Peace Kills (19 page)

The liberties of Kuwait may be quotidian, but Kuwaitis are serious about them. Even in New Jersey the right to drive
isn't exercised with Kuwaiti vigor. I was on that six-lane highway going seventy miles an hour in the left-hand lane, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, when a Mercedes 500SE sedan blinked its lights behind me. I had nowhere to go. The Mercedes driver cut left onto the unpaved shoulder and proceeded at ninety or a hundred down the barely car-width slot between the traffic and the concrete barrier. I could see his taillights wobble. He was terraplaning, gravel-surfing, leaving a mile of stone stars in the windshields of the cars ahead.

The small, ordinary freedoms of life are priceless, especially if you remember to have someone else pay the price. Billboards on the backs of Kuwait's city buses show a photograph of a Kuwaiti hugging an American soldier during the 1991 liberation with the caption, in English and Arabic, “We Never Forget.”

In early March 2003 most American soldiers were too far from town to be hugged. Also, they were about to liberate in the other direction. I wondered whether the Iraqis would say, “We never forget.” If so, in what tone of voice will they say it?

Two days before the war began, the president of the United States gave an inspirational speech.

“I thought the Bush speech was a little bit inspiring,” said a PFC at an Army Aviation Chinook helicopter base in western Kuwait.

“Nothing we didn't expect, just a confirmation,” a warrant officer said.

“We most definitely have more to look forward to, now, instead of the standstill wait,” said a sergeant. She'd obtained,
somehow, in a Muslim marketplace, a case of pork sausages, and she was cooking lunch for her platoon in scrounged pans over a jury-rigged propane fire.

“This is just like being home after work,” said a platoon member. “We're enjoying ourselves while we can. It's going to be a longer day once combat begins.”

Some of the battalion's troops had come from Afghanistan. Kuwait's landscape was bleaker still. Six sandbags on the floor of each portable toilet—more ballast than portable toilets are given at Ozfest—said everything about the wind. The soldiers had free weights, laptops (though no Internet access), and once-a-week phone calls home. They said they had CDs with a variety of music: country, heavy metal, rap, bluegrass, gospel, alternative rock. But each soldier listened to one variety, not to the others. There was no “Tenting Tonight” or “Lili Marlene” in the Walkman-headphone army. “Everything is fine, aside from cold showers,” said a private.

“One day closer to redeployment,” said a lieutenant.

“Your worst day of waiting is better than your best day of combat,” said a captain.

Asked about world opinion, peace protests, the UN, and so forth, a helicopter pilot said, “I don't care. We're here to do one thing and one thing only. If they tell me to go hurt someone, I'll go hurt someone.”

That was a chilling statement of military professionalism, unless it was a heartwarming testimony to what military professionalism means in a democracy with armed forces under civilian control. Either way, the professionalism was different than it was in Kipling's time. A second pilot, leaving base as a sandstorm blew in, said to the first, “If I don't come back, I'm willing you all my tampons.”

“We came here to do a job,” said an enlisted man. “It doesn't matter what we think about it, we've got to do it.” Then he added, “I'm doing it for my wife and kids.”

And each soldier may have been listening to different music, but all the soldiers were
not
listening to the same tunes. A member of the popular country-and-western group the Dixie Chicks had stated that President Bush made her ashamed to be from Texas. A gunnery officer collected Dixie Chicks CDs to throw out the window of his Chinook. Also a campaign was discussed to return the Statue of Liberty to the French: “Take the Bitch Back.”

The previous week a network anchorman had been scheduled to take a ride on one of the battalion's helicopters. I had happened to be on the base. I asked the private on sentry duty at the landing pad, “Have you seen Peter Jennings?”

“No, sir,” said the private. “And I don't much like him, anyway.”

At Camp Virginia, in northern Kuwait, amenities were fewer. Hot meals were infrequent. There were long lines for those cold showers. A sergeant took me for a ride in his Bradley fighting vehicle. We went across the desert at terrific speed—“terrific” being about forty-five mph. But in a large armored, tracked vehicle, this is like forty-five mph down the stairs on a cafeteria tray. As we crested a berm, the sergeant said, “Sometimes I don't know why they pay me!” He'd been in Kuwait for six months. Camp Virginia came back into view. “And sometimes,” the sergeant said, “they couldn't pay me enough.”

