Pecked to death by ducks (2 page)

Later that day another man would come through the field, stopping at each of the markers. He would dig a hole next to

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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 ordnance 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, 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 were British. They had to rescue the lizards.

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 of days ago, I said.

"The Iraqi corpses still there?"

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

There was no one at the guard station that flanked the entrance to the emir's gardens, a weekend retreat for Kuwait's ruling family. It would have been cruel to station a man there. Fire-fighting teams had not yet reached the large walled compound—they were working far to the north—and the fires burning on all sides kept the area shrouded in heavy smoke no matter which way the wind was blowing. It was, at ten o'clock on a desert morning, dark as dusk, and the temperature under the smoke stood at 80 degrees. It was 105 in the sun.

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We drove through a shallow pond of oil at the entrance and onto a circular driveway fronting a modest group of buildings. There was a children's play area nearby: teeter-totters and monkey bars coated in oil. On the ground were the oily remnants of a cow that had been slaughtered, presumably for food, by occupying Iraqi troops. There were other black cowlike shapes on the ground, interspersed with the corpses of several large birds, presumably from the compound's aviary. The largest and highest plume of flame I saw in Kuwait—I estimated its height at two hundred feet—boomed and thundered just beyond the north wall.

This fire was a smoker, and it had formed a lake that abutted the eight-foot-high wall. Where there were breaks in the blackened cinder blocks, tongues of oil seeped into a low-lying palm orchard. These small rivers were burning and running down irrigation ditches, where they lapped at the tree trunks.

My boots were caked with a black sandy muck so that I walked in a clumping, stiff-legged manner, like Frankenstein's monster. Visibility was limited to about fifteen feet, though I could see, through the falling soot, the large fire and half a dozen others leaping above the north wall. I moved toward them, careful to avoid stepping on the nubbly tracks of coke, a rocky, coallike by-product of the burning oil. In some places the coke was several feet deep, but it was also possible that the coke could be mere scum over a burning stream below. Crack the coke, I thought, and the entire track could reignite.

Presently, I saw a man-size break in the wall and moved toward it through the swirling, granular darkness. The inferno beyond lit the break with a shifting, red-orange light, and I could feel the heat on my face like a bad sunburn. Everything that wasn't burning was black: the earth, the familiar shapes of the trees, the animal carcasses that littered the place. This was ground zero for the largest man-made environmental disaster in history. It was a perfect vision of hell.

I moved through the break in the wall and stopped. The next step would put me in the burning lake, which was throwing up the thickest, grainiest smoke I had yet encountered. It blinded me

and made my eyes water. Despite the bandanna I wore over my nose and mouth, I found myself choking, and then I was coughing in fits that bent me over at the waist.

It was a sudden misery, and yet something that lives in my soul —some compelling, godawful urge—found this horror grotesquely enthralling. It is the same urge, I think, that drives us to observe the destructive effects of a hurricane or tornado, an avalanche or flood. We shudder deliciously in the face of incomprehensible forces, in the wake of events that insurance companies call "acts of God."

But this was an act of Man, which made it a palpable evil: madness made visible in flame.

I fled back into the black gardens, clumping over the burning trenches, coughing uncontrollably as tears streamed from my eyes.

On our way back north to the Al-Ahmadi drive-in we decided to stop and see how Safety Boss was doing on its fire. Safety Boss Ltd. is a fire-fighting crew out of Calgary, Canada. The other three outfits fighting the fires—Boots & Coots, Red Adair, and Wild Well—were all from around Houston. All were experienced pros, good teams that worked well together.

Safety Boss—I loved the name—hadn't been in the business nearly as long as the other companies, but the Calgary group thought its men worked safer, harder, and dirtier than anyone else. This was a matter of constant argument. Every fire fighter thought he worked safer, harder, and dirtier than anyone else.

Safety Boss had started on this new well yesterday and thought it would have it under control today. That was fast: I had watched some other fire fighters work two full weeks to extinguish a particularly nasty smoker.

The road here was a newly plowed lane—sandy white against the oily desert—built in part through an oil lake that was showing a bit of ripple under a freshening afternoon wind of about forty miles an hour. The wind had swept the area clear of smoke, and the sky was clear. We drove past burned- and bombed-out Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, bunkers, and ammuni-

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 12

tion depots. Every half-mile or so we passed a Rockeye canister. Red-and-white RO marking tape waved on metal spikes, indicating that the field to the south hadn't been fully EODed.

It was pleasant to breathe fresh air again after the burning oasis we had just visited. In March the town of Al-Ahmadi had looked much like the emir's gardens, and doctors there had been treating a large number of respiratory complaints. Now, with the fires beaten back around the town, the air was still smoggy, but at least you could see through it.

One foreign industrial-health specialist at the hospital in Al-Ahmadi had shown me a chart indicating that sulfur-dioxide levels had dropped to the point where they were hardly measurable. A Kuwaiti chemist had argued with the man: The industrial-health specialist was measuring known pollutants, the byproducts of internal combustion; how could he—how could anyone—know what toxic substances were being released by all the external combustion surrounding the town?

The chemist was one of the few Kuwaitis I met who seemed concerned about the level of toxins in the air. People in Al-Ahmadi, for instance, having undergone months of smoky dusk at noon, now lived under mostly blue skies. The air was breathable, it had no odor, and things could only get better. So they seemed to think. The chemist believed that it would be years before anyone knew for certain just how badly the Kuwaiti people had been poisoned.

