking the pills.
After sleeping a few hours, I felt Doc moving around the tent. It was dark, 5 a.m. on February 24, and drizzle tapped on the canvas. I was warm in my sleeping bag and didn’t want to get up. Talking on a radio program from Washington, President Bush asked for a prayer for the troops. Then the radio re
porter wondered what the war would mean for Bush’s political future. Staff Sgt. Jeff Taylor, a twenty-five-year-old medic who was cleaning his M-16 for the final time before going into Iraq, barely looked up and spat out, “Who cares?”
It was time. We were told to go to “MOPP4,” or the highest level of Mission Oriented Protective Posture, meaning, put on all the chemical gear. I tore open the bag carrying my chemical suit, which looked like a bulky snowsuit in a forest green camo pattern. The protective boots were weird rubber galoshes that laced up like Roman sandals. I struggled into the suit but left the boots in the bag.
One reason I was willing to wear the suit was to appear the same as the soldiers. I had read somewhere that snipers picked targets who wore unique clothing, thinking maybe they were important or special. I didn’t want an Iraqi sniper to think I was special. The boots didn’t matter so much because a sniper couldn’t see them from far away. I went outside the tent and watched the howitzers fire on the area we were going to cross in a few hours. They called it “prepping the breach.”
On either side of us, tanks and armored vehicles rumbled single file into Iraq. The display of force compared to nothing I had ever seen. I kept thinking it was such a waste, all this energy to restore things to the way they were before Saddam invaded Kuwait. What if we marshaled that power to build schools or hospitals, or to do something constructive? The engineers had put up a sign that read, “Welcome to Iraq,” with arrows pointing to the “Beach” and “Golf Course.” So far, this still felt like training. The guns were firing for real, but the rounds were hitting downrange and out of sight.
I was talking with the battery captain when a breathless lieutenant came running up: “Sir, there are reports of chemicals on the battlefield.”
My stomach dropped. I had managed to convince myself that Saddam would not use chemical weapons, and now I wasn’t fully protected. I ran back to the tent, plopped down on the ground, and asked a soldier to help me lace up the rubber boots.
When the guns paused from firing, we loaded up and crossed into Iraq, a heavily armed carnival caravan, with packs, sleeping bags, boxes of food, and crates of water bottles lashed to the sides of the artillery and Humvees. The guns rolled north and fired all day, and at night they circled around like covered wagons. In the center of the protective ring was the TOC, or tactical operations center. I wasn’t sure what happened inside the TOC, which was the brigade’s classified nerve center, because it was off-limits to me.
The brigade was a pack of its own, and the soldiers pulled in tighter now that the hunt was on. I was on the outer ring, riding with the lower-ranking troops. I was free to interview soldiers and grabbed commanders if I needed official information for a story, but I didn’t have access to the secrets inside the headquarters. A lot of what I did was to stand around and watch.
When we settled in for the night, my escort, whom the troops nicknamed “Pathfinder” because he was not great at finding his way, announced that in the morning he was taking me back to the rear. I was stunned because the ground war had just begun. I can’t go back now, I pleaded, but he insisted. There was no way I was leaving, but I didn’t think I could stay without an escort from Public Affairs.
I explained the situation to the brigade commander, Col. Morris J. Boyd, forty-seven. He said it was no big deal. I could stay with the brigade, even if my escort left. Out here, Colonel Boyd was the absolute boss. “There are two ways we could do it,” he said. “I could brief you every day about our operations, and you could write your stories. Or I could read you in.”
I thought it was a trick question, because option two sounded like unfiltered access to the brigade’s operations and secrets. If he was going to read me in to the battle plan, I would be inside the brigade during combat. This was a dream of every reporter.
“The catch is you would have to stay for the duration,” Boyd said, answering my unspoken question. “You would know too much to leave.”
That did change my calculation. The expected length of the war and the anticipated casualties were highly classified, but it could take a couple of months to clear the Iraqis out of Kuwait. I had heard casualty estimates in the thousands for US troops. Everyone expected a few reporters to be killed. I didn’t want to commit myself to such a long time, but it was a unique opportunity.
The other part of the deal was that Boyd’s S-2, or intelligence officer, would read my stories for a security review. The brigade did not have a media person, so “The Deuce” would perform the task. I didn’t have to think long about the ground rules. “I’m in,” I said.
As Colonel Boyd was walking back to the TOC, I said, “Sir, I just want to tell you that I feel privileged to be here.”
He came back and said, “You are getting to see something that not many people see. The sergeant major and I are going to quit after this one and go fishing. No more of this for us. We’re going to leave it to the younger guys.”
