by William Thomas

Night falls over a city awash in perpetual twilight. Framed in the apartment’s high picture window is a kinetic monstrosity so incomprehensible, I find myself mesmerized by a scene that has remained unchanged for weeks.

Blazing oil wells ring a blacked-out skyline. Backlit by hundreds of unquenchable torches, distant high-rises loom unevenly, like the heads of an audience enraptured by capering giants. The huge flames writhe demonically, dancing on the graves of a half-million dead - and every wild and human survivor who inhales their poisons.

Shifting my gaze upwards, I eye a thin but steady stream of black smoke pouring through a neat round hole high in the window. Unable to reach punctures in either the glass or my own sense of dread, I simply watch this dubious haven fill like a foundering ship with a petroleum pungency whose reek I’ve grown as accustomed to over the past month as the scent of flowers in spring.

I’m told by the only other occupant of this building that the hole was made by bored Iraqi gunners manning an anti-aircraft battery at the intersection below. For five months they had stared at empty sky.

There was a Kuwaiti family in this room when the Iraqis fired into it: husband, wife, daughter. They are not here now. Their uncaring assailants also fled a city that suddenly provided too much excitement. Or perhaps those soldiers have left the planet. The emblem of their ennui remains, pouring carcinogens into a living space that, like this entire smoke-shrouded city, has come to resemble a gas chamber.

As usual, I’m wearing my jury-rigged respirator against oil particles that would otherwise lodge in my lungs. Except for Thorpe and Bailey, who occassionally followed my example, I have never seen anyone else take similar precautions here.

But the toxicity of sweet Kuwaiti crude is not my biggest concern. It’s the nearby buzz of bullets, not cancer’s ticking time-bomb, that commands my attention now.

A sharp burst of gunfire broke out just a few minutes ago. Like the surrounding oil fires, sporadic gunplay has become an unremarked feature of everyday life in Kuwait City as unglimpsed trigger-fingers disperse tension, triumph or traitors. But this is the first time I’ve heard gunfire directly below my window. The next shots come like unwelcome questions: Friend or foe? Who goes there?

It could be rival factions fighting over neighborhood turf, or uniformed “liberators” taking advantage of the opportunities that always accrue to armed men bursting into family dwellings. Even after nearly three months of nightly check-points and martial law, I’ve interviewed enough frightened Hindi women to share a British TV producer’s on-air certainty that Saudi and Egyptian soldiers are filling the vacuum left by an exiled government by looting and raping Pakistani and East Indian guest workers who once performed all manual and most managerial work for their overseers.

Every type of small arm - including the ubiquitous Kalashnikov, Rocket-Propelled Grenades, even a few shoulder-braced rocket launchers still in their shrink-wrapping - could until recently be picked up as easily as asthma by anyone audacious enough to evade the check-points, and the desert’s drifted dangers...

The next crash of gunshots reaffirms my yearning for Canada’s west coast and my seagoing home. The only hitch is that no commercial flights are coming near a sandbagged and burning international airport whose control tower and concourses are blackened, shell-pocked husks. The Persian Gulf is heavily mined. And forget driving out. The border remains closed in both directions to infidels without visas, which no one seemed to be handing out when I arrived.

With our health falling to bits and the other two team members sick, I’ve asked Earthtrust to relieve me after a stint more than twice as long as CNN is now allowing its news teams. All the other news agencies have begun following Atlanta’s example, and are limiting their employees’ exposure to this highly carcinogenic city to two weeks or less.

CNN never did air our findings. And no test data are being released by French, American or Chinese monitoring teams. But the readings I took using an expensive, one-shot pocket gas analyzer on the roof of the Kuwait International Hotel exceeded Boston's National Toxics Campaign findings. That independent organization had measured hazardous levels of dichlorobenzene, arsenic, zinc, cadmium and lead in Saudi Arabia - 175 miles away from the oil fields burning in KC’s front yard.

Allah help the oil field workers and their families unable to leave ground zero. Driving through the oil-soaked suburbs of Ahmadi the day after meeting up in KC, Bailey, Thorpe and I had passed a city hospital besieged by people troubled by strange rashes and difficulty in breathing.

It was not difficult to understand why. Just across the street from that tree shaded suburb stretched the Great Burgan. Kuwait’s biggest oil field contained more than 400 wells. Many were alight, and the rest were fountaining geysers of black crude when we arrived around noon. As Bailey attempted to keep the taillights of our oil-worker guides in sight close ahead, we were horrified to find ourselves driving in almost total darkness.

The only light came from hundreds of towering flames spearing out of the earth. How would just three teams whose Canadian and American companies shared a fire-fighting monopoly ever put them out? The reservoir that fed these drastic oil lamps contained nearly a tenth of the world’s known oil reserves.

