Opening with an introduction entitled 'Hunting the Virtuous -- and How to Clean and Skin Them', the author provides his own comments on the people, places and events behind the newspaper headlines, before launching into an account of the first Gulf War. Beginning with a concise history of the Middle East, he delivers a day-to-day chronicle of the tedium of waiting for war in the Saudi desert, signing off with an eyewitness account of the victory march into Kuwait city.