Pecked to death by ducks Read online

  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

  13 A THE UNNATURAL WORLD

  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.

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 14

  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

  15 A THE UNNATURAL WORLD

  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.

  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 th
eir 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.