On the way to the emir's gardens, deep in the southern oil fields, we saw a brown Land Rover, coated in black, gummy sand, parked by the side of the road. American fire fighters drove Ford and Chevy pickups, Kuwaiti oil executives drove Mercedes. The Land Rover, we knew, had to belong to our friends in Royal Ordinance, a subsidiary of British Aerospace. Composed mostly of former British military explosive experts, RO had won the contract to dispose of explosives in this area of the fields.

When Iraqi troops blew the wells, they sometimes salted the surrounding area with antipersonnel mines to sabotage the fire-fighting effort. But what RO was mostly finding were the universally feared Rockeyes that had been dropped by American pilots onto Iraqi positions. A Rockeye is a metal cylinder, maybe three feet long. When it is dropped it splits apart, releasing 247 six-inch-long rockets designed to explode on impact. The deadly submunitions look like fat lawn darts. All over, all across the black desert sands, there were Rockeye submunitions buried about three inches deep. Sometimes the pilot had dropped the Rockeyes too low to the ground; sometimes the submunitions had hit very soft sand. In any event, RO estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of the submunitions were still live. They were black with oil and could be identified only by their three fins. Usually there was a blackened Rockeye canister nearby.

Our RO friends had the dirtiest, meanest job in the fields. Whereas the fire fighters who followed them worked with the north wind at their backs, which meant that they often had blue sky overheard, the RO teams worked in heavy smoke in the midst of the fires, looking for explosives within a 150-foot radius of a burning well.

Three teams of ten apiece were now walking the hellish landscape. I could just make them out through the shifting clouds of soot that blotted out the desert sun. They were illuminated, in silhouette, by a nearby plume of fire some 80 feet high. They walked with their heads down, very slowly, looking like a precision drill team of very depressed men. The Rockeyes were marked with red-and-white tape fluttering at the end of a metal stake driven into the sand.

Later that day another man would come through the field, stopping at each of the markers. He would dig a hole next to each of the Rockeyes, place a wad of plastic explosive in the hole, string a long wire, and detonate the deadly submunitions from a safe distance.

Now, however, Lance Malin was standing by the Land Rover, coordinating the three teams currently walking the sand. The process of locating and destroying live ammunition was called explosive ordinance disposal, or EOD, and I knew it amused Malin that American fire fighters were using the acronym as a verb:"Has this area been EODed?"

He was talking to a man wearing heavy leather gloves. There was a large spiny-tailed lizard, about two and a half feet long, dangling from the man's index finger. The RO men had found a lot of these lizards, known locally as dhoubs, stuck in the sand and too weak to free themselves. They took them back to their headquarters in Al Ahmadi and fed them bits of apple until they regained their strength and snapped at anything that moved. Finally, the lizards took a ride in one of the Land Rovers and were released in the relatively pristine northern desert.

The RO men had no choice. They had to rescue the lizards. They were British.

Malin stowed this particular dhoub in the Land Rover and asked if I had been to the big mine field that RO was working near the Saudi border.

A couple days ago, I said.

"The Iraqi corpses still there?"

We admitted that they were. Right where everyone had left them. Unburied. For five goddamn months.