April 1, 2003
Although media embeds are sharing the hardships and hazards of the soldiers’ lives in the Iraqi war, there is one comfort we have that may be the most important: the ability to call home. Soldiers look at my laptop and satphone arrangement, ask what it costs, how it works. They say, “So you can just pick that up and make a call anywhere in the world.” “Yeah,” I tell them. Most leave the broad hint right there. A few have suggested they would pay or barter for the service. I explain that the CO doesn’t want me doing this.
As we share the same conditions and the same exposure to hazards, it may be the single biggest dividing line, underscoring my status as a civilian. It is not that I am a non-combatant. They regard that as my misfortune, that I don’t have the same opportunity to kill the enemy that they do, and that I must ride out fights impotently. It is not that they must obey orders while I float somewhere outside the chain of command. In the stratified world of the military, they accept that some people have status and perks that they don’t have, or job descriptions that spare them some unpleasant tasks. It is my ability to communicate with the outside world and loved ones when they cannot. They envy it but so far, they don’t seem to begrudge it.
March 31, 2003
Good news about the embed process. The military -– at least the people I’m with -– won’t hold you back if you want to jump out of the track and join them where the bullets are flying. I found myself in the middle of a battlefield-clearing operation gone wrong today, and the only admonishment was that perhaps I might care to step behind that palm tree, they hadn’t quite killed them all. Any cop reporter will tell you that this doesn’t happen in the civilian world. This is good news because this means they are comfortable with us, and this project — from the media’s perspective — can be a success. We will get the unadulterated stories and images of war we came here for.
March 28, 2003
All wars have their lulls, and many wars have their false starts before the horrors of combat become known to the soldiers. In this lopsided contest, where the world’s most technologically advanced force is facing an army with antiquated and poorly-maintained weapons, one side is already fully acquainted with death and mayhem, while the other side has been experiencing it in small numbers or from afar. For those of us among the forces still positioning themselves for battle, it is still September of 1939 or early August 1914.
The soldiers remark with a sort of gee-whiz wonder that they will be war veterans when they go home, and debate about who they will tell that they didn’t actually see combat, if that is what happens.
Reporting on this still-quiet sector of the war –- the frequent sound of outgoing artillery and sight of smoke plumes on the horizon notwithstanding -– can seem as frustrating and futile as “fighting” the war seems to soldiers who have accomplished a record armored road march of hundreds of kilometers in a few days but now find themselves playing the old Army game of “hurry up and wait.” But I suspect it is also a time I might look back on fondly or perhaps with some wistfulness or sadness after the tank battles we are awaiting come to pass. I am almost tempted to stop filing, but find myself unable to do that, and figure there must be some value in recording the idle actions and thoughts of soldiers inching toward their first combat.
In any case, it is important that the wise-ass remarks of soldiers such as Pvt. Robert Baxter, 22, “Southern honky,” of Cairo, Ga., be recorded for posterity.
March 27, 2003
I remember my mother telling me a story she had heard from an Australian soldier back from the North African campaigns of World War II. He had tried in vain to protect a treasured watch. But the dust got into everything. It was one of those phrases from childhood that stuck with me.
“The dust got into everything.” Into their boots, into their clothes, into their food. I have an image in my head to this day of some Australian soldier, in his khaki shorts and desert boots, his digger hat with the brim pinned up on one side, shaking dust out of his watch. I think she must have meant Jim, a squinty-eyed outback horseman that her friend Kath had married, because he had been a soldier. She had told me he was the model for “The Digger,” a bronze bust of a soldier at the Australian War Memorial.
So here I am out in another part of the desert that stretches from Afghanistan to Morocco. Last night was the most intense of the dozen or so duststorms I have experienced in my two months here. The air turned brilliant yellow and orange in the afternoon, red at dusk, and pitch black at night. Stepping out into it, none of the surrounding vehicles were visible at all. A buddy standing a few feet away was a dim shadow. Grit flew into my mouth and formed a layer of mud on my lips. Through my dust-covered goggles, I made out something darting around my feet, a desert rat that looked like it wanted to climb up the leg of my J-list chemical warfare suit, our required attire out here.
