What do you think?
Rate this book
Martyr's Day: Chronicle of a Small War
Michael Kelly, who traveled through every country touched by the Gulf War, moved about as a free-lance journalist for the Boston Globe and the New Republic. He traveled through much of the Middle East during and after the Gulf War, watching the bombs fall on Baghdad and waiting for Scuds in Tel Aviv, inspecting the gold bathroom fixtures installed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the empire's temporary palace in Kuwait City and dining with Kurdish chieftains in remote mountain camps in northern Iran.
When ground war in Iraq began, Michael Kelly rented a four-wheel-drive Nissan Safari, borrowed some camouflage pants and gas-proof rubber gloves, and set off across the desert, where he was mistaken for an advance party of the American Army and surrendered to by a batch of bewildered Iraqi soldiers. In Kuwait after the liberation, he listened to horrific tales of torture and rape, and walked among the grotesque remains of the bombed-out retreating Iraqi army on the roads home. Later, when Kelly went to Kurdistan, he hiked into forbidden Iraqi territory and then traveled with various guerrilla bands at war with Saddam Hussein. He got out of Iraq by swimming across a river into Turkey in the company of smugglers. Kelly's story is witty, moving, and dramatically compelling, at once superb reporting and the very best travel writing. By avoiding the human story of the Gulf War, he has given us an indispensable piece of our history.
"Restrained yet explosive dispatches from the front . . . Kelly demonstrates a keen eye for the telling detail, a well-developed sense of irony . . . courage and enterprise."--National Magazine
When ground war in Iraq began, Michael Kelly rented a four-wheel-drive Nissan Safari, borrowed some camouflage pants and gas-proof rubber gloves, and set off across the desert, where he was mistaken for an advance party of the American Army and surrendered to by a batch of bewildered Iraqi soldiers. In Kuwait after the liberation, he listened to horrific tales of torture and rape, and walked among the grotesque remains of the bombed-out retreating Iraqi army on the roads home. Later, when Kelly went to Kurdistan, he hiked into forbidden Iraqi territory and then traveled with various guerrilla bands at war with Saddam Hussein. He got out of Iraq by swimming across a river into Turkey in the company of smugglers. Kelly's story is witty, moving, and dramatically compelling, at once superb reporting and the very best travel writing. By avoiding the human story of the Gulf War, he has given us an indispensable piece of our history.
"Restrained yet explosive dispatches from the front . . . Kelly demonstrates a keen eye for the telling detail, a well-developed sense of irony . . . courage and enterprise."--National Magazine
384 pages, Paperback
First published March 29, 1994
About the author
Michael Kelly
2 books6 followersAmerican journalist for The New York Times, a columnist for The Washington Post and The New Yorker, and a magazine editor for The New Republic, National Journal, and The Atlantic. He came to prominence through his reporting on the first Gulf War, and was well known for his political profiles and commentary, but suffered professional embarrassment for his role in the Stephen Glass scandal at The New Republic. Kelly was the first US journalist to be killed while covering the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The Atlantic Media Company, owner of the publications for whom Kelly worked from 1997 to 2003, annually honors journalists in Kelly's name with the Michael Kelly Award. First awarded in 2003, it celebrates "the fearless pursuit and expression of truth". In 2003 the University of New Hampshire, Department of English, established the Michael Kelly Memorial Scholarship Fund, which awards a sophomore or junior student "who is passionate about journalism".
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 19, 2017
Michael Kelly went to every major country affected by the Gulf War within the span of 4 or 5 months. The product is this very well written and moving account of a region thrown into turmoil. Kelly covers all kinds of fascinating stories: partying in Tel Aviv during the SCUD attacks, traveling with Kurdish peshmerga, visiting hospitals in southern Iraq, hanging with the elite and the impoverished in postwar Baghdad, talking with soldiers and Iraqi prisoners in Kuwait, etc. His account of getting dysentery in Kurdistan is particularly gripping. It also illustrates just how easy it was to die in postwar Iraq when so much of the country's infrastructure was shut down and its people cut off and dislocated. I'd recommend this book for anyone looking for an interesting first hand account of life in the major countries of the Middle East during and after the Gulf War.
February 29, 2008
Bought this book after reading the late Michael Kelly's accounts of the war in the newspaper. He was an excellent journalist and this is an outstanding work which brought insight into the continual struggles in the Mideast. I learned more about Iraq from his account than I had from any other source. His death there a few years ago, is so sad.
