The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Even to say that the ballroom was in Dhahran was enough to earn one of Captain Sherman’s famous “letters of admonition.” For there were rules aboard his ship and the journalists who enjoyed its warlike facilities were expected to obey them. “Violations of ground rules” by any of the 1,300 newspaper and television folk who had signed up to cover the war—including the identification of military bases, even Dhahran, which Iraqi pilots used during the Iran–Iraq War (though Sherman was unaware of this)—would be “dealt with on a case-by-case basis.” There was something of the schoolmaster in all this, for Captain Sherman’s command—officially known as the Joint Information Bureau or “JIB”—was itself an education. It provoked, confused, infuriated and misled.

  In the old days, back in mid-August when war seemed closer, Sherman ran the JIB with only six military officers, corralled behind a stable-like door of the hotel. In an identical room beside them sat two representatives of the Saudi information ministry. But as America’s military goals widened—as President Bush’s decision to liberate Kuwait was transformed into a decision to destroy Saddam Hussein— so Captain Sherman’s ship turned into a behemoth and moved upstairs, beneath a roof of giant blue and gold eggshell design, into a bigger ballroom of high-pile carpets, telephone bells, word processors, kitbags, rifles, notebooks and more information than any sane person would ever need to obtain about the mechanics of killing fellow human beings.

  On the right, behind a long wooden arras, sat the representatives of the Western military alliance, thirty uniformed officers from the U.S. Marines, Army, Navy and Air Force and—new crew members aboard Sherman’s hulk—a team of British defence ministry functionaries. On the other side of the ballroom, with fewer computers and more telephones, sat eighteen Saudis, each dressed in red kuffiah and white dishdash robe. At an isolated desk, there also sat a representative of Kuwait’s government-in-exile, dispensing coloured snapshots of torture victims. Like girls and boys at dancing class, the Westerners rarely crossed the ballroom to talk to their Saudi opposite numbers. Only the journalists moved between these two cultures, perhaps 6 metres separating the power of the West from the cradle of Islam. At opposite ends of the ballroom were two massive television sets. At the Arab end, Saudi television broadcast football matches and prayers. At the U.S. end, CNN portrayed the American way of life. The Saudis much preferred CNN.

  Within this emporium of war, journalists from fifty nations could seek information about Patriot missiles, arrange an overnight visit to the 82nd Airborne, set up breakfast with fighter pilots from an RAF Tornado squadron, demand to know the range of an F-15, the explosive power of a Sidewinder or the calibre of a Challenger tank barrel. They could sign up for buses and planes to take them to U.S. battleships, Egyptian armoured brigades, Syrian commandos, the U.S. 101st Infantry Division, the American 1st Cavalry or the Puerto Rico reservists. The Saudis would even escort reporters to the Hofuf camel market.

  It took a few days before one realised that while this might seem exciting, there was also something very disturbing about the JIB. All the promises of military potential, the inescapable firepower, the expressions of confidence, the superiority of technique and equipment, took on a subliminal quality. For while you might learn all you wished about the squash head of a 155-mm shell or the properties of a cluster bomb, you were not permitted to dwell upon the results of its use. What happens when the shell or the Sidewinder explodes? There was much talk of “neutralising” targets and the “loss of assets” and the way in which “enemy” units would be “negativised.” You might demand a visit to the British 7th Armoured Brigade, but not to a mortuary. Requests to visit medical facilities were politely granted. Ask about the body-bags arriving in Dhahran and a reporter was quietly told that his question was “morbid.” For this was war without risks, war made acceptable. It was clean war—not war as hell, but war without responsibility, in which the tide of information stopped abruptly at the moment of impact. Like sex without orgasm, the USS Jib was easy to view, drama and entertainment suitable for all the family. If you believed in the JIB, there was nothing X-rated about the future.

  It was Saddam Hussein who had cornered the market in death. The Iraqis dispensed no information about their military machine, there were no facility trips to the Republican Guard. But over the airwaves each night, it was Saddam who talked of the desert turning into a graveyard, of bones bleaching in the sun, or corpses rotting in the heat. Iraqi radio described the putrefaction of death as the ultimate cost of war for the United States, martyrdom as the highest price for Iraqi patriotism. The Americans talked about confidence, the Iraqis about worms.

