A huge bomb crater graced the entrance to the Cinema Ahmadi Drive-In, which was baking in the heat under relatively blue skies. Surrounded by a high, white cement fence and featuring an immense screen, it was perhaps the most luxurious and high-tech drive-in on earth. Every speaker post featured a thick hose ending in a device that looked like something that might be used to clean draperies but in fact provided air-conditioning for each car. Occupying Iraqi troops had ripped the gadgets off each and every post so that the place as a whole looked like an explosion in a vacuum cleaner factory.

The theater was otherwise empty except for a few late-model American cars that had been stripped of their tires. The doors were open and the windshields had been smashed. The wind, now gusting to 50 miles an hour, was the only sound inside the world's most luxurious drive-in theater.

In the refreshment stand, behind a broken window sporting an advertisement for Dr Pepper, I found a number of Iraqi helmets, uniforms, grenades, rifles, and ammunition clips. The troops had defecated in the projection room, which they had also thoroughly trashed. Dozens of reels of film had been methodically cut up into four-inch pieces. That would teach those Kuwaitis, all right: Rip out their air conditioning, crap in their projection room, and cut up their film! Ha!

I held one of the film strips up to the light: a lovely Arab woman was comforting a sick old man. Other strips featured other lovely Arab women in family situations: cooking, eating, tending children.

These gentle family films hardly seemed appropriate for a postapocalyptic drive-in. This was Mad Max territory, this was Road Warrior turf. Australian director George Miller's vision of postnuclear desolation—depraved individuals driving a disparate variety of vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines and battling each other for...well, for oil—seemed, in this place, less a B-movie triumph than a sagacious prophecy.

Scenes from just such a movie were being played out in the Burgan field every day. Caravans of odd vehicles moved slowly though the darkness at noon, their headlights pathetic against the swirling smoke. Sometimes they were illuminated by the flickering light of a nearby fire: a few pickups, an 18-wheel mud truck festooned with valves, a bulldozer with a metal enclosure, a huge backhoe...all these vehicles, most of them like nothing seen anywhere else on earth and all of them moving against a backdrop of fire, deeper into the blackness, into the smoke and soot and falling purple rain.