<...I hitched a ride back to Saudi Arabia on a New Zealand Air Force C-130. The members of the flight crew were all in their twenties and filled with leftover joy of combat. They let me stand on the flight deck as they brought their 132-foot wingspan, 100,000 pounds of an airplane down to a hundred feet and began chasing camels and goats across the desert at 300 miles an hour. The scattered tamarisk bushes were coming at us like uncountable fastballs in a batting-cage nightmare. The camels gave out pretty quick but the billies and nannies and kids were inspired to remarkable sprints of terror--turbo goats. The vast destitution of the Dahna Sands spread out in an infinity around us. "Wall-to-wall fuck-all, eh?" shouted the Kiwi pilot. He and his crew mates had smiles as wide as their skulls. This was the stuff that made it all worthwhile, to be in absolute charge of 17,200 horsepower, to have, gripped in your fists, the whole might of science, of industry, of civilization's mastery of the world--our civilization's mastery of this world. "HOOOOO-AH!!!" as the Gulf troops say.

We popped over the top of a little ridge, and there was a Bedouin camp on the other side. I watched a boy about nine or ten years old come running out from one of the goat-hair tents. We were so close I could see his expression--thrill and fear and awe and wonder combined. His whole life he'll remember the moment that skyblackening, air-mauling thunder-engined steel firmament of war crossed his face. And I hope all his bellicose, fanatical, senseless, quarrel-mongering neighbors--from Tel Aviv to Khartoum, from Tripoli to Tehran--remember it too.



From "Give War A Chance" by P. J. O'Rourke