  But if Captain Sherman was now marketing war, we journalists were its salesmen. Observe my colleagues in the ballroom of expectation. Several of them have taken to wearing military fatigues. The man from Gannett News Service is purchasing military name-tags to stitch onto his clothes. A lady from the Voice of Columbia (S.C.) Television station has turned up in the JIB kitted out entirely in U.S. combat dress. Lou Fontana of WIS TV, South Carolina, wears boots camouflaged with paintings of dead leaves, purchased for the desert at Barron’s Outfitters. (Anyone who has glanced at a desert—even looked at a desert in a picture—will be aware that there are no leaves in the sand, no trees, no nothing.)

  Behind the arras, Captain Sherman’s men and women, some of them journalists in civilian life, feel more at home with the press than with the military. Sherman himself is based in California and was naval adviser to the television version of Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance. Naval First Lieutenant Charles Hoskinson took a college major in Middle East studies but regards his true vocation as journalism, reporting on education and politics for The Daily Reflector of Greenville, North Carolina. I keep meeting marines who want to write stories. The reporters in uniform and the soldiers with journalism in their veins suggest a symbiotic, even osmotic relationship. Half the reporters in Saudi Arabia, it seems, want to be soldiers. Half the soldiers want to be in the news business.

  The rest were mouldering away in the desert, feeding on meals-ready-to-eat and copies of Stars and Stripes and wondering, many of them, how they came to sign up for a college education only to find themselves on the “big beach” waiting to fight a man whom many of them had never heard of until a couple of weeks before leaving home. Every time I could, I would wheedle a ride into the desert, official or unofficial, with soldiers I made friends with in Dhahran or on official junkets run by Captain Sherman and his fellow entertainers or with the French journalists who—with an admirable freedom of spirit—refused to abide by the rules and simply drove off into the sand in search of pictures and interviews with soldiers of any description, American, British, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, Syrian, Saudi, even Pakistani. Yes, the Gulf contingents contained their own Asian expatriate soldiers, the military version of all those millions of Pakistani, Filipino, Sri Lankan and Indian maids who slaved across the Arabian peninsula for Arab masters and mistresses.

  The sand was their enemy as it was ours. The sun shone like a sword and the sand invaded us. It was the same sand, hot and dry and sticky, that had prickled its way into our lives in the Iran–Iraq War, sugar-thick or fine as ground salt, brown and white and grey, clinging to the hairs in our ears, lodged between our toes, moist and scratchy between our thighs, blasted like a viscous spray into our faces, slithering up between eyelids and eyes, a wind described in P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste, the book my dad gave me as a boy, which is “not so much a sand-storm, but a mist or fog or dust as fine as flour, filling the eyes, the lungs, the pores of the skin, the nose and throat; getting into the locks of rifles, the works of watches, defiling water, food . . . rendering life a burden and a curse.”

  I looked for Wilfred Owen—even the occasional Rupert Brooke—out in the desert, forgetting that Brooke was a virgin soldier and that Owen’s poetry was forged in war, not in the highway supermarkets between Dhahran and Khafji where the soldiers queued for milk shakes and Cadbury chocolates and vanilla ices and stood in the fo
recourt with their mobile phones talking to Cedar Rapids or Bristol and bitching about the mail and the lack of booze and women and the presence of the scorpions—big snappy things that arrived at night to replace the torment of heat with the torment of freshly torn skin—and the lack of news. We played on all this, of course, we scribes. We took newspapers with us, heaps of them, and phones so that the soldiers, if we caught them on the motorway where the mobiles were in range, could call home free of charge and—when they did so—we felt their discipline and their orders slipping away as we became their friends, to whom they could disclose their fears and their loneliness and the shocking unpreparedness of soldiers who might have to go to war. How many times was I asked by marines or infantry or ambulance drivers if they could beg, borrow or buy my maps? Soldiers without maps, soldiers with no idea where they were in this ocean of grit, the sand moving at such speed over the landscape that the gales blew it in dust across Iran and Turkmenistan, staining the Mediterranean brown, heaping it up during the khamsin winds on my own balcony in Beirut, drifting it over Greece and southern Italy and deep into those parts of Europe that Arab invasions never reached.

