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Martyr's Day: Chronicle of a Small War

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Accomplished journalist Michael Kelly died as an 'imbed' covering the war in Iraq. The Humvee he and his military escort were traveling in lurched facedown into a dike. I decided after hearing of this tragedy that I would honor his bravery by seeking out "Martyr's Day," described by his colleagues as *the* master work of Gulf War reporting.

I was not disappointed. This is fabulous writing...and reporting. Reading 'War,' it comes as no surprise to know that Michael died in the middle of action. The book is rife with passage after passage of Kelly routinely putting his safety in jeopardy to get a story. Far from being a chonicle of simply Kuwait and Iraq, 'War' moves from Iraq to Jordan to Israel (via a complicated route through Cyprus - read the book to do this intricate travel itinerary justice) to Egypt to Saudi Arabia to a newly-liberated Kuwait.

The book stays strong throughout. In fact, the two most powerful passages are towards the end: the first depicts - in shocking detail - the carnage on the so-called "Highway of Death" (the road back to Basra from Kuwait City); the second takes us deep into Kurdistan, where Kelly shows us what befalls those areas once the U.S. pulls its support for the post-Gulf War Kurd uprising. Kelly follows the ramifications of Saddam's lash back at the Kurds through to a set of refugee camps on the Iranian border. Kelly himself picks up and battles as nasty bout of dysentery from his treks through the camps and experiences first-hand how one could get so sick so quick.

The book ends with his personal tale of escape through a smuggler's route and into Turkey. Other journalists traveling that same route are not so lucky: three that preceded Kelly are later found murdered.

In addition to the inherent splendidness of Michael Kelly's writing, the reason 'War' remains a compelling read 12 years after the fact is due to the numerous threads that tie these events to what transpired in Iraq in 2003. For example, there are a couple of horrifying pages on Uday Hussein's thuggish domination of Baghdad nightlife in 1991. Obviously, things would only get worse from there.

As you probably know, Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq during the late war, at the height of a truly distinguished journalistic career.

This book was written in the aftermath of Desert Storm. It is, as Kelly states in the forward, an impressionistic account of his experiences during the run-up to the war, the hostilities themselves, and the aftermath. With politics and military science largely excluded, it all adds up to a superior piece of travel writing.

Kelly had a great eye for scene-setting, for the telling anecdote, the incongruous detail, and the contrasting pair of viewpoints. Also for the pithy description: he describes a gorgeous couple he met in an elevator in Israel thus: "She looked like Darryl Hannah, and he looked like money and tennis."

The people's tales he tells are sometimes funny, and sometimes haunting. The funny ones often involved himself, as when he records himself gaping across a restaurant in Baghdad for a glimpse of the TV news. No one else shows any interest, and it dawns on him that it's because the Iraqi TV newscast is just a series of Saddam's Great Leader proclamations, boringly familiar to everyone. Some scenes are funny and haunting, as in one where a British TV crew is filming an interview with a Kuwaiti man who is describing his torture ordeal at the hands of the Iraqis. The tearful man is repeatedly interrupted by the blasé producer, to amend some technical difficulty or other.

It's a fine wartime travelogue, and it is a great pity that there won't be any more such from Michael Kelly.

Mike Kelly's account of the Gulf War in Martyr's Day: Chronicle of a Small War, is informative and interesting. The Gulf War was carefully planned, undertaken and won by the United States in little over a month. Kelly has carefully written about the war from behind the lines and places we weren't able to see on CNN. I am quite amazed at one point, that Mike Kelly actually swam across a river into Turkey with smugglers. Courage and bravery Mike Kelly must be commended with. His book should be given the same credit for what he went through to write it.

An amazing account of Desert Storm. Rest in Peace Michael Kelly, for those who are familiar with his wonderful writing in The New Republic, an Atlantic Online, and Washington Post. A conservative thinker with a liberal's heart. True blue.

On April 3, 2003, America lost one of its greatest journalists, Michael Kelly. He was covering the Iraq war as an embedded reporter, and was killed when the humvee in which he was riding came under fire and plunged into a canal. Kelly was both an acute observer of places, people, and events, and also a remarkable writer and literary stylist.

By 2003, Iraq was already very familiar terra firma to Kelly, having covered the first Gulf War. The book begins on "Martyr's Day," 1991, in Baghdad, Iraq, which was two days before the air war portion of the first Gulf War began. Kelly was required to be accompanied at all times by a government official that everyone called a "minder." Kelly's minder was former army officer who had served during the interminable and costly war with Iran. He could not afford to pay for his son's wedding, and felt he had wasted his life in the army. "All my friends have businesses money," he complained bitterly. "Look at me--I'm a minder!"

Kelly was in Iraq as the bombs and cruise missiles began to rain down. Two days later, Kelly traveled by car to Syria, a car trip that cost $7,000.00. After staying in Syria for several days, Kelly traveled to Israel via Cypress, to rendezvous with his fiance, who was a news producer. Travel to Israel from most arab countries is a tricky business, requiring two passports, because these countries do not officially acknowledge Israel's existence. He was in Israel at the height of Saddam's scud missile attacks on that country. Everyone was required to carry a gas mask with them at all times. Women being what they are, however, a market for designer covers for gas masks soon sprang up, allowing the women to coordinate their gas mask with their outfit.