The camp was dark at night, except for the occasional sliver of light when someone opened the door of the TOC, which was an expandable trailer. The TOC operated all night, with people and information going in and out around the clock. We slept nearby on the open ground, and I was advised to bed down near a vehicle so I wouldn’t be run over in the darkness. I put my sleeping bag next to Pathfinder’s truck and tried to sleep. I had been on the ground for an hour when a soldier came over and stood above me.
“The colonel wants to know if you want to sit in on the meeting,” he said.
I jumped up and followed him closely in the dark up the steps to the command trailer. He opened the door to the TOC, and the light blasted my eyes. It took a minute to recognize the brigade commander without his helmet. I was beginning to think it was part of his head. Colonel Boyd introduced me to about twenty of his young officers and sergeants, including one woman.
They stood in front of two large maps, one showing US positions and the other showing the Iraqis, right down to individual units. This was exactly what I had been trying to figure out since August. Here was the battle plan, and it was close to the one I had imagined. I kept thinking I was not supposed to see the map, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. I remembered being thirteen and catching a look at a Playboy magazine.
“What kind of security are we going to have?” Colonel Boyd asked.
“Fifty-fifty, sir,” one of the officers replied.
“What’s 50–50?”
“Half of each section up and half asleep,” was the answer.
“We need to run a sanity check on that,” Colonel Boyd responded. “I’m not expecting a full, frontal attack tonight, but we’ve got to be on guard against a straggler coming in with a grenade who wants to do his bit for Allah. Let’s have good security, but let them get some rest.”
Capt. Bill Cain, the intelligence officer, briefed everyone on the disposition of Iraqi troops. I admired how he spoke of the Iraqis in an almost intimate way, as in, “He’s thinking we are coming from the south.” In a calm and measured way, Cain described two nearby Republican Guard units on the move. One appeared to be heading toward Basra and one toward Baghdad, but neither was moving to engage US forces.
Colonel Boyd said he wasn’t interested in fighting over a piece of ground: this was a movement to contact, not a movement to territory. To me that meant they were planning to chase Saddam’s elite Republican Guard and destroy it, not just drive it out of Kuwait. They spoke in a bewildering array of acronyms and jargon. Even after covering the military every day for a couple of years, I wasn’t sure about FLOTs, MSRs, or phase lines. Like a lot of people at the Pentagon, I had spent more time worrying about budgets, Congress, and interservice rivalries than actually fighting a war.
After the meeting, I tried to get comfortable on my little piece of ground next to the truck. Pathfinder was inside the cab, already asleep. He was sick of me, and I wanted to stretch out and be by myself, so he slept inside the truck while I slept outside on the ground. I was excited about the war and my new access to th
e brigade leadership. I wasn’t really afraid, but it was energizing. I liked the tunnel vision of war, the absolute focus on life and death. There was nothing to think about except fighting: no grocery shopping, no bills to pay, no politics, and no plotting and scheming. Even though I was just along for the ride, I liked being part of something big, something that mattered, something that would change the world.
I did worry about one thing: What if the soldiers I was with made a mistake or fired on the wrong target? What if they committed a war crime or an atrocity? Would I betray them and write the story, or betray my readers and not write it? For my own reasons, I wanted them to have a good war.
I drifted off to sleep only to wake with a start: I couldn’t breathe and my eyes stung. Gas attack! I sat up coughing and looked around. All quiet in the camp. Nobody was racing for cover or putting on masks.
Then I realized I was sleeping under the tailpipe, and Pathfinder had started the engine. Blue exhaust, kept close to the ground by the cold night air, enveloped me. Furious, I struggled to get out of the army sleeping bag (labeled with extensive instructions for use, including, “How to make an emergency exit.” Really). I expertly made the emergency exit and banged on the window, trying to reach through and hit Pathfinder in the head.
“What are you doing?” I yelled.
“I was cold,” he replied, “so I turned on the heater.”
I reinserted myself in the bag on the other side of the vehicle, away from the exhaust, and fell asleep.
Pathfinder was a good sport and left me with the brigade the next morning. I printed a story on my battery-powered printer and showed it to the intelligence officer, Captain Cain. The Deuce looked at it briefly and handed it back. After that, he didn’t ask to read any of my stories. I asked Pathfinder to hand-deliver the story to the media pool office in the rear.
I was told to ride with John Woodley, the command sergeant major, and his driver Spc. Stan “Tex” Lenox, whose soothing drawl made me sleepy. Tex’s dream was to return home and become a deputy sheriff in Argyle, Texas. (“No sir, they don’t make any socks there.”)
Finding the News Page 22