Safety Boss was now just up the lane. We turned, as we had been instructed, at the third dead camel, which was a rounded, camellike lump of tar lying on its side and baking in the sun. Arranged to the north of a seventy-foot-high plume of flame were a few three-quarter-ton American pickups, a backhoe with an eighty-foot-long shovel, two water tankers, an eighteen-wheel pumping truck, a huge crane, and a bulldozer with a tin shed on top to protect the operator from the heat. There was also an eighteen-wheel mud truck, an indication that Safety Boss thought it would have the fire out momentarily. Mud trucks are called in just before a fire is killed.

The plume of flame billowed orange and black against the blue

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sky above and the smoke to the south. I had spent days staring at such plumes. They were transfixing. You couldn't be near them and not stare. They were hell's Lava Lites.

Two man-size backless tin sheds had been erected a hundred feet or so from the fire. Large hoses ran from tanks of water, through the pumping trucks, and up to the sheds, where they were mounted on tripods like heavy high-power rifles. There was a man in each shed, working the hose through a rectangular slit in the front of his enclosure.

A crew foreman gave me a hard hat and permission to walk up to the sheds. I had a scientific thermometer to measure the heat near the fire, but it was useless. At one o'clock in the afternoon it was already 122 degrees. The thermometer pegged at 125.

One of the men had his hose trained on the arm of a backhoe that was chopping away at what had been a seven-foot-high mound of coke at the base of the well. The coke accounted for the curious shapes of the fires, bending and twisting the flame as it accumulated. It was necessary to clear the wellhead of coke before it could be capped.

The concussive stress on the backhoe, combined with the heat, often resulted in broken shovels. This one was digging close to the wellhead, and one of the hoses was trained on its dinosaur head, keeping it cool.

The backhoe swung around and deposited another shovelful of steaming coke on the ground eighty feet from the well. Because this coke, even eighty feet away, could reignite the well once it was extinguished, the bulldozer quickly pushed a mound of sand over it.

The fellow manning the water monitor in the shed where I stood was spraying the fire. My completely useless thermometer said 125 degrees. It was hotter than that. There was no talking above the jet-engine howl of the fire, and though I wore earplugs, I could feel the sound reverberating in my chest. The ground literally shook under my feet.

The billowing plume of fire looked as fierce as any burn I had seen, but it had already been beaten. When the backhoe finished its work, one man trained a stream of water at the wellhead.

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About fifteen minutes later the fire went out. But only at the wellhead. The geyser of oil above it was still burning. And then both hoses started putting the fire out from the bottom of the geyser up.

When the plume had been killed to a height of perhaps twenty feet, it reignited from below. The hoses started again. It only took a few minutes for the fire to surrender at the wellhead. When the hoses had beaten it up to the twenty-foot level, one held steady, right there, at the point where the fire wanted to reignite. The other worked its way up the wavering plume, and when the fire was out to a height of thirty feet, the whole thing died, puff, like that, revealing a gusher of rusty black oil shooting seventy feet into the air.

In the relative silence I heard the crump-crump-crump of a controlled RO explosion to the south. A few hundred yards away, in the smoke, another drill team of depressed men was wheeling slowly around a nearby burning well.

The Safety Boss crew moved back behind its trucks. Only two men would work with the damaged wellhead. It was the most dangerous job for a fire fighter. The first order of business was to remove the wellhead. There were bolts to be loosened—bolts that had been fused by explosives and fire—but sparks from power tools could turn the gusher above into a massive fireball. The men used wrenches and hammers made of a special alloy that didn't spark, and they worked in a downpour of oil. The black pool they stood in was hot and burned their feet so that every few minutes they jumped away from the wellhead and let the men with hoses spray them down.

Half a dozen men hooked a series of hoses to the mud truck and ran the line toward the well. A new wellhead was lowered onto the gusher with a crane. Two men with ropes directed its fall, then bolted it into place. Oil erupted out of the new wellhead as before, but this assembly had a pipe projecting from its side.

The hose from the mud truck was screwed onto the side pipe. At a signal, the mud man began pumping a mixture of viscous bentonite and weighty barite into the well. This "mud" had been formulated to be much heavier than oil, and it was pumped into

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the well under extremely high pressure. The gusher dwindled to thirty feet, to twenty, to ten, and then it died, smothered in mud.

No one shouted, and no one shook hands. These men had been working since five in the morning. It was now past two in the afternoon, and they were ready to move out, to get on to the next well.

The only break the Safety Boss crew had had all day was a brief catered lunch. A few of the men had chosen to eat several hundred yards away, near a bombed-out Iraqi tank. There were always interesting things to be found in the tanks: live ammunition, helmets, uniforms, diaries, war plans, unit rosters, oil-smeared pictures of Saddam Hussein.

Near this tank, the crew had found a man-shaped lump of tar lying on its back with a black clawlike hand raised in death. Graves details had long ago buried all the dead they could find but hadn't been able to work their way through the choking smoke of the oil fields, over land that had yet to be EODed. The Safety Boss crews, which were working farther south than the other companies, were always finding bodies: the bodies of men who had fought for oil and died for oil and finally, horribly, been mummified in oil. The Safety Boss crew had buried this soldier on its lunch break. They had buried him where he fell and driven a stake into the ground to mark his final resting place. They always buried the dead they found.

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.