Middle East Adventure Travel - The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2003

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The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

CONTROL, OR THE PORTION of control that we truly possess, is not lost; it is surrendered, bit by bit, from one hour to the next, from one decision or nondecision to the next. I'm not saying that war is a drug—that's too easy, a cliché—but I am saying that I cannot identify a moment when the control I had, or thought I had, was taken away from me. In fact, it was given up.

We spent our first night in Iraq under an overpass outside Safwan, with the sounds of artillery and small-arms fire in the distance, and the mosquito-like whine of Predator drones high above. Basra was not falling. Soldiers on both sides were fighting and dying.

At dawn, there was only one direction to go. The road to Umm Qasr was closed off by barbed wire. We had already tried the road to Basra. And the road back to Kuwait was a professional dead end. I told myself I would stay with this war for now, see what happened, and pull out if that became the wise thing to do. Oddly, going deeper into the war was the easy way. Deciding that the risks were too high and living with the second-guessing and feelings of cowardice that might afflict me if I retreated and my colleagues continued on—that would have required real courage.

We drove north, circling up toward Zubayr, a suburb of Basra, past a line of several hundred military vehicles going nowhere. We followed a column of about 30 Marine armored vehicles as they took a northern side road, and when they stopped at a plateau, they allowed us to park inside their perimeter. Now there was no way I could turn back: Even if I remembered the zigzagging route, I would be traveling without military cover, in a war zone of amorphous front lines surrounded by free-fire zones.

Within a few hours the Marines began moving out, heading north again.

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