Pecked to death by ducks (3 page)

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 fifty 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 post-apocalyptic 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 through 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 eighteen-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.

The postapocalyptic town of Dubiyah, forty-five minutes south of Kuwait City, was a fenced-off vacation community for midlevel Kuwaiti oil executives. Iraqi troops had thought to make a stand here, and the beaches were very obviously mined. I could see a

17 A THE UNNATURAL WORLD

number of Italian-made mines about the size and shape of flattened baseballs littering the sand. They were designed to maim, to tear a man's leg off at the knee. It takes several men to care for one wounded soldier. The mines, which didn't kill, were therefore militarily efficacious. A few weeks earlier, a Kuwaiti teenager, ignoring the posted signs, had strolled out onto the beach and lost a leg for no military reason whatsoever.

Now the town was deserted. The wind had swept the skies clear of smoke, but the sea itself, washing up onto the mined beaches in sluggish waves, was covered over with a faint rainbow sheen of petroleum. Dead fish rotted on the beach next to the mines.

Sometime in mid-January Saddam Hussein's troops had purposely spilled an estimated 6 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. The spill was actually a series of releases, with the main dumping on Januarv 19 at Sea Island, a tanker-loading station not far from Dubiyah. Prevailing winds had carried the massive slick south, sparing Kuwait. Saudi Arabia took the brunt of the spill, and its beaches had become heavy mats of tar. The glaze of oil here, off Dubiyah, had come from the petroleum rains, from rivers of oil that had flowed from the fields to the sea.

Closer to where I stood, the beach that fronted the deadly sea was decorated with a double row of concertina wire, and behind the concertina wire was a trench reinforced with cement blocks that stretched for miles. There were houses three rows deep beyond the trench. They were blocky cement buildings with faded lawn chairs and tattered umbrellas on concrete patios. Most of them were undamaged, except for those that fronted antiaircraft guns, which had been deployed about every half-mile along the beach. Each and every gun had been destroyed. Some were mere heaps of shredded metal. The houses behind the guns had taken some corollary damage. They were, in fact, piles of rubble. All the other homes were intact, undamaged but for a broken window or a kicked-in door. And there was no one there, not a soul in this town that must have housed thousands of people. It felt as if the apocalypse had met the Twilight Zone at Kuwait's Last Resort.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A I 8

I stepped through broken floor-to-ceiling windows and invaded any number of these houses. Dozens of them. Everywhere it was the same. At least one room was completely full of human excrement. Sometimes every room was packed with the stuff.

Peter and I, being journalists, felt compelled to quantify the mess. I don't know why, really, but that's what we did.

"I got thirty-four piles in here," Peter yelled.

"Seventeen in the kitchen," I shouted, "and twenty-four in the laundry room."

We examined the condition of the piles.

"These guys," I said, "weren't healthy."

And then it occurred to us that maybe the soldiers had been scared. Maybe they'd shit in these houses because they were afraid to go outside during the bombardment. Maybe the odor, at least here in Dubiyah, wasn't so much contempt as fear.

Someone had drawn on a wall in red Magic Marker. There was an idyllic scene of an Arab boat, a dhow, floating in a calm lagoon. Near that, on the same white wall, was another drawing in another hand: a man and a woman staring at one another with a large heart between them.

Iraqi soldiers, I knew, had been allowed to listen to only one radio station: twenty-twenty news straight from the mouth of Saddam Hussein himself. Those who disobeyed could be disciplined or killed. Kuwaitis who had talked with Iraqi soldiers before the bombardment said that the occupying troops had no idea that forces were massing on the Saudi border, for they weren't hearing that news on their single radio station. What they didn't know would kill them. And poison their world. They defecated in bathtubs and drew pictures of men and women in love on the wall.

I thought about the day we had driven to an oil field near the Saudi border. There the Iraqis had installed a mine field that stretched from horizon to horizon. They had marked it off with a pair of concertina-wire fences. Presumably only portions of the field were heavily salted with mines, and the fence had been built to give the advancing troops pause. On the Kuwait side was a deep pit, which was, I suppose, meant to contain oil that could be set afire.

19 A THE UNNATURAL WORLD

The Allied troops had easily punched through the mine field, and there was a cleared road over the oil pit and through the fence. I could see rounded antitank mines, about the size and shape of home smoke alarms, scattered around beyond the fence. They were a beige color, hard to see in the sand until my eyes adjusted. Then I could see dozens of them.

There were three corpses in Iraqi uniforms alongside the road. Presumably they had lain there for at least five months. It was 118 degrees, the wind was blowing a low-level sandstorm, and the dead men were partially covered in sand.

Someone—the Saudis, I was told—had decapitated one corpse, and the head lay on the man's lap in an obscene position. The lower portion of the face was all grinning bone, but the upper portion of the head, protected by hair, was intact. The skin was desiccated, a mottled yellow. I have seen mummies in museums and in the field. This scene, these corpses, was five months old and already looked like ancient history.

Peter and I were alone, and we thought to bury the corpses, as was the custom. We had equipped our Land Cruiser with a shovel to dig ourselves out of the sand. Still, I didn't want to dig a grave in a mine field.

We discussed the possibility of putting the dead men in the back of our vehicle and driving to a place where we could dig. But the idea of having that desiccated, grinning head rolling around in the back was distressing.

"We could just leave them here," Peter said. "To illustrate the horror of war."

