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.