The sun had fled to another planet. In this alien world, there was no sky, no stars, no sun - only a roiling black “oilcast” that spread a twilight pall all the way into Iran. Dismounting from the battered GMC “Jimmy” that Bailey had somehow scrounged for a daily rental commensurate with a private vehicle’s rarity in this ransacked emirate, we ventured on foot into this burning ground. Alert for signs of wildlife, we kept looking up for low-flying jets until we realized that the turbine-like shriek all around us was the roar of high-pressure oil venting from the ground.

Nothing could have prepared us for such bleak satanic surroundings. Though we looked closely, no life stirred in a place many outsiders thought of as “just dirt.” But these desert sands had until recently formed a skin and a skein of creeping, crawling, flying and flowering lives. Not any more. The creosote coating our arms and hair covered every shrub, soaking every square inch of sand so that even the winds being sucked into this firestorm could not dislodge a single grain.

I don’t remember who suggested we hire a fleet of buses, print posters, provide box-lunches - and charge visitors fortunes for a one day package tour of hell. Adrift in a landscape shrieking in agony, we tried to make sense of the nonsensical. Ringed by roaring fires, splattered by crude oil geysers vomiting into a petroleum sky, we eyed burned-out Iraqi tanks and a mound of blackened camel bones and told each other that this must be some extravagant film set, left over from some ultimate attempt to depict catastrophic desolation.

What could three environmentalists hope to accomplish in the midst of such overwhelming devastation? If the entire coalition army, now waiting for transit home, traded their tanks for bulldozers, pumps, hoses and shovels we might begin a cleanup that would tax even

Our mission had seemed straightforward when Michael Bailey called me in Dammam. “It sounds like we’re doing the same thing,” an unfamiliar voice suggested over the phone.

Bailey explained that he was with a group called Earthtrust. He and a New Zealand ornithologist named Rick Thorpe had flown into the Gulf to assist millions of migrating waterbirds. More than 200 species of grebes, plovers, herons, flamingos and other long-distance fliers were now winging their way up from Africa and the southern Gulf, bound for destinations as distant as Persia, northern Europe and Siberia’s short spring. Some species, like the Socotra Cormorant, were already endangered. Others soon would be, Bailey said, if no one intervened.

With all the emphasis on fire-power in the Gulf, it seemed only right that someone should be concerned with the critters who had settled here long before armies arrived. Every morning I had watched from my upper floor hotel room in Manama as flights of bat winged British Vulcan bombers and Saudi Mirage fighter-bombers took off from Manama’s main airport. Many afternoons I watched them return from bombing Kuwait and Iraq.

The warplanes must have done something to get Saddam’s attention. Around three o’clock one very quiet morning I was lifted from my bed by three nearly simultaneous blasts. The first soul-shattering bang! catapulted me from deepest dreams into blinking disorientation. A Patriot missile launched from a battery hidden near the hotel had accelerated to supersoinc speed within seconds.

The next nearly simultaneous bang! came like the voice of Allah demanding retribution even for sins I had neglected to commit. The sound of two missiles clapping meant I was still alive. But before I could choose between repentance or celebration, a third ear-splitting thunderclap signified an incoming SCUD that had arrived ahead of the speed of its flight.

More missile alerts interrupted the Mideast Emergency Oil Spill Conference in downtown Manama. The day-long session featured frightened representatives from states as distant as Oman pleading with their Gulf neighbors to stockpile oil response equipment, or at least pledge the loan of oil booms should roving slicks wash ashore on their beaches.

But no one in possession of such scarce prophylactics wanted to give them up when their own coastlines could just as easily be hit. The Iranian delegate was particularly angry. The damage to his country was not hypothetical. More than half of the trees and crops in Iran's westernmost province were already dead or dying. Fresh water supplies and many inshore fish stocks, the Iranian added, had also been decimated by something called “black rain,” and massive oil slicks sweeping down from Iraq...

Buy This Book | 185 Pages

Bringing The War Home is a war story unlike any you will ever read. Drawing on his experiences as a reporter and environmental emergency response worker in the war-torn Persian Gulf - as well as US congressional and military records never before assembled in a single volume - British Columbia journalist William Thomas takes readers from nighttime missile attacks on American forces and frantic cries of "gas, gas, gas!" to the dazed survivors of Baghdad bombing raids and the wreckage-clogged Highway to Hell. Part two details a Pentagon cover-up intended to bury forever Washington's complicity in supplying the chemical and biological weaponry to Iraq. Part three of this remarkable and timely book is a mini-medical thriller. Looking over the shoulders of medical investigators we peer into powerful microscopes as they search for a mysterious malady first identified as a syndrome, and later simply called Gulf War Illness. This book concludes with good news: Gulf War Illness can be treated. The chapter on successful treatments will bring new hope to those afflicted by this multi-faceted disease.