by Tony Horwitz
In one hand the soldier clutched a white “invitation card,” one of millions dropped from allied planes. It illustrated, in cartoon form, the proper way to surrender: hands up, gun muzzle pointed down, bullet magazine removed. The cartoon's second frame showed the same soldier seated cross-legged in the desert, feasting on platters of fruit and pots of tea given to him by his Arab captors.
The Iraqi's actual captor was a strapping American MP, and the feast—clutched in his other hand—consisted of mud-colored ration packets called Meals-Ready-to-Eat, or MREs (also known to American wags as “Meals-Rejected-by-Ethiopians”). Limping in his tight shoes back to the huddle of other prisoners, the Iraqi tore an MRE open with his teeth and ravenously devoured a packet of pink dust that I recognized as undiluted “base beverage powder.”
That morning at dawn, I'd joined a unit of Britain's Desert Rats as they strapped on chemical-weapons suits before crossing a small ridge of sand separating allied and Iraqi troops. One pimply teenager was so nervous that he had to ask an officer for help pulling on his plastic booties. “If you can still spit, you're not too nervous to fight,” counseled the officer, a Falklands War veteran. The two men expectorated weakly on the sand and climbed in their APC. A few miles on, we reached the foremost line: a column of allied tanks blasting into a void of dust and smoke.
No one fired back. In the three days that followed, the only real action I saw was the odd choreography of surrender. Iraqis popping out of bunkers, like rabbits from their hutches: waving surrender cards, waving white T-shirts strung on rifles, waving scraps of tissue. Iraqis kneeling in the sand, pleading with their captors not to kill them, as their officers had warned would happen. Iraqis darting out from under bridges where they'd shivered through the night, waiting for someone—anyone—to take them in. Some Iraqis even surrendered to Western journalists, and in one instance, to an unmanned U.S. drone plane—a sort of airborne robot—that had touched down on the sand.
After so many visits to Baghdad, the mass surrender was strangely exhilarating. Here, for the first time, Iraqis could vote—casting their ersatz white ballots in a resounding no to the man who had tyrannized them for so long.
As we pushed deeper into Kuwait, however, the scene turned much grimmer: blasted bunkers, mangled vehicles, and corpses scattered beside the road. The gritty sandscape closely resembled the Iran-Iraq front I'd visited in 1988, but the killing here was different. The Majnoon battlefield was World War I revisited: Iranians piled like firewood, clear-cut by raking gunfire. Here the slaughter was state-of-the-art, the desert plowed with “smart” bombs, cluster bombs, and fuel-air bombs, whose eerie, mushroom-cloud ignitions I'd watched set the night sky on fire from the safety of a Saudi sentry post a week before. Fuel-air bombs sucked oxygen out of the atmosphere, suffocating any soldier dug in beneath its lightning flash.
In Kuwait City, another correspondent told me about his ride in a helicopter gunship, a scary, insect-like aircraft with missiles for tentacles and swirling headlights for eyes. He'd watched through night-vision goggles as the helicopter shot a laser-guided missile at a dozen Iraqis fleeing their disabled tanks. “It was 'poof and then nothing,” he said, staring into his non-alcoholic beer. “They just vaporized.”
The handful of corpses I did see were scorched and hairless, their faces frozen in expressions of astonishment, like Pompeii residents mummified by lava in workaday postures. I thought of the artillery man who had given me a lift that last rainy night in Baghdad. It seemed doubtful that he or any of his fellow soldiers had managed to aim their “piece” before being cooked by allied fire.
A few days after the war's end, I traveled with two other journalists on the highway from Kuwait to Basra, to report on what seemed the imminent victory of Shiite rebels in southern Iraq. Flaming oil wells lined the road, filling the sky with a cloud so black that at midday we had to turn on our headlights. It was here, too, on the war's last day, that allied aircraft had surprised a fleeing Iraqi caravan, transforming it into a grisly traffic jam of twisted metal and roasted flesh.
The road was still littered with shrapnel, and as we'd brought only one spare tire, we were quickly forced to loot Iraqi vehicles for intact rubber—working the tire jack quickly, eyes averted, lest an Iraqi or some part of an Iraqi still lingered in the driver's seat. By the time we entered Iraq, it was three, too late to get to Basra and back to Kuwait in time to file our stories. So we parked the car and leaned against the hood, watching the passing traffic. A farmer in a donkey cart clumped slowly by smoldering tanks, upturned trucks, and a dead cow. An Egyptian worker with burlap on his feet trudged toward Kuwait, pushing a shopping cart filled with his soiled possessions. Iraqi deserters in tattered uniforms rummaged through roadside trash, frantically pointed fingers at their open mouths, begging us for food, water, cigarettes. The only sign of authority was a towering portrait of Saddam, his head flanked by fluttering doves.
Two farmers paused to chat, and we asked them if the government still controlled southern Iraq. “There is nothing to control,” said a weary man named Kassim, gesturing at the blasted landscape. “No money, no food, no gasoline.” A barefoot friend ran a finger across his throat and declared, “Saddam is finished. All done.”
He was, of course, wrong. Within days, Iraqi forces crushed the Shiites, then turned their guns on rebellious Kurds in the north. I lingered in Kuwait for two weeks, then hitched a ride on a U.S. transport plane ferrying Saudi troops home. My brain was numb from lack of sleep, my laptop computer had seized up from typing in the open, oily air, and the desert camouflage I'd been wearing for three weeks stank of sweat, grease, and the MRE ham slices I'd spilled on them in the back of a jeep some days before.
My head drooped on the shoulder of the sleeping soldier beside me, and I began fantasizing about the soft feature writing to which I'd return in England. But as the plane rumbled down the runway, the soldier beside me jolted awake. He was staring at an American woman in headphones and Air Force jumpsuit who strode briskly from the cockpit to the plane's tiny porthole, monitoring the takeoff. The other Saudi soldiers were rigid as well, eyeing the lithe, ponytailed servicewoman with an unabashed mix of lust and terror. The plane lurched and shuddered as we climbed through the dense oil clouds overhanging Kuwait; that week a plane full of Senegalese troops had crashed in this same greasy gloom. I tried to put myself inside the head of these young Saudi soldiers, who would shortly return to a land where heavily veiled women weren't even permitted to drive.
And here they were, their fate in the hands of a fragile, swan-like female.
I instinctively reached for my notebook: another weird Middle East scene. And I wearily recalled something Geral-dine had said one late night in the Jordan Intercontinental three months before, when I'd confessed my desire to say ma'a salaama to the Middle East as soon as the Gulf crisis ended.
She laughed, nodding her head at a group of graying, paunchy reporters who had returned to the region, like so many others, after long stints in Washington or New York. “Don't kid yourself,” she said. “Once the Middle East's in your blood, you've got it for life. Like malaria.”
As the plane leveled and glided smoothly over the desert, the Saudi soldier fell asleep again. The engines purred and the plane banked gently, its porthole opening out on blue sky and blank dunes. Dozing off, head slumped on the Saudi's shoulder, I dreamed of green hedgerows skirting meadows of sand.