I had tried to transmit with this laptop and my satphone for about an hour in the afternoon, but for the first time, it was impossible to get a connection. Duststorms had never stopped me before, but this time the column of dust must have been too high in the sky, and the volume of dust, the size
of the bits of dirt flying around, were too much for my Iridium. Dirt poured in the overhead hatch of the medics’ truck where I was working, with the satphone perched on the roof. It coated the keyboard and the screen of this laptop … nothing new about that, except that this time, immediately
after blowing it clear, I’d feel a new gritty layer under my fingers.
The sky finally cleared at midnight, and I crawled over the bodies of the soldiers I live with, three of us crammed in the back of the Bradley, forced in by the storm instead of outside under the stars. Up in the turret, I found the laptop wouldn’t start up. I finally figured out that the pin-sized “standby” button was stuck, and I struggled to free it with a paintbrush bristle, until I finally hit on the expedient solution of turning over the laptop and slapping it. Other keys have been sticking, but so far, this laptop is hardier than I have any right to expect. I use the wet wipes that come with MREs to clear the coating of grime from the screen.
This morning, we all began our personal cleaning rituals. “Whore baths,” as the GIs call them, with baby wipes or washcloths; bucket laundry; shaking stuff out. My enduring memory of Iraq might be blowing clumps of mud out of my nose and wiping the waxy grime out of my ears. You have to be careful cleaning the crust of dirt around your eyes, or they’ll become red and inflamed. Dust is perpetually trapped in the scales and cracks of my dried-out hands, leaving them ashen. Despite multiple layers of plastic bags, everything in my ruck has its dusting. The dust gets into everything.
Near as I can tell, the only thing that remains dust-free is the inside of my waterproof diver’s watch. Nothing special about this $70 G-shock, but I think I’ll keep it.
March 26, 2003
Note to print colleagues: It turns out our TV brethren can be just as big a pain out in the middle of the Iraqi desert as they can be when you’re doorstepping a tragedy-stricken family back home, making your low-key approach, and suddenly half a dozen of them show up with their cameras.
All of us here are guests of the military, and presumably all of us are trying as hard as circumstances allow not to make nuisances of ourselves. But one TV network, which shall remain nameless but belongs to an Australian-born media mogul, is now threatening to detract from the war effort.
Informed sources report that the network’s civilian Hummer (see “Chase Vehicles”) has broken down on the hard push north, and to accommodate the media, the higher brass has determined that a line company must surrender one of its Humvees to carry the network’s not inconsiderable load of electronics, Jujubes and makeup or whatever it is they have crammed in the back.
“They’re taking my Humvee,” said a beleaguered lieutenant. “Now, they’re not saying it’s for the TV guys, but their little super Hummer is broken down, and now Brigade needs mine. Seems like a bit of a coincidence. Our chief went down to fix theirs so they won’t take ours.
“Why would the media want this? It’s obviously a military vehicle. It’s a target,” the lieutenant said.
“Well,” I explained, “Usually they want anything and everything they can get their hands on.”
“It sucks. It’s embarrassing,” the lieutenant said. “It’s one thing if they want it for soldiers who need it.”
The lieutenant has a tank he can ride in, but the two maintenance men who had been using the Humvee to sleep in, run critical maintenance errands, and follow the convoy will have to find something else to ride in. Too bad the M88 tank hauler is also down, another casualty of this road march.
Jules Crittenden has covered crime, politics, science, maritime matters and foreign affairs for the Boston Herald for 10 years, including ethnic conflicts and other issues in Kashmir, Kosovo, Israel, Armenia and Nagorno Karabagh. He has been in Kuwait covering the buildup to war since Feb. 2 and is now embedded with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. Crittenden was raised in Indonesia, Australia, East Pakistan and Thailand, and lives south of Boston with his wife and three children.