After several days in Israel, Kelly traveled to Egypt by car across the Sinai, and from thence to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and from there by car to Dahran, Saudi Arabia, then to the jumping off point for the liberation of Kuwait. The pool system employed by the army during the first Gulf War was far too restrictive, so Kelly opted out of it, rented his own car with another journalist, skirted some roadblocks and went off to find the fighting. He hooked up with some Egyptian troops, then a couple of days later on the road to Kuwait City, some 25 Iraqis surrendered to him.

Arriving in Kuwait City in time for the liberation party, Kelly faithfully recorded the stories of the random torture, murder, rape and looting that had been inflicted on Kuwait during its 7 month occupation by Iraq. Then he went out to inspect the famous "highway of death" where U.S. warplanes had destroyed fleeing columns of Iraqi troups and equipment. The grisly scenes of death later caused him depression and lassitude.

After reporting from liberated Kuwait for awhile, Kelly returned to the U.S. but later headed out to the Kurdish provinces of Iran to view up close the humanitarian disaster caused by Saddam's attempted extermination of the Kurdish population of northeastern Iraq. After inspecting the wretched and pathetic refugee camps along the Iran/Iraq border, Kelly crossed over the border into Iraq, and traveled through the Kurdish provinces, now under the umbrella of a U.S. enforced no-fly zone. Kurdish Pesh Merga fighters controlled the territory, but the destruction Saddam had already inflicted was immense. Saddam's troops had tried to systematically destroy, with dynamite, all of the Kurdish cities, towns, and hamlets. Before the no-fly zone policy became effective, Saddam's air force had dropped gas on one large Kurdish city, killing several thousand people in one day. The victims had to be pushed into mass graves with heavy equipment. While touring the Kurdish territories, Kelly became very sick and dehydrated with amebic dysentary, and had to seek medical help. He eventually made his way to Turkey and crossed the border there.

Later Kelly made another trip to Baghdad to observe the city after the war had been lost and sanctions imposed. Perversely, the sanctions merely allowed Saddam and his son Udai to tighten their control over the country, and allowed their inner cicle of thugs to grow very rich.

All told, this is an incredible Odyssey through the middle east in time of war. It is a necessary preface to the current Iraq war and, without ever making the argument explicitly, shows that Saddam should been removed at the time of the first Gulf War, and not after 12 more years of needless suffering by everyone in Iraq except for Saddam and his inner circle.

Michael Kelly has written an engrossing, witty, and insightful account of his coverage of the Gulf War, and one which makes clear to what lengths he went to get to the story on the front lines as well as the suffering at the margins.

Outside of his skills as a reporter, he is a wonderful writer, evoking vivid scenes with pitch-perfect dialogue and powerful descriptions of landscape.
An experienced Middle Eastern hand, one of his best vignettes is a description of moving from the Isreali border checkpoint to the Egyptian. The contrast of styles is hilarious, but not, as one might expect from a Western reporter, at the expense of the Arab way of doing business. His familiarity and fondness for Arab culture is evident throughout the book.

To skirt the propaganda feed of the notorious journalist "pools" the US military organized, Kelly and fellow journalist Dan Fesperman set out on their own by rented car and wind up embedding (more or less) with an Egyptian unit, less rule-bound than their US counterparts.
Kelly's peregrinations soon take him from Kuwait to Kurdistan, always astutely observing the feelings and mores of those around him. There are no easy lessons here. For all the cruelty of the occupying Iraqis, the Kuwaitis hardly come off as deserving the fortune that the war returned to them. For Kelly, it's the Iraqis themselves who paid the highest price for Saddam's machinations. I did wonder, however, if Kelly wasn't a little credulous about some of the Kuwaiti descriptions of Iraq atrocities; we learned after the war that they greatly exaggerated some of these claims.

In the afterword in my edition, written shortly after 9/11, Kelly makes a strong pitch for finishing the war that George Bush senior began, even going so far as to connect the failure to depose Saddam (and the cynicism that bred throughout the Arab world) to the rise of bin Laden. It's fascinating to remember that there were some intelligent and articulate voices arguing for the Iraq War. One can't help but speculate over what Kelly would have written about the misbegotten history of the recent conflict.
My own guess is that he would have severely taken George W Bush to task for trying to do the invasion on the cheap, not to mention neglecting Afghanistan. I think he would have been right in the middle of the grotesque Iraqi civil war that followed our invasion, too effected by the human suffering to hue to easy ideologies.

This is a rare book that transcends the specifics of a small war and is all the while mightily entertaining.

Rather than concentrating on the military aspect of the Gulf war, Michael Kelly has instead focused on the human drama taking place behind the battle lines in this wonderful chronicle. Highly recommended !

This book makes a valuable addition to the literature of the first Gulf War - it might be oversimplifying it a bit, but think of it as a Gulf War version of "Balkan Ghosts." Part history, part travelogue, part war reporting, Kelly takes us around the periphery of the war - in Bagdhad, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Kurdistan, and gives us some sense of how it affected ordinary people. Very well written and quite moving (saying goodbye to his driver in Iraq, touring the ruins of Kurdistan, seeing starving children). War is not all bombs and lines of operations - it's people too, and this book drives that home.

This book is a random collection of personal impressions from different civilian points of view in different areas of operations in the 1st Gulf War. This is not a long book, but I get this feeling, the book would have benefited if 25 pages or more of the most mundane parts were left out, I really don't need to know the details of what he ate in Paris (compare and contrast, no, quirky, yes). Still the book is unique and has some amazing high points and on a subject with so little out there, I am glad I took the time to read it.