The Name of the World (14 page)

Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Name of the World

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The next winter I took an assignment to cover the Gulf War. I arrived in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, six days before the U.N. bombing campaign began. Soon Scud missiles began blowing up over the city.

I’ve taken assignments steadily since then. I remain a student of history, more of one than ever, now that our century has torn its way out of its chrysalis and become too beautiful to be examined, too alive to be debated and exploited by played-out intellectuals. The important thing is no longer to predict in what way its grand convulsions might next shake us. Now the important thing is to ride it into the sky.

After three weeks in Dahran I moved to the north, the town of Nuaryriyah. Off and on, for a while, I traveled around the uniform emptiness of the Hijarah Desert interviewing American soldiers at the gates of their encampments. I spent
many nights near the Iraqi border sleeping inside my rented Toyota in the middle of a vast waste. The desert trembled with incessant bombing, rumbled so deeply it couldn’t actually be heard. I was there, I felt it, it thudded in the soul. I wore khakis and desert boots and an Australian commando’s hat. My face burned brown in the sun. I was adopted by a group of junior executives (what else to call them?—they were young engineers, computer jocks, even an accountant, from Parker-Boyd, a civilian helicopter-maintenance firm under contract to the military in the Gulf) who erroneously understood me to have permission to travel anywhere in the region. With them and their crews and guards of bulky, invulnerable-looking young Marines I flew in helicopters above blazing tank battles in the desert in the night, through black smoke overclouding a world pocked by burning oil wells like flickering signals of distress, of helplessness, floated like prey in the talons of a hawk above a bare brown planet with nothing in it but two or three roads and a war; and continued day after day in a life I believe to be utterly remarkable.

About the Author

Denis Johnson is the author of
Already Dead, Jesus’ Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon,
and
Angels
. His poetry has been collected in the volume
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly
. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award, among many other awards for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.

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F
ICTION

Already Dead

Jesus’ Son

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Fiskadoro

The Stars at Noon

Angels

P
OETRY

The Man Among the Seals

Inner Weather

The Incognito Lounge

The Veil

The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly

Copyright

THE NAME OF THE WORLD
. Copyright © 2000 by Denis Johnson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub © Edition JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780061869396

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