Editor’s note: Now that war has begun, The Daily Standard will be deviating from its normal schedule. For the next several days we’ll have morning and afternoon editions posted regularly and other reports posted throughout the day, so you’ll want to check back with us often.
With Matt Labash and Stephen F. Hayes on the ground in the Middle East, Christopher Caldwell in Europe, and Fred Barnes, William Kristol, David Brooks, and the rest of the team in Washington, The Daily Standard will have some of the best reporting and analysis around. Stay tuned.
–JVL
Kuwait City
CODE GREEN. That’s military-speak for all-clear, for normal life here in Kuwait City. That’s the official status right now. But normal is relative. The streets outside of our hotel complex are dotted with checkpoints. Recent arrivals here say that their trip from downtown Kuwait City, 20 kilometers away, took hours. Thirty minutes after the third and most recent sustained air raid siren, red lines still mark my face where a gas mask formed a tight seal.
The scene on the street outside the apartment in the immediate aftermath of the third alarm was bizarre. Journalists and uniformed military scrambled to don their gas masks and return to their apartments while the hotel staff, many of them foreigners living in Kuwait, wandered about with an apparent sense of resignation about their fate. Most of the workers here do not yet have protective equipment.
Bernard, a Filipino who recently came to Kuwait for a job at our hotel, told me shortly after the last alarm that he doesn’t even have a gas mask. “The hotel has some for us, but they just haven’t been passed out yet,” he says with apparent concern.
When I ask him if that makes him nervous, he abruptly switches back into customer-service mode. “There is much contingency planning for the staff,” Bernard assures me. “And of course we have many contingency plans for the guests as well, sir.”
But everyone is on edge here. Yesterday, as I wrote and watched television in the apartment’s main room, my colleague Matt Labash shouted something unintelligible from his bedroom. As I turned down the volume on the television, he yelled again.
“Sarin!”
I tossed the remote and dove in the direction of my gas mask and chem suit.
“What did you say?”
“Sarin! Do you know how to spell Sarin, the nerve gas? S-A-R-I-N?”
Hours later, I was awoken by the fire alarm in our apartment. Within seconds, as I looked out into the hallway, Labash came sliding down the hall, like Tom Cruise in “Risky Business,” gas mask on. It’s evening here now, and in the hour or so that I’ve been writing–with numerous interruptions–we’ve had two more alarms.
It’s unnerving even here, at a nice hotel, some 50 or 60 kilometers south of the Iraq-Kuwait border. Low-flying allied planes are heading south, visible despite a low cloud cover. Their muffled roar is at times hard to make out, combined as it is with the constant hum of winds whipping outside the window.
Further north, U.S. troops burrowed in the sand report seeing Iraqi missiles overhead and hearing the irregular “thud” of mortar. They don’t have windows or walls or doors to protect them.
It’s going to be a long night.
Stephen F. Hayes is staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
