THE HUNT FOR WMD IN IRAQ The abandoned ammunition storage dump in southern Iraq near Karbalā’ was in the middle of nowhere. Late one night in early April 2003, flashlight in hand, I inched through the derelict buildings and sheds. Desert dogs howled in the distance. I was freezing. I had left my down jacket back at the base at Camp Udairi in northern Kuwait, the launching pad of the military’s WMD-hunting brigade, the 75th Exploitation Task Force—the 75th XTF—to accompany Mobile Exploration Team Alpha, one of the brigade’s units that were surveying suspect sites. This was supposed to have been a three-hour mission to Mussayab, a town where buried barrels of suspicious-looking liquids had turned out to be gasoline. That was ten days ago. Ever since then, MET Alpha and I, the brigade’s sole embedded reporter, had been moving from one site to another, and, finally, to this abandoned facility. The unit members had hosed down the floor of a building in the complex and were sleeping on its icy floor.