  There are no poets in Bravo Company of the U.S. 24th Mechanized Infantry Division. They admit that their letters home are full of boredom and descriptions of the heat. They read a bit, sleep a bit, work a lot, mostly at night when the air cools. They live in a world of oppressive silence, so that you can hear Private Andrew Shewmaker rummaging around deep inside the hot bowels of his M-1 tank. When he climbs out of the turret, he is clutching a folded sheet of brown cardboard. He leans his right elbow on the gun barrel and scuffs the glistening, sugary sand away with his left hand before sitting on the scorched outer casing of the armour. He unfolds the cardboard with great care, as if it is a love letter.

  Running across it is a set of straight lines, intersecting and dividing in a series of perfectly drawn circles. Each circle possesses a name. Saturn, Pluto, Uranus, Mercury, Earth. At the top, in biro, an almost childish hand—it is Private Shewmaker’s—has underlined the words “Planet Damnation.” It’s his idea. All you need is a dice. “I wanted to keep the guys from being bored,” he says in a shy, embarrassed way. “We each start off in a spaceship from Planet Earth and have to travel far through space. At each planet—at Mars, say—we have to take on fuel. But distances are so great that we start running short. You have to try and reach just one more planet before you run out of gas and then you can refuel. The last person to keep going, he wins. The rest lose.”

  Private Shewmaker does not realise, I think, that he has captured the lives of his tank crew on this creased, rectangular sheet of cardboard. Isolation, the desperate need for fuel, fear of the unknown. On the tank around him, and sitting in the sand beside its tracks, Shewmaker’s friends listen intently as he explains the board-game. In the eleven days since they settled into this immense, lonely planet, they have received no letters from home, no newspapers, no hot meals. Many of them have no maps. When they talk, they do so in a monologue, having thought a lot and spoken little since they arrived. On the other side of the gun barrel, Sergeant Darrin Johnson is sitting on his haunches, eyes focused on that point in the desert where the sand is so white and the blue sky so pale that the two become one. Not once does he look at you when he speaks. He has been married for just twenty days.

  “Her name’s Virginia, I love her. I guess there’s nothing unusual about her— except that she wears blue contact lenses.” The other men laugh nervously. “I’ve known her for ten months. She was working in Hardee’s fast food when I met her. We were going to get married on my birthday on September twenty-third. I was alerted at Fort Stewart on August seventh and we both decided then to get married right away. We had the ceremony at her mom’s home. Her people were there, my mother couldn’t make it. I had eight or nine days with her.” Sergeant Johnson was still staring at the missing horizon, his thoughts far beyond it. “She came to say goodbye to me at the airport and I’m luckier than some. There’s a guy over there”—he waves his hand across the scrubland to the west—“who only had three or four hours with his new wife. He got married at lunchtime the day we left. I’ve written two letters to Virginia so far. What did I tell her? That I was OK and that they probably wouldn’t do anything.”

  The “they” was Sergeant Johnson’s concession to Saddam Hussein and President Bush. But what he told his young wife was a lie. “To keep her from being upset,” he says. Sergeant Johnson believes that “they” will indeed “do something.” “It looks like it’s going to happen,” he says. “But if we do have a war, I hope it’s over soon. Getting wounded comes into my mind a lot. Yes, I think about it a lot. I guess I feel safe in our tank, I feel I’ll survive in there. I’ve been in tanks for seven years and I know what it will do.”

  When I climb into his tank, it does not feel very safe. On one side is a worn black plastic seat—Sergeant Johnson’s position to the left of the gun breech—and on the right is Private Shewmaker’s platform, with his gas mask slung over the back. It is perhaps six feet from wall to wall. The thermometer on the ammunition locker reads 125 degrees. When the tank is moving, it climbs to 135. When I haul myself back out of their fragile spaceship, the men are holding their hands to their faces to shield them from the blowtorch wind. The desert here is spiked with broken, dried-up bushes. Spread out in the sand beneath their thick camouflage netting, Bravo Company’s tanks look like giant, long-dead spiders whose webs have decayed and overgrown them, congealing them into the desert floor.

