The Face of Modern Warfare

It's a gloomy winter day in the northern Arabian Gulf, with choppy seas below, as our Navy H-3 helicopter swoops in toward the USS Milius, a gray destroyer that from a distance looks like a flint arrowhead in the water. When war comes — as nearly everyone in the Gulf expects it to soon — the Milius will likely be among the ships firing the opening shots. It is loaded with Tomahawk cruise missiles, America's first-strike weapon of choice. Our helicopter thunks onto the aft deck of the Milius with a jarring, sideways lurch.

There are about a dozen of us onboard the chopper, mostly sailors returning from leave for training or medical emergencies. (During my time on the Milius, the only medevac case occurs when a young sailor cracks two molars on some Corn Nuts.) By Navy standards, the Milius is not huge. It's a little more than 500 feet long, a windowless steel box that right now holds a crew of 280. Since leaving its home port of San Diego in November, the ship has been zigzagging off the coast of Iraq, ready at a moment's notice to unleash a devastating missile barrage upon Baghdad.

The Navy has invited Rolling Stone onto the Milius as part of a policy of putting reporters as far forward with U.S. forces as possible. The military wasn't as forthcoming in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. As a result, some in the Pentagon believe, the media focused too much on the downside of that conflict — friendlyfire incidents, accidental bombings of villages. "This time," a Navy public-affairs officer tells me, "we want you telling the American side of the story." The Pentagon calls sending reporters into frontline positions "embedding." It's sort of like the ultimate backstage pass to war.

I am determined to use my pass on the Milius to search out isolated pockets of bitterness, fear and discontent. It would only make sense: No conflict since the Vietnam War has provoked such division at home and abroad — and this war hasn't started yet. Even among reporters, questions of war provoke bitter dissent. A couple of nights earlier, there was a full-on fistfight between an American photographer and a Canadian reporter in the lobby of Bahrain's mediahangout hotel, the Diplomat Radisson. While stunned Arab security guards looked on, the Canadian, who had been arguing for peace, knocked down the American and put him in an LAPD-style chokehold. As I figure it, there have to be undercurrents of tension on the ship, as well.