Which is what we told ourselves we were doing as we drove off into the desert, leaving three men unburied in contravention of Muslim and Christian custom. I felt mildly guilty about this and knew that I should feel very guilty about it, so I ended up feeling very guilty about feeling mildly guilty.

I was still thinking about those dead men as I stepped carefully through the chalets that fronted the oily beach.

"Oh, man," I heard myself shout as I moved into one of the grander chalets. It had a fine view of the mined beach and the dead fish and the glittering petroleum sheen that was the sea. And in one big room, in front of the broken picture window, were

well over a hundred remnants of the men who had invaded this land. Souvenirs of ignorance, all in fear-splattered piles.

Outside, not far away, contaminants released by the howling fires were poisoning children; they were creating acid rains that would kill crops so that people could starve in the name of oil; they were spawning rivers of flame that ran to the sea and killed what lived there; they were throwing 3 percent of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions into the air, intensifying the greenhouse effect that would bake the earth in drought before an alternative to the internal-combustion engine could be found. It was the beginning of the end, the environmental apocalypse, and here I was, in the oblivion of the Last Resort, thinking about the unburied dead and counting crap.

utes. If they have to miss a day or two of work, they don't like to specify the condition: "Some stomach trouble" is how I might put it. Around home, bad bowels are an embarrassment best kept hidden. They are a hammer to the crystal of love.

But, oh, develop the most minor irregularities on a camping trip, and everyone gets to hear about your symptoms. In nauseous detail. The more remote the campsite—the greater the perceived distance from home—the more clinical these descriptions become. This is Cahill's first law of bowel babble.

Recently, I spent a few weeks in a third-world country known for an ailment called Delhi Belly, though the same problem is called Montezuma's Revenge elsewhere and is known, generi-cally, as traveler's diarrhea. Delhi Belly was rampant on this trip. It was an international party, and everyone, without exception, suffered some symptoms. We talked about those symptoms. Oh boy, did we talk about them. At breakfast. At lunch. At dinner. Every fifteen minutes an update.

I took Lomotil, an antidiarrhea agent prescribed by my doctor, but this drug, while it relieves the symptoms, is not a cure. Others took antibiotics, codeine, paregoric, or double-dosed their water with iodine. Nothing worked. Nothing ever seems to work for me. Not right away.

Once, in Guatemala, while fishing for tarpon in Lake Patexba-tum, a small, shining body of water completely surrounded by a thick, nearly impenetrable jungle, I got one of my worst cases. Near the place of my suffering there were several Mayan ruins that archaeologists had just begun excavating. The lodge where I was staying had been built by and for these scientists. When they weren't working, it was rented out to fishermen to help defray expenses.

It seemed almost unbearably romantic, sitting on the veranda in the midst of a violent twilight thunderstorm. The clouds rolling in had been operatic, Wagnerian. The world was pure purple, punctuated now and again by neon-bright stroboscopic flashes of lightning. There were Mayan ruins, one thousand years old and older, out there in the jungle, covered over in grass and leaves. I

was philosophic about the fragility of man's greatest achievements and, consequently, settled on the fine idea of having an alcoholic beverage. We had brought fresh meat to the lodge, and there was still a bit of dirty ice at the bottom of the cooler. I put a chunk in my glass of rum.

The first mild cramps struck some hours later. Albert, the ancient caretaker, directed me to the outhouse behind the lodge. He was Guyanese, Albert, and he spoke an elegant, lilting brand of Caribbean nineteenth-century English. He loved to talk but had neglected to tell me about the minor problem with the outhouse. When I screamed, as I suppose everyone does on the first visit to the place, Albert shouted, 'They doan bite, mon."

The outhouse represented a serious error in judgment, an exercise in zoological ignorance. Rather than dig a latrine, the scientists had constructed the classic two-holer over a large, rocky abyss. A cave. They had overlooked a fact I would think to be somewhat important: Bats live in caves. And the bats hated what humans were doing to their home. They came belching up out of the unoccupied hole, they screeched their little sonar screeches, they rose up and gently brushed certain exposed portions of the anatomy. I thought of the place as the Throne of Terror.

And, over the course of the evening, I had ample reason to visit the Throne of Terror several times. The bats hated me, and I hated them.

The only person I know who was delighted to develop a life-threatening case of diarrhea is Dr. Conrad Aveling, a British biologist who specializes in wildlife conservation. Aveling was working in the Sudan when he was captured by terrorists, whose cause I will not dignify here. The terrorists didn't purify their water, and Aveling was ill for several weeks. Had he not been prepared—if he hadn't had rehydrating salts in his pack—he would have surely died from dehydration. As it was, he was merely comatose, and the terrorists decided, smart fellows that they were, that a dead hostage is worse than no hostage at all. Aveling was released.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 24

Generally, however, doctors describe traveler's diarrhea as a relatively mild illness, by which they mean the victim suffers the miseries of hell for only a few days. There are descriptive terms for what doctors call peristaltic rush that I hope never to hear again. This last trip was the worst.

And so, home again, and with a view to obviating forever the campsite conversations regarding the health of one's bowels, I talked to Dr. John Spika, an epidemiologist in the Enteric Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Traveler's diarrhea, he said, is generally mild, but if the victim continues to drink water containing the bacteria that caused the problem in the first place, dehydration could be a problem. "You could lose a lot of fluids," said Spika. He recommended the rehydration salt packets, which are available in many health-food stores. You add salts, he said, to a liter of water—"good water, of course."