  But there is no protection from the sand. Its grains fly into our hair like insects, into our ears and mouths and noses. When I close my jaws, I can feel the sand crunching between my teeth. When I sweat behind the tank, the perspiration leaves sand tracks down my face. Shewmaker and Johnson and their comrades are in full battledress, most of them wearing their helmets. There are no showers.

  There are thin lines between cynicism and duty, between complaint and courage, lines which are not as straight as those on Private Shewmaker’s board-game. Specialist Cleveland Carter from Georgia has little heart for this adventure in the Middle East. “I like the army, don’t get me wrong. But I never thought I’d come here. This is none of my business—Ay-rabs, you know—but since I’m told to do this job, I do it. I’m a soldier. But I’d like some of those Congressmen to come out here, with all that patriotism, to feel the heat in the desert. It doesn’t seem right to me. I’d rather folks paid more for their oil, than pay for their oil with my life.”

  The generals may be roaring for battle, but the young American soldiers I was talking to were not gung-ho for war. Sergeant Parrott, a thin, reedy tank-loader from Texas, says he is wasting his time in the desert. He joined the army for a college scholarship, not to fight in Saudi Arabia. They talk about the chances of war in few words. Private Shewmaker also joined the army to finish a college degree. “But I always wanted to be in the army, you know. I used to love all those movies. I used to watch so many films about the Second World War. I loved Patton, you know? I always wanted to be in tanks after that.” He is twenty years old. Most of the 24th’s battalion commanders are Vietnam veterans. Most of their men were five-year-olds when the war ended in Indochina.

  The politics of oil have not infected them all. Johnson thinks that “if the Saudis are our friends, then we’ve a duty to protect them.” Sergeant Jeff Eggart believes that “the Saudis needed our help, we promised it and we’ve got to provide it.” Two of the soldiers talk about their duty to obey the president. After a while, “duty” begins to occur in all their explanations for being in the desert. They do not demonstrate any hatred towards the Iraqis. Their enemies are a little nearer. “The scorpions come out at night,” Johnson says. “Dozens of them. There are snakes, too, you can see their tracks in the sand. So we can’t sleep down there. We all have to sleep up here, on blankets because the metal is so hot, curled round the turret of our tank.”

  Two midnight-black A-10 jets fly over us, the famous—or in
famous—“Tank Buster” that is supposed to protect Private Shewmaker and his friends from the Iraqi armour; clinging to the underbelly of each of the two aircraft is a yellow-painted missile. The soldiers do not even look up. “If they’re ours, I don’t care,” Eggart says. “I know how to recognise theirs, the MiG-23s, the Mirages. But I don’t think the Iraqis would use chemical weapons. I tell my wife that in my letters to her. I say that the longer this delay lasts before a war, the less chance they’ll use chemicals. It’s just my logic. I don’t know why.”

  Two years ago, Private Shewmaker got engaged to his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Heidi. “We were going to be married soon, but I had not seen her for five months when I was sent here. All I could do was call her on the phone and say goodbye. I left straight from barracks at Fort Stewart. I’ve written her but have no letter back yet, nothing from my Mom. I think about them at night. I sit on the tank and look at the stars. I thought up my game about the planets that way.”

  The tankers have neither battle experience nor prescience. Private Shewmaker and the other members of his crew seemed dulled by the heat. Shewmaker did not even have a radio on which he could listen to the BBC. “What’s happening out there?” Shewmaker and Johnson and their friends chorused when I was leaving them. I told them there had been a summit between Bush and Gorbachev, about Iraq’s release of some women and child hostages, about the growing tragedy of refugees on the Iraqi–Jordanian border. Just briefly, they caught sight of the outside world and their response was immediate. “Will you call my wife?” Sergeant Johnson asked. Shewmaker wanted me to phone his mother. And the other soldiers scribbled into my notebook the numbers of their families 8,000 miles away, further than any line on Shewmaker’s board-game.