Covering the first Gulf War, Rolling Stone foreign correspondent P.J. O'Rourke wrote about leaving Kuwait and collapsing in a hotel bed with his shoes on, insensate with fatigue and shock, and looking up to see Billy Idol on the televison screaming about something in a video. O'Rourke wondered what Billy Idol could be upset about that was as heavy as what O'Rourke had just witnessed in a war zone. It was a compelling rhetorical question, that contrast of war and what we treat as important in everyday life, and now Fox News' Steve Harrigan writes an equally affecting dispatch from Fallujah, Iraq:
I got on an elliptical machine in the gym...The Tyra Banks Show was on the Armed Forces Network on a big screen in front.
There was a large boom off to my left.
It may have been a controlled detonation, which is when the military regularly destroys captured explosives. It usually happens at the top of the hour, and it usually happens in the daylight. It may have been outgoing artillery; no cause for alarm. Or it may have been incoming. I glanced left.
The woman on the elliptical was not looking around, nor was the guy on my right, who had iPod headphones on. No one seemed to sense anything out of the ordinary, so I kept running. A few seconds later, there was another boom. It was hard to tell just what it was over the sounds of the machines and The Tyra Banks Show.
The Tyra Banks Show was following the standard format of choosing a model — all the models come up and one gets rejected in front of everyone.
There was another boom.
Each of the models had to act out one line that said, "If I don't get it, I will die."
Boom.
I looked at the elliptical counter. In seven minutes, there had been 11 explosions. I always counted them....
Boom.
"If I don't get it, I will die." The models were not convincing. Their black and white still photos looked good, but when they had to talk it all disappeared. They were nowhere near being able to say, "If I don't get it, I will die." Not like that Korean hostage they killed. They had him plead on the air first.
More here.