May 25, 2019
When one of my daughters was very young, you dare not ask her to tell you about a show or movie she had seen unless you had as much time as the show itself to hear the details. The late Michael Kelly, author of Martyers’ Day: Chronicle of a Small War must have been such a child. His account of The First Gulf War is the most literary conflict reporting that I have ever encountered; his level of detail is simply breath-taking. On the literary front, Martyers’ Day reads like a novel: “He was a wild-looking man, with flyaway hair and a grin that was all gaps and red gums, and a week’s beard that had sprouted in varied patches of brown and gray and red, like the fur of a mongrel cat.” (p. 81) On the detail side are the descriptions, for instance, of the bodies in the morgue of Kuwait City, a quotation of which I will spare you. These observations are not criticisms. Martyers’ Day is a wonderful, if sad, read, even if the story of The First Gulf War now seems like ancient history. It’s the same man’s inhumanity to man story as all conflict reporting but told with excruciating elegance and style.
Kelly visited Iraq on the eve of the war, Kuwait during the war, the refugee camps in Iran after the war, and along the Kurdish-Turkish border during the U. S. no-fly period. He witnessed the evil everywhere. One observation was particularly striking to me, that of the refugee camps: “The poor are as different as the rich, not only from me and you, but from the way they were themselves before they were poor. In their better lives of just three weeks before, most of the people, I am sure, had lived with a reasonable attention to cleanliness (it is next to godliness in Islam too), but being very poor makes the trappings of decency seem like frivolous affections.” (p. 282) Many of his comments are understated poignancy: “Death by malnutrition or disease is a process of dismal accrual, not dramatic change, and each day the people who are dying look more or less as they did the day before, which makes it hard to sustain interest in them; the world attention span for a given population of refugees is about a week at most.” (p.287)
Kelly visited Iraq on the eve of the war, Kuwait during the war, the refugee camps in Iran after the war, and along the Kurdish-Turkish border during the U. S. no-fly period. He witnessed the evil everywhere. One observation was particularly striking to me, that of the refugee camps: “The poor are as different as the rich, not only from me and you, but from the way they were themselves before they were poor. In their better lives of just three weeks before, most of the people, I am sure, had lived with a reasonable attention to cleanliness (it is next to godliness in Islam too), but being very poor makes the trappings of decency seem like frivolous affections.” (p. 282) Many of his comments are understated poignancy: “Death by malnutrition or disease is a process of dismal accrual, not dramatic change, and each day the people who are dying look more or less as they did the day before, which makes it hard to sustain interest in them; the world attention span for a given population of refugees is about a week at most.” (p.287)
May 20, 2021
If Michael Kelly hasn't read Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language, then he has arrived at one of the same conclusions Orwell did, namely, to never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which one is used to seeing in print. Here are some examples of Kelly's inventiveness:
>The land between the border and Amman was an especially morbid piece of desert, flat and black and bald as a banker.
>Amman is built on jebels, hills, seven major ones and six lesser, and it rambles from one hilltop to another, and up and down the sides, strung together by streets that wander in confused fashion through traffic circles around which the cars whirl dervishly.
>There were indeed many bad boys around, or at least dirty boys, and they settled on me like a cloud as I walked up the street, mistering me for money.Kelly is an inquisitive and humane reporter too and sensibly doesn't cast judgment on the people he meets. He has an ability to get his subjects to say enough for the reader to come to their own conclusions. What more does he need to say about the Jordanian hustler in Baghdad from whom he garnered this quote?
"But", he said, and he lifted his glass, "to hell with all that. By God, I love America, and thank you! By God! Do you know I always said - my whole life - I had one goal, to be a millionaire by the age of forty. And do you know - thank God for America! - if these sanctions last three more months, I will make it."
April 16, 2013
4/16/2013: I know so little about the Middle East and the United States' presence there over the last 20 years, and the best part of this book is that it made me want to read more about it. Written during Kelly's travels through Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel, and Egypt, during the Gulf War in 1991, this chronicle strikes a wonderful balance between the facts and numbers, stories from all the people he talked to, and his opinions of what was happening.
Kelly is an amazing journalist, able to describe such foreign places and people and cultures with a deft metaphor, a telling line, or a perfect detail. It is so tragic that he died in 2003, again covering war in Iraq. It's hard to imagine his motivation (almost a compulsion, really) to put himself in these dangerous and uncomfortable situations over and over; but I'm so glad he did, as he has performed an important service for the rest of us, bringing these people to us--these people who seem so foreign, but as he shows us, are just so much like us, wanting only peace and a bit of happiness in their worlds.
