Life on The Line

By NANCY GIBBS

To the ground soldiers of Operation Desert Storm, the shortest road home from Saudi Arabia cuts through Kuwait. But the prospect of traveling along it fills the grunts with dread.

In the evening, when the meals are over and the winds pick up and the temperatures drop below freezing, there are words of comfort. Some come from tentmates, some from letters, some from the radio muttering at cotside 24 hours a day. There are favorite songs, including one that is making the rounds of tents and bunkers in northern Saudi Arabia. It is a verse for a soldier, the 91st Psalm.

Under his wings you will find refuge.

His faithfulness is a shield and

buckler.

Life at the front is a song of dark fear, deep pride, lost mail, long waits and improvisation. The white heat of the summer is hard to remember now, when it becomes cold enough at night to leave ice rattling inside canteens. At the very front lines, the motto is "Travel light, freeze at night." Soldiers sleep in parka linings, with socks on their hands if their mittens are missing. They wish they could requisition extra toes.

It is a nuisance to lug around gas masks and protective gear, but no one complains. For the troops on the ground, the greatest fear is of chemical attack, a strike by an enemy they cannot see. "You imagine walking around, and your buddy is lying on the ground having convulsions, and you have to inject him with atropine," says Private First Class Myra Camacho, 26, of Brooklyn, N.Y. That is why the troops love the chickens.

Near the gas-monitoring machines and scattered around the bases are live chickens. The machines' sirens will sound if there are chemical agents in the air, but the birds are the backup. Coal miners used canaries to warn against poisonous gases; the desert uses chickens. One air base named its newspaper after its chicken -- Buford Talks -- on the grounds that as long as the bird is squawking, they are safe. When peace comes, the soldiers daydream, they will hold a barbecue.

You will not fear the terror of the

night, nor the arrow that flies by

day, nor the pestilence that stalks

in darkness, nor the destruction

that wastes at noonday.

The closer to the front, the more raw the nerves. "When we moved farther north, it helped morale because we broke the routine. The troops joke around a lot more," says a soldier. "We get T rations, which are hot and a lot better than MREs." MREs, or Meals, Ready to Eat, are the soldiers' most accessible enemy. Everyone hates them. Egyptian soldiers refused them. Only ravenous Iraqi prisoners of war wolf them down -- including the chewing gum. When the milk runs out, there is pineapple drink to pour on the cornflakes.

Closest to the enemy are the lead scouts of the 82nd Airborne Division, whose job is to watch and listen and assemble information on Iraqi troop movements. Fires are outlawed for heating or cooking; hot coffee comes from tiny butane heaters hidden in cardboard boxes. Nights are so quiet that a cough can be heard from 400 yds., and the land is so barren that a single twisted piece of brush becomes a landmark known as the Tree. "It's easy to get lost out here. There are no terrain features," says Captain Scott Barrington, 29, of Chester, Va. "It's like the K mart parking lot."

Because he cleaves to me in love, I

will deliver him. I will protect

him, because he knows my name.

The soldiers are older (average age: 27, compared with 21 in Vietnam) and better trained than the troops of past wars. More than 95% of last year's recruits had graduated from high school, in contrast to 54% a decade ago, and they are more physically fit. "I hate the new Army," says a sergeant as he tries to bum a cigarette. "Nobody smokes."

This profile has confounded some traditions about what makes a good soldier. Military conventional wisdom warns against infantry soldiers who are too smart or inclined to dwell on the risks entailed in combat. "But you can't have space-age hardware without space-age personnel," says Lieut. Colonel Alexander Angelle, a former recruiting officer now in the gulf. "Some people ask, 'Don't street fighters make better soldiers?' The answer is 'No, they don't.' They require more discipline and are less able to get the job done."

Six out of 10 soldiers are married, up from 40% in 1970. Since the U.S. buildup began, some 14,000 of them have learned, via Red Cross telegrams, that their wives have given birth. "You've got a real debate going now," says Martin Binkin, a military manpower expert at the Brookings Institution. "Some say an older soldier with a stable family life makes for a better soldier. On the other hand, someone with dependents has lots to think about, especially if he's in the desert for six to eight months and is worried about a sick child."

The women, universally known as "females," who make up about one-tenth of the armed forces, are writing the rules as they go along. The Saudi government, rejecting the idea of female soldiers coming to their defense, designates them as males with female features. Some women are in traditional support roles as cooks, clerks and nurses. But they are also armorers, fire fighters, strategic planners and intelligence officers, serving close to the fire zone.

Enlisted women have their own tent and their own latrine. That rare concession to gender does not guarantee much privacy, since most latrines are plywood outhouses with wire screens from the waist up.

The men seem to take the women's presence in stride. "Once you work with them enough, they realize that you're a soldier like they are," says Lieut. Lynnel Bifora, 23, of Mohawk, N.Y., of the XVIII Airborne Corps. "I won't let them carry gear for me. I like to tell them that a bullet has no gender. Combat has no gender. You can kill the chivalry bit." She admits that it would be nice to put on a dress again, and clings to what femininity she can. "You can be tough and strong and still be a female," she says. "You don't need to be foulmouthed and spit."