His crew wanted to know about
my
pay. “How much do
you get paid to come here?” they asked. “Is this fun for you?” An officer from Army Public Affairs shushed them.

I was shown a mobile command-post tent carried by five trucks and big enough for a circus that's given up aerial acts. But inside, it seemed to be a Wall Street bond-trading boiler room. Officers sat at rows of tables, staring at computer terminals. In front of the tables were PowerPoint presentations on three large screens. Map displays showed enemy and coalition military positions in the planned initial combat zone, in Iraq as a whole, and in the entire Middle East.

The tent was windowless, the better to protect against NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) threats. The other tents were also windowless. Ordinary soldiers, along with headquarters staff, spend a lot of on-duty time staring at computer terminals. And they spend a lot of time inside NBC suits, behind gas-mask lenses, breathing through filters. In the back of the Bradley fighting vehicle, where six combat infantrymen sit, the only peek at the outside is through periscopic slits. The Chinooks themselves, if you stand away from the door gunner's post, don't have a view. Or they don't unless the crew drops the rear-loading ramp. Then you have the disconcerting view you'd get from putting a French window in the floor of your mountaintop house deck. There's something as indoorsy as eBay about the twenty-first-century military. And from all I know about either part of that simile, something as historically transformative.

The military is indoorsy but not homey. The numerous ducts, tubes, and wiring bundles of technology—covered by Sheetrock and acoustic tile in civilian life—are left bare in the Army. The hardware seems to expand with exposure. Austere functionality has so overgrown the interior of the
Humvee that only four soldiers can fit into that hulking vehicle. Perhaps technology is squeezing humans out of warfare. But will they want to go?

A Chinook helicopter crew took me along on a live-fire exercise, to practice with the door-mounted M-60 machine gun. We flew to a range on the northern Kuwait border where Iraqi military junk from the Gulf War had been hauled. One of every so many rounds in the M-60's ammunition belt magazine was a tracer, which left a Fourth of July rocket trail telling where the bullets were going. I asked if it was like shooting a rifle, aiming precisely, or like shooting a shotgun, leading the target. “It's better than either,” said the gunnery officer who'd been collecting Dixie Chicks CDs. “It's like walking the dog!” Bullets ambled along toward a Soviet-era Iraqi tank—trot, trot, trot, and mess in the yard.

Flying back from the firing range, I had a moment of clarity about one of the supposed underlying causes of the conflict in Iraq. The Kuwait desert is as flat as a patio and as big as Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. The entire space appeared to be covered in tanks, artillery pieces, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees, transport trucks, and Patriot missile batteries. Streaks of asphalt runway ran in all directions. The tarmac held fighter planes, cargo planes, and hundreds more helicopters: Chinooks, Black Hawks, Apaches, Kiowas. Amid the matériel were Camp Virginia, Camp New York, Camp Pennsylvania, and—the way it looked to me—Camps Other Forty-seven and Camp Puerto Rico and Camp Guam. Military force extended from me to the horizon in every direction, 360 degrees of war. It is much cheaper to buy oil than to steal it.

* * *

At dawn on Thursday, March 20, when the first American missiles struck Baghdad, I was asleep in a big, soft bed. My wife, watching late-night news in the United States, called me in Kuwait to tell me the war had started. That was embarrassing for a professional journalist in a combat zone. But I looked around my comfortable hotel room and thought, “We
are
fighting for freedom. In this case, the freedom to go back to sleep in a big, soft bed.”

I got out of bed, eventually, and went to interview the random bystanders who have become central to news coverage in the contemporary era. About a third of the stores and businesses in Kuwait City were closed. A bomb-sniffing police dog was digging furiously in a concrete planter outside my hotel, which would have been alarming if the dog hadn't had the unmistakable mien of a pooch who smells something deliciously dead.

The Kuwaitis I talked to were confident and enthusiastic. The proprietor of a fabric shop said, “America is here. I feel no problem in Kuwait.”

