Front-Row Seat

Luck is the residue of design, an old saying goes, and Caryle Murphy of the Washington Post has turned that into her own version of Murphy's Law. As Saddam Hussein intensified his war of words against Kuwait, she decided to fly from her bureau in Cairo to the Persian Gulf emirate for a firsthand look. Thus she was the only American reporter in Kuwait when Iraqi troops invaded on Aug. 2. Her calm, lucid eyewitness reports -- some printed without a byline to disguise the fact that she was there -- will surely be among the prime candidates for journalism prizes next spring. As Murphy wrote in one dispatch, she had "a front-row seat for witnessing a small nation being crushed by its larger neighbor."

Murphy, who moved into the apartment of some American friends to avoid Iraqi troops in her hotel lobby, was initially able to tour the city by taxi with two European journalists. Some diplomats, including Belgians, provided facilities for filing stories. On Aug. 14 some Europeans made an early-morning run for Saudi Arabia; Murphy, who was staying across town, could not join them. Two days later, Iraq ordered all American and British citizens to report to hotels and register with Iraqi forces. "I did make a couple of taxi trips after that," she said, "but it was pretty nerve-racking."

In one dispatch, Murphy described the Iraqi attack on the Emir's palace as seen from her hotel window. "Throughout the day," she wrote, "the sound of machine-gun and mortar fire echoed through the city as a dull percussion accompaniment" to the siege. A few days later, she described the captured city as being like "the eye of a storm" as the main highways "give off a low hum from the washboard-like ruts caused by the tread of heavy tanks."

Murphy eventually made contact with someone who helped her join a convoy making a daring cross-desert escape to the Saudi border. A cheer went up when word reached the Washington Post newsroom last week that she was safe. Through the whole ordeal, the Massachusetts-born Murphy, 43, managed to keep her Yankee sense of thrift. When she telephoned the Post from Riyadh last week, an assistant tried to switch her to foreign editor David Ignatius. Murphy demurred. "This hotel is charging too much. Have David call me back."