Safwan was a dump, but not a ruin. There was little war damage. Coalition forces had destroyed almost nothing but the customs sheds, which hadn’t been used since 1991, when the Gulf War cease-fire was signed—as it happened, at Safwan.
In an hour and a half we were back in Kuwait City—in the same geography, on the same oil reserves, with the same people, same language, same religion. But Kuwait City is Houston without Enron (or, unfortunately, beer).
Twelve years ago Kuwait City was a dump and a ruin. The Iraqis destroyed what they couldn’t steal and left the rubble full of their garbage, including piles of human feces. The hotel where the Gulf War press stayed survived only because it had carpets made from some self-extinguishing synthetic fiber. The Iraqis kept pouring diesel oil on the carpets. The flames kept going out. The hotel stank. There was no electricity. The rooftop cisterns ran dry. The only food was eggs, cooked by the hotel staff over campfires in the parking lot.
Twelve years later in Kuwait City I had tea and smoked salmon sandwiches and tarts and cakes and sticky treats with an American lawyer who has lived in Kuwait for twenty years. He was trapped by the 1990 invasion and forced to hide. He described the convoy of empty trucks that came from Baghdad every day—” all kinds of trucks, dump trucks included”—and returned every night full of swag. He told about the Baghdad buses that were driven to Kuwait carrying members of the “People’s Army”—men and women turned loose in the shopping districts to pull down gates, push in doors, and loot. “The Iraqis,” he said, “pried up the reflectors between the lanes in the streets and took them back to Baghdad.” Then the lawyer spread his hands to take in the magnificence of the restaurant where we were sitting. “Even after all that,” he said, “there was a lot left in Kuwait.”
The smelly Gulf War hotel and everything else I remembered had been rebuilt or replaced. Freedom accomplishes extraordinary things. And there is an extraordinary list of things that Kuwait is free of. Kuwait is free of the Wahhabi religious idealism that inspires neighboring Saudi Arabia. There is an evangelical church in Kuwait City, a Coptic church, and a Roman Catholic Holy Family cathedral complex with crosses forty feet high on its gable ends. (I confess to thinking that one way to get a drink in Kuwait was to take communion. But a priest from India drank all the wine.)
Kuwait is free of the lofty goals of pan-Arab socialism that animate the Baath Party. Kuwait is also free of the lofty goals that animate other political parties. Political parties are illegal. To vote in Kuwait one must be basically a son of a family that lived there when oil was something that seeped from the ground and ruined the camel forage. Franchise is denied to women and to most naturalized citizens and to the 62.9 percent of Kuwait’s population—mostly guest workers and their dependents—who aren’t citizens at all. The national assembly is of dubious political power anyway. Kuwait is more majority-owned than majority-ruled. The relatives of Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah have held control since the eighteenth century.
As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone. Kuwait became a British protectorate in 1899. In 1961 the British were asked to leave and immediately asked to return, to forestall an invasion by a previous Iraqi strongman, Abd al-Karim Qasim.
Now, some would say, Kuwait is an American fief. The Kuwaitis are free of resentment about that. Being an American in Kuwait City was like being a minor celebrity come back home to live. Walking through the souks, I was greeted with shy smiles and hellos from fellow shoppers. Merchants invited me to have coffee after I’d bought something. In the luggage souk two shopkeepers left their stores and showed me around until I’d bought what I wanted from a rival. The teller at the bank told me he liked my haircut. As the war neared, hotels and shopping centers put metal detectors inside their doors. As I was going into the Salhiya Mall, a security guard saw me start to empty the many pockets of my safari jacket. He got up, helped me out of the coat, carried it around the detector stanchions unsearched, and helped me put it back on.
The freedom that Kuwaitis do have is the freedom to do what they want. What they want to do is shop, eat, and sit around. The Kuwaitis are among the few peoples on earth—teenagers aside—who don’t sneer at these freedoms. Apparently, they never did. Kuwait’s Popular Traditional Museum is devoted to recapturing “Old Kuwait”—” old” being before 1951, when bountiful oil revenues arrived. In the museum’s corridors are life-size models of bazaars, food markets, coffeehouses, kitchens, and home interiors, all filled with mannequins in period dress, sitting around. Exhibited artifacts include early electric fans, gramophones, Brownie cameras, radios with vacuum tubes, and a set of china commemorating the 1937 coronation of George VI.
In the new Kuwait this freedom of ways and means benefits from means that are prodigious. The McDonald’s on Arabian Gulf Street has a doorman and a maître d’. A Mercedes dealership on the west side of town is the size of a county fair. Premium gasoline costs eighty-seven cents a gallon or—to put that in Kuwaiti currency (at $3.34 to the dinar)—nothing. Lunch lasts from noon to five. The gutra on the man in line ahead of me at the McDonald’s bore the Dunhill label.
Souk Sharq, on Kuwait Bay near the sheik’s palace, might have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, if Wright had been alive in 2000 and in need of a quick job to knock off. The souk has its own yacht harbor. Inside the marketplace is a wide central aisle, space that in an American shopping center would be given over to booths selling sunglasses and caps with sports-team logos. At Souk Sharq one aisle stall was occupied by the De Beers diamond company.
As previously noted, Kuwait is not as wealthy as Luxembourg, on paper. But the papers at Souk Sharq’s newsstand were censored (although it was décolletage, rather than economic information, that was blacked out with marker pens). Anyway, Luxembourgers may be better at earning, but they cannot excel the Kuwaitis at spending.
The souk’s grocery store, the Sultan Center, was Balducci’s as Costco. Caviar tins were piled to the ceiling. In the food court the Chinese counter had Peking duck to go. At a children’s clothing store a toddler play outfit—shirt, jumper, and gym shoes—came to $140 worth of jam mop and chocolate milk sponge. The Kookaï boutique was filled with the latest in the fashionable ethnic look; never mind that Kuwaitis are ethnics.
I interviewed a Bedouin the next day. He was tending his camel herd in the desert west of the city. He wore sandals and a sail-sized dishdashah. His gutra (not from Dunhill) was tucked in manifold gatherings under the agal headband. On the back of the Bedouin’s riding camel was a carved-wood and tooled-leather footstool of a saddle. The camel’s flanks were covered by vividly woven and elaborately tasseled wool provision bags. This was the first time I’d ever seen anyone really use the kind of handicrafts that tourists bring home. The Bedouin milked a mother camel and offered me the bowl. We sat around. He said, “I have three sons in medical school in the United States.”
The camel’s milk was frothy, light, slightly sweet. It would make an excellent latte. The desert sky was crosshatched with power lines. Pumping stations and tank farms could be seen in the distance. There was a six-lane highway behind the desert patriarch. He was Lawrence of New Jersey.
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 el
se 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 wa
s 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.
Peace Kills Page 14