A thousand may fall at your side, ten

thousand at your right hand; but

it will not come near you.

All along the northern line, the days are passed with digging. Divisions arriving at the front make their homes with a shovel. Everyone, from the lowest privates to the officers and chaplains, digs. "Each shovel I scoop out means I might save an arm," says Private Gregory White, 20, of Los Angeles, the 82nd Airborne. "The next shovel means I might save a leg." The initial hole is called a "hasty" or a "run and dive." With each passing day, the hasties are dug farther down, so that by now they are armpit deep and flanked by sandbags. This is low-tech war of the most vital kind.

There is bravado everywhere. At the air bases, troops scrawl messages on the bombs: ALL ABOARD; GET OUT SADDAM; SAY CHEESE; HAVE A NICE DAY, with a smiley face, are written on a Maverick AGM-65 air-to-ground missile. When General Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney visited a Stealth fighter squadron, they inscribed a 2,000-lb., laser-guided bomb. TO SADDAM, WITH AFFECTION, wrote Cheney. YOU DIDN'T MOVE IT, SO NOW YOU LOSE IT, Powell wrote.

Every day brings a test of ingenuity. The Army's combat engineers, a cerebral-sounding brigade, are the masters of improvisation. If an offensive starts, their task will be the most perilous of all: to clear the way across the flaming trenches, minefields, 40-ft. berms and killing zones the Iraqis have devised over the past six months. It is handy to know how to hot-wire a bulldozer. The 20th Engineer Brigade is under orders to take what is needed along the way and leave a receipt, in Arabic and English. If it is civilian equipment, "we have papers to fill out, to leave with the owner so they could later claim compensation," says Colonel Robert Flowers, commander of the brigade. He has distributed homemade hot-wiring kits for trucks and other vehicles but ordered his troops not to take anything they don't need, for fear of booby traps.

Everyone, meanwhile, learns to scrounge. Supplies have a way of not keeping pace with the soldiers: the technical term for material with no forwarding address is "frustrated cargo." This makes for frustrated soldiers, who must master the time-honored military art of swapping what they have for what they need: long underwear, cigarettes, air filters, a forklift. The local Saudi merchants are not much help. Soldiers complain that prices double and triple between visits to the small local shops. A pack of Snickers bars has jumped from $6 to $15 -- the tax, say the shopkeepers, for doing business in the line of fire.

For he will give his

angels charge of you,

to guard you in all

your ways.

There is free time in the desert -- sometimes much too much of it. Desert Shield Radio, a network of four FM stations, plays news and music round the clock, a welcome replacement for Baghdad Betty, who used to taunt soldiers that their wives back home were being unfaithful. (One cuckolder was said to be Bart Simpson.) She has not been heard from since the bombing began. By and large, music tastes are fairly sedate. Since the fighting started, says program director Sergeant Major Bob Nelson, "it's like someone put a pillow on it; we got a lot of requests for soft and sentimental songs. When it heats up, we slow down." Army Private Brian Chavez, 18, of Wagner, Okla., worries about being out of touch. "There will be all new music when we go back," he moans. "There'll be a new way of dancing. We will look like dorks, like we are dancing the Watusi or something."

The most precious distraction, the source of the most pleasure and some pain, is the mail, typically weighing in at 400 tons. A letter from home is reread until the pages crumble. "I had just opened the letter from my wife when we had a Scud alert," says Sergeant Darrell Thompson, 37, of the XVIII Airborne. "I dropped my mail to run off to the bunker, but I put the photo of my little girl in my pocket, like a good-luck charm."

Letters are prized because they punctuate the waiting. They move time forward, even in painful ways, as fathers and mothers discover, from one letter to the next, that their children are growing up in their absence. Every word from home inflames the desire to get the fighting started, and finished. "It's like an exam," concludes Marine Sergeant H.B. McDuffie, 26, of Tallahassee, Fla. "You can only study so long, and then you're ready to take it. The whole thing is personal with me now. I missed Christmas. I missed New Year's Day, and now Valentine's Day, because of this war."

Among the greatest concerns, news reports notwithstanding, is that the soldiers will suffer the same fate as Vietnam veterans when they come home. Visiting reporters are constantly asked whether there is support back home. No reassurance is enough. "The politicians, they have nothing to lose because it's not them doing the job. It's us," says Marine Lance Corporal Scott Gruenefeld, 20, of Columbia, Mo. "My main concern is that I don't want to be looked upon as doing something wrong. I don't want to be spit on when I go home."

The psalm ends:

With long life I will satisfy him, and

show him my salvation.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Hart/Holmes/Lertola/Wells

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Sources: Janes: Armour and Artillery; All the World's Aircraft; Weapons Systems; Fighting Ships.}]Military Balance, Center for Defense Information, AP

CAPTION: ALLIED GROUND TROOPS

IRAQI GROUND TROOPS

Lara Marlowe in the Saudi desert, with pool reports