'I Was Sure I Was Dead'

摘要

It wasn't until Friday that the Third Marine Expeditionary Brigade set out from a checkpoint west of Route 80, the primary artery between Iraq and Kuwait City. The trucks and armored cars moved slowly on the dirt tracks at 12mph. "What the hell are we doing here?" said Lance Cpl, Sydney Woods, dusting off his pants and letting a thick gob of spit dribble out of his mouth, Few in the unit had showered in more than two weeks; all of them had been eating nothing but MREs. Pfc, Joel Adams, 21, was so lost in reverie about his home in Albany, Ga., that he didn't even realize that he was by then in Iraq, the second foreign country he had ever visited (Kuwait had been the first). "I don't even count the days anymore," he said. "I don't even know what today is." A NEWSWEEK photographer and I had been hiding out in the desert frontier. We had crossed the border on our own. Now here we were with a group of Marines. As "unilaterals," journalists who are not embedded with U.S. forces, we were not all that welcome, But they let us join their convoy in our Pajeros (basically, gas-guzzling SUVs). We drove down a road with mines on either side. At night, the Marines told us that we had to go back south.