US tanks and supply trucks rumble over the dunes in the pitch black of night. By day, thousands of troops are on the move in mass formation, as the sound of mortars and missiles snaps and crackles through the air.

"Let's go, let's go!" an infantryman shouts. A high-powered charge blows a barbed wire fence to smithereens, before ground troops storm through the breach and unleash hundreds of rounds of machine-gun fire at imaginary targets.

A handful of reporters have been invited to watch up close as the US army carries out what officials say is routine training, little more than a stone's throw from the Iraqi border.

But this is not exactly business as usual. There is no mistaking that these soldiers are getting ready for a potential march north, and the US military is letting the media have a glimpse of its overwhelming firepower.

We hustle over the shifting sands right behind the infantry, keeping low as the sky roars with armour-piercing bullets spitting out of dozens of tanks just a few feet away. Long-range fire arcs above our heads and explodes in the distance.

The live-fire exercise makes good theatre for the press, and juices up the emotions of soldiers who have been in Kuwait for months -- battling the endless grit of desert sand and eating rations that pack more calories than taste.

"I'll feel cheated if we don't go into Iraq," said Specialist Eric Huth, 21, from Cincinnati, Ohio. "Let's get in there and see what we're made of."

His remarks are not the scripted lines of commanders higher up, who avoid unguarded moments with the press like a minefield and say little beyond the standard fare: we're just here to do our jobs, we're ready for whatever the president