(I read this for the Mt. Auburn Cemetery Book Club. Michael Kelly is buried there.)
Kelly is an amazing journalist, able to describe such foreign places and people and cultures with a deft metaphor, a telling line, or a perfect detail. It is so tragic that he died in 2003, again covering war in Iraq. It's hard to imagine his motivation (almost a compulsion, really) to put himself in these dangerous and uncomfortable situations over and over; but I'm so glad he did, as he has performed an important service for the rest of us, bringing these people to us--these people who seem so foreign, but as he shows us, are just so much like us, wanting only peace and a bit of happiness in their worlds.
(I read this for the Mt. Auburn Cemetery Book Club. Michael Kelly is buried there.)
April 14, 2013
This is a recap of the travels of the author around the Middle East during the first Gulf War. He begins in Iraq, followed by Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, before entering Kuwait with the Arab forces. He completes the book by revisiting the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, a year later and reporting on the worsening conditions there. A very detailed look at an almost forgotten war. Kelly later died during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
May 20, 2021
I read this shortly after it came out in the early nineties and again after the author was killed covering the Iraq War. It's an enlightening look at the results of war on an underdeveloped country. It is balanced and brutal. His descriptions of the highway of death left me shaken. I would recommend this today as strongly as I would have (more so probably) when it was first published.
September 30, 2015
A remarkable book about humanity and inhumanity in the first Iraq war.Saddam Hussein was indeed a monster.Michael Kelly was the first embedded journalist killed in the second Iraq war.He is sorely missed.
September 21, 2008
This book is the reason I went into the journalism program at the university. Kelly's death is one of the great tragedies of the current Iraq war.
January 19, 2023
Michael Kelly is best-remembered today as the first American journalist to be killed in Iraq, during Operation Iraqi Freedom. That’s a shame, as he was a hell of a journalist in his prime—brave, inquisitive, and a good writer—three traits too often lacking in media flaks these days.
Martyrs’ Day finds him in rare fettle, at the height of his powers and nigh-Thompson-esque in his embrace of the madness. The book starts with him in Bagdad on the eve of the First Gulf War, taking the pulse of the Iraqis as Bush and Saddam ready to square off. The Iraqis seem to treat him almost universally with hospitality, expressing their aversion to war and pride in their ancient land.
Kelly does a wonderful job describing the Biblical beauty of the region, its lush date palms and orange groves, correcting misconceptions of this supposedly arid, desert land. He also does a stellar job of presenting a thumbnail history of the region, which, while not exhaustive, is admirably precise. Alas, as political bluster by heads of state gives way to actual carpet-bombing, all of Kelly’s descriptive powers get diverted to describing the war.
The tracers in the sky and rounds strafing the minarets are beautiful in their way—provided one doesn’t really consider the context. But then the next day the sun comes up, exposing the bodies to the light of the morning. The scenes Kelly describes are harrowing, literally stomach-churning in his case, as he vomits multiple times. Things grow even more harrowing, though, as he heads south to Kuwait and begins interviewing the formerly-occupied, now-liberated people. By all-accounts the Kuwaitis were richer and more well-educated than the Iraqis, and the Ba’athist brass took out their resentments on their well-off neighbors with a campaign of indescribable torture. And still Michael Kelly’s interview subjects make their best efforts to describe the unspeakable acts committed against them, the campaign of fear that enveloped their country, poisoning its life.
Eventually Kelly migrates north, back once again into the mouth of the lion, his bravery starting to border on recklessness. He spends time with the Kurds in Iraq’s mountainous regions, and their defenders among the paramilitary Peshmerga. At one point he contracts a harrowing case of dysentery that almost kills him, before returning to Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, where the worst is still waiting for him:
US sanctions have been imposed on Iraq, and rather than harming Saddam, they have given him a convenient scapegoat in the Americans. They’ve also managed to make his son, Udai—a brutal psychopathic bully—into a very rich man. As Saddam’s clan and inner circle—including the infamous “Chemical Ali”—continue to enrich and ingratiate themselves, Iraqis literally begin to starve. Most of the victims are children.
What, ultimately, did Michael Kelly learn? What lessons can his book impart? None perhaps, but it serves as an unimpeachably vivid look at the war, and an important historical record. Most of its power is contained in the testimonies of the victims and perpetrators of the conflict, those brutalized people who in turn brutalized others.