I went to buy additional pens and notebooks, in case other spokesmen for the Arab street were more loquacious. I asked the stationery-store owner about the onset of hostilities. “This is good,” he said. “This is better. I want Saddam finish.” He told me about seeing a young Filipina raped by Iraqi troops in 1990, outside his shop door. “I could do nothing,” he said. “They loot my store—everything.” He put a finger to his temple. “Click,” he said. He all but came over the counter with angry enthusiasm. He declared, “I go for a soldier!” Then he sighed. “But my son says, ‘You are sixtyseven.'” His Indian shop assistant steered me away from the less expensive pens.

Non-Kuwaiti guest workers were less certain about the war (although the stationery-store assistant did give me a hug after I'd interviewed his boss—and bought two boxes of felttips and a dozen steno pads).

“My owner won't let me close,” said a Pakistani man at an appliance store. “You ask me, I close. Maybe you will inform him.”

The Indian manager of a women's clothing store said, “I think this is not fair. Is for us and everybody, not good. Is bad for Saddam Hussein and very sad because of one person is all this trouble.”

“You mean because of Saddam Hussein?” I asked.

“Yes, Saddam.”

“But you still don't think this war is good.”

“Yes.”

I questioned a Filipino clerk at a photo-developing booth about his decision to come to work.

Me: Some businesses are closed.

Clerk: Sometimes they do not open.

Me: But you're open. You're not afraid?

Clerk: Some are a little afraid.

Me: How do you feel about the bombing?

Clerk: (Polite smile.)

Me: The U.S. bombed Baghdad this morning.

Clerk: I did not know about this. (Another polite smile.)

Iraq began firing missiles at Kuwait. Only the first air-raid warning had any effect on the Kuwaitis. When the sirens started, I saw a man in a
dishdashah
come out of an office building and rush nervously toward his car. Fifteen feet from
the vehicle he stopped and pressed the door-lock button on his key-chain remote, and then he went back into the office building.

There was a mannequin wearing a gas mask in a store's window display, but it turned out that the store sold equipment to the police and military. Plastic sheeting and duct tape were displayed in the hardware souk. “Many sales,” said a fellow at one of the stalls. “But not because of the war—because of good price.”

One of the Kuwaiti soldiers guarding my hotel wanted America to pick up the pace. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow,” he exhorted, and made the motion of a baseball umpire calling a runner safe. “Boom!” he urged.

A tiny old lady wrapped in a black
abayah
approached me in the vegetable souk. She had the face of Mother Teresa—or, rather, the face that Mother Teresa deserved but didn't get. “American?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

She gave me a beatific grin, a smile of hope and blessing, and drew her finger across her throat.
” Saddam!”
she beamed.

There was no sign of fear or patience among the Kuwaitis, any more than there would be among the Iraqis at Safwan. Sermons could be preached about the civilizing benefits and progressive influences of fear and patience.

And I've preached all of them to my three- and six-yearold daughters. I suspect I have one or two elements of the Muslim world in my own home.

But only one or two. An article in
Kuwait This Month
featured the
miswak
, a twig from the saltbrush tree that is employed as a natural toothbrush. “Muslims use it,” the article said, “on the recommendations of Prophet Muhammad.”

The Prophet is quoted in the text: “Use the
miswak
, for verily, it purifies the mouth, and it is a pleasure for the Lord.” Not only is there no separation of Church and State in the Muslim world, there is no separation of Church and dental hygiene.

In
Arab Times
, a Kuwait English-language daily, the law court roundup reported that “S.H.F.” was accused of raping “O.S.M.” He took her to an apartment for a tryst, then invited some other men to have sex with her. She refused and was raped. S.H.F. was acquitted. The court ruled that “the testimony of the victim cannot be taken into account because during earlier interrogation she had said S.H.F. had sex with her three times and later confessed to having sex five times.”

But just when I had decided that the people of the Middle East were as troublesome and confusing as the algebra they invented, there came a glimpse of the brotherhood of mankind, or—apropos of algebra—the brotherhood of sophomoric guykind. I was in a phone store when a young Kuwaiti married couple came in. They were in their late teens. She was a beauty, though cloaked to the soles of her feet and veiled to the eyes. A girl who is really pretty—whether she wraps herself in an
abayah
, a nun's habit, or the front hall rug—never wraps herself so that the world can't tell. The boy was tall and gawky and had a foolish grin. A line of hickeys ran up his neck.