In war's dust, 'fog,' a yearning to communicate

Tuesday night the phone rang at the Alkeysi home in Al Atmeay, a prosperous Baghdad neighborhood near the city's largest university. This sound was, in some ways, more startling than the explosion of a bomb, as Real Alkeysi hadn't even heard from her sisters across town since the beginning of the war.

Yet, miraculously, on the other end of the line was her brother Khadouri, who had moved to America and lived in New Jersey. "How did you call? How did you get through?" Ms. Alkeysi asked excitedly into the phone.

Meanwhile, in Havelock, N.C., Elizabeth Clingersmith was enduring a blackout of e-mail from her husband. On the news they said the weather was bad in the Middle East, so Tom - a marine in Iraq - probably just couldn't get through.

Still, Ms. Clingersmith was restless. The TV soaps she normally loved weren't holding her attention. During an ad she ran to check her PC - even though she'd done that three minutes earlier, an exasperated friend pointed out. "You never know," she replied as she pounded up the stairs.

Last week, sandstorms both real and metaphorical drifted across the face of the US-led conflict with Iraq. For some, lulls in this weather allowed brief moments of clarity and communication. For others the dry, blowing grit seemed an embodiment of the phrase "fog of war."

When the storms lifted, the landscape seemed changed. Fighting that was predictable in its opening days had turned unscripted. It was a phase-shift that produced wildly varying emotions in people around the world.

• • •

Clouds rolled in over the desert vastness of Kuwait all Tuesday morning. By midday they blocked out the sun. Bad weather was coming, and in this part of the world, bad weather can be really ugly - 50-knot winds plus rain, lightning, and dust all swirled into one.

Yet at 5:45 pm, two US F-16s sat on the end of a runway, cleared for takeoff and missions over Iraq. "Saw" - that's the call name of one US Air Force captain - took off first. "Thumper," another captain, followed him into the gathering storm.

It was after midair refueling, as they crossed into Iraqi airspace, that they got hit. Or rather, seemed to get hit. "Hey, One, I got struck by lightning," Thumper said. She sounded excited.

Saw's plane was glowing too, with a white-green light from the nose past the canopy. But Saw, the more experienced pilot, knew it wasn't lightning. It was St. Elmo's fire, an electrical discharge.

"Oh, I've never seen that before," said Thumper. She sounded awed.

Thousands of feet below, the forces of nature were even more Biblical. Howling winds swept reddish-brown dust hundreds of miles. US armored convoys ground to a halt. Plans for over 1,400 sorties by US and coalition warplanes were scrapped.

The mission of most of those who made it into the air was to bomb Republican Guard military positions. Capts. Saw and Thumper, for instance, simply punched coordinates into fire-control computers, and launched satellite-guided munitions into the darkness below. Then they returned to base, landing through lightning-filled clouds, the bursts making it seem as if hundreds of flashbulbs were going off around them.

But concentrating on the Republican Guard meant other targets went untouched. Baghdad telecommunication equipment remained up and running even though US commanders were becoming concerned about the Iraqi regime's continuing ability to control troops and broadcast its view of the war around the world.

• • •

Whatever this meant for the war effort, it also meant that Real Alkeysi (not her actual name) could still hear from America.

Her brother Khadouri had been trying to call her every 20 minutes virtually without ceasing since the war began. Bip-bip-bip-bip - 11 digits punched into the phone, over and over.

Tuesday night, for some reason, it finally went through. Real quickly told him the news. The home, near the center of the city and surrounded by lush plum and orange trees, had been shaken and rattled as missiles struck nearby. But it hadn't been damaged, and so far everyone in the immediate family was safe.

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