Ultimately I closed the book feeling more than a little ambivalent about it all. I served in the Army for four years, and spent a year in Iraq, and always felt a little ashamed of my part in the war. But now, after reading about what Saddam actually did to his own people, and to the Kuwaitis, I’m not so sure.
The United States no doubt did terrible things to Iraq, and more broadly to the region, but it’s a good thing that many malefactors described this book are dead. And these private feelings should have no bearing on what potential readers will bring to the book, regarding their own histories and biases. Michael Kelly could write, and he was honest about what he saw, heard, suffered, and ultimately thought when exposed to the unmitigated horrors of war.
Recommended, especially for aspiring journalists, and even more especially those contemplating becoming war correspondents. But be careful out there. A couple of Michael’s friends in media described in the book end up dead before the last pages, killed by their supposed guide in a dispute over money.
Martyrs’ Day finds him in rare fettle, at the height of his powers and nigh-Thompson-esque in his embrace of the madness. The book starts with him in Bagdad on the eve of the First Gulf War, taking the pulse of the Iraqis as Bush and Saddam ready to square off. The Iraqis seem to treat him almost universally with hospitality, expressing their aversion to war and pride in their ancient land.
Kelly does a wonderful job describing the Biblical beauty of the region, its lush date palms and orange groves, correcting misconceptions of this supposedly arid, desert land. He also does a stellar job of presenting a thumbnail history of the region, which, while not exhaustive, is admirably precise. Alas, as political bluster by heads of state gives way to actual carpet-bombing, all of Kelly’s descriptive powers get diverted to describing the war.
The tracers in the sky and rounds strafing the minarets are beautiful in their way—provided one doesn’t really consider the context. But then the next day the sun comes up, exposing the bodies to the light of the morning. The scenes Kelly describes are harrowing, literally stomach-churning in his case, as he vomits multiple times. Things grow even more harrowing, though, as he heads south to Kuwait and begins interviewing the formerly-occupied, now-liberated people. By all-accounts the Kuwaitis were richer and more well-educated than the Iraqis, and the Ba’athist brass took out their resentments on their well-off neighbors with a campaign of indescribable torture. And still Michael Kelly’s interview subjects make their best efforts to describe the unspeakable acts committed against them, the campaign of fear that enveloped their country, poisoning its life.
Eventually Kelly migrates north, back once again into the mouth of the lion, his bravery starting to border on recklessness. He spends time with the Kurds in Iraq’s mountainous regions, and their defenders among the paramilitary Peshmerga. At one point he contracts a harrowing case of dysentery that almost kills him, before returning to Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, where the worst is still waiting for him:
US sanctions have been imposed on Iraq, and rather than harming Saddam, they have given him a convenient scapegoat in the Americans. They’ve also managed to make his son, Udai—a brutal psychopathic bully—into a very rich man. As Saddam’s clan and inner circle—including the infamous “Chemical Ali”—continue to enrich and ingratiate themselves, Iraqis literally begin to starve. Most of the victims are children.
What, ultimately, did Michael Kelly learn? What lessons can his book impart? None perhaps, but it serves as an unimpeachably vivid look at the war, and an important historical record. Most of its power is contained in the testimonies of the victims and perpetrators of the conflict, those brutalized people who in turn brutalized others.
Ultimately I closed the book feeling more than a little ambivalent about it all. I served in the Army for four years, and spent a year in Iraq, and always felt a little ashamed of my part in the war. But now, after reading about what Saddam actually did to his own people, and to the Kuwaitis, I’m not so sure.
The United States no doubt did terrible things to Iraq, and more broadly to the region, but it’s a good thing that many malefactors described this book are dead. And these private feelings should have no bearing on what potential readers will bring to the book, regarding their own histories and biases. Michael Kelly could write, and he was honest about what he saw, heard, suffered, and ultimately thought when exposed to the unmitigated horrors of war.
Recommended, especially for aspiring journalists, and even more especially those contemplating becoming war correspondents. But be careful out there. A couple of Michael’s friends in media described in the book end up dead before the last pages, killed by their supposed guide in a dispute over money.
March 6, 2007
Not enough character development. Too jumpy. More travel writing than war reporting.
June 5, 2007
Account by a journalist who snuck into the combat areas of Iraq during the first gulf war. ends up in Kurdistan when they revolt, but no US forces show up.
May 27, 2008
This made a big impression on me in '93. I was sorry to part ideological ways with Kelly in his later years.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews