En Route to Kuwait City
DESPITE THE STEADY HAND and nerves of steel I am exhibiting while filing this dispatch from a British Airways cabin, there is nothing easy about shipping off to a war zone. There’s the tearful good-byes, the intimations of doom, the begging and pleading not to go. Or there were, until my managing editor gave me a smack, and told me to pull myself together.
Now, as we have reached a cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, somewhere between London and Kuwait City, on what we’re told is the last flight in before they stop running civilian routes in anticipation of war, a strange sense of relief has set in. Not because I have signed on for what could be a memorable adventure. Nor because I have the chance to possibly document the feats of our men and women in uniform, to take a ringside seat for the ultimate spectacle, to witness man in all his glory and depravity. No, the reason I am happy to be headed for a country that the State Department has advised the rest of the world to steer clear of is because I have soaked the company for so much gear that I want to be long gone when my expense reports are filed.
I can hardly be blamed. A little over a month ago, I was assigned to do a story on Centurion Risk Assessment Services–a company staffed by a roughneck crew of recently retired British Royal Marine commandos. They spend their days teaching naive journalists all the ways they can get splatted while covering a war. The best way to prevent this, they told us–aside from staying home–is to be prepared, to anticipate every situation, to never go into any environment where you don’t have the tools to get yourself out safely.
Taking the lesson to heart, my colleague and traveling companion, Steve Hayes, and I went to REI, Hudson Trail Outfitters, and Radio Shack–to wherever we needed to go to get the desert-friendly outerwear, the electronics, and other miscellaneous gee-gaws, in order to better serve you, the reader. Under the tutelage of our magazine’s outdoorsy, gearhead publicity director, Catherine Titus, we went on a shopping trip to procure the necessary wardrobe. Seeing as how we are both men of refinement who prefer to be haberdashed by the most reputable discount Hong Kong tailors, neither of us were terribly excited about the specter of all those synthetics and bush vests that make you look like Gunga Dan Rather on safari.
But after Catherine persuaded us as to the utility of synthetics, warning that the denim, linen, and velour we usually favor are a disaster when you get them wet, we slowly embraced a new sartorial worldview, going in for the full war correspondents’ rig: lots of extraneous pouches, zippers and mesh–everything but the Peter Arnett rake-over. As I write this, I am wearing enough pockets to hold the entire 3rd Infantry Division’s gum and car keys for the war’s duration. By afternoon’s end, we were trying on fleeces and Gore-tex and tight thermal shirts that accentuated our man-racks. We bought dry-wick underwear in case we get close to a firefight and wet ourselves. We bought North Face zip-off cargo pants–half pants, half shorts. Mine come in desert tan, Hayes’s in charcoal, making them, as he calls them, his “night pants.” At first, we felt like honking dorks. But after showing up to the office with the cargo pants, then around lunchtime, zipping them off into shorts–confusing the interns by “varying my routine” as my Centurion instructors encouraged me to do in the interest of safety–I immediately realized that with pant/shorts, all things are possible.
We bought canteens with nuclear/bio/chemical nozzles, in case we get thirsty in the middle of a sarin attack. We bought chem suits and back-up chem suits–JSList military-style, Tyvek (which resemble a lawn tarp), and see-through plastic suits, which make you look as if you’ve been stuffed into a giant Ziploc bag. We have red-light flashlights, glow sticks, and headlamps. We bought Leatherman multi-tools in case we need to open a bottle of wine or cut the tags off our new clothes. We have a short-wave radio, a solar battery charger and alligator clip/jumper cables, in case our laptops run out of juice, and a Marine is kind enough to let us charge up off his Humvee battery. We have body armor and Kevlar vests. We have helmets with desert camo covers that make us look like Middle Eastern versions of Michael Dukakis. Though I can’t speak for Hayes, I have a protective cup–not because anyone suggested I needed one–just because I like the way it looks, and it makes me feel sexy.
Then there are the bags. We have small bags and big bags: bike messenger pouches, huge backpacks, three-day assault packs, and rolling duffels the size of small coffins. To be honest, it all might be a bit excessive, considering our base of operations is going to be a Resort Hilton on the Persian Gulf. That too, is largely my editors’ fault. One of us could have accepted a permanent embedding assignment with the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division. The 1st Cav was Robert Duvall’s unit in “Apocalypse Now”–though in this conflict, they are late-deployers that will likely be used for post-war stabilization. But our bosses argued that everybody was embedding–we’d be better off doing a variety of stories by staying unattached and remaining mobile.
Remaining mobile? I have so many bags, I need a coolie just to help me get off the Heathrow shuttle. No worries, however. I will fully embrace the 1st Cav’s hooah spirit just as soon as I check into my hotel room and get a hold of the room service menu.
I love the smell of bacon in the morning.
Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
