And so, for the first time in...a while, we weren't board at night. With the Stroocklettes put to bed, last night at about 9:15 we hobbled down to the kitchen, sat down in front of the computer and began World War 1990: Saddam's War. We had a nice, easy hour which produced 749 words. This was a good start.
Saddam's War begins with a trio of Israeli military intel types going over sat photos of Iraqi military deployments around the Kurdish city of Irbil, against which the Iraqi Air Force has just launched a chemical weapons attack. Footage provided by the Iraqi government shows they used Mirage F-1s, they're best aircraft. Meanwhile, sat photos show the Iraqis have deployed only a couple of crappy regular army brigades around Irbil. Why not units of the Republican Guard? Where are they?
Saddam's chemical weapons attack is just the first phase of a general offensive against Iraqi Kurdistan. Unusually, Saddam has granted the media full access to Irbil and its environs. The international community is outraged. All eyes turn to Irbil, and away from the Iran/Iraq border.
Alright, let's settle down now. We won't be rocketing ahead, cranking out scene after scene. Tonight we're going to go back over this opener and make it better, add detail and context and edit the hell out of it. The goal is to move slowly, ever slowly and write it right so we don't have to go over it 20 times.
Oh but we have the ju-ju. We have the ju-ju....
A decade ago we wrote a magazine article about the Iran/Iraq war, which Strategy and Tactics never got around to publishing because they're a mess when it comes to stuff like that, one of the reasons why we don't write for them anymore. The other reason being we designed their Meuse/Argonne Folio Game and they stiffed us. So we're in a pretty good place, research wise. We ordered two books about the Iran/Iraq War and two books about Saddam's regime to supplement that. That'll keep us busy at night too.
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