Fighting broke out on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border today, but Saudi troops quickly intervened to quell the hostilities.
“No one who is not on the list will be able to go,” the Saudis said, checking us off one by one.
An hour later we were at King Khaled Military City, an extraordinarily modern military base in the middle of the northern desert. We were met by a group of Saudi officers and piled into school buses painted desert brown. We drove along the highway for an hour or so, until the driver suddenly pulled off the road and headed across the desert. Here the sand was flat, hard-packed, and mixed with gravel. In other places, a fine, powdery sand was carved by the winds into delicately curved dunes that looked like snowdrifts. There were no trees anywhere and only occasional scruffy vegetation.
“I’ve been doing this 30 years,” he shrieked. “I studied in the United States. Don’t tell me how to do my job. Why dont you people act like adults? Never again, never again. The Saudi press is going to hear about this, mark my words. The Arab News. The Saudi Gazette.”
Maybe I was headed to the Middle East, where Iraq had stormed in and toppled Kuwait on August 2. I had been expecting the call for several days, but still my heart skipped a beat with excitement. “Come to the Pentagon right away with your passport and your suit size,” the marine said.
“No one will take you in-country without a chem briefing,” a Pentagon official told me when I presented my passport. We were to fly first to Tampa, Florida, to meet the commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf and learn to use our protective suits, gas masks, and the syringes that carry antidotes for nerve gas.
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In some ways the ground rules made our job a dream assignment: without any facts to clutter up the stories, we had less to worry about. We didn’t have to check the spelling of names, count heads, or even know where we were, except to remember it was “Somewhere in Saudi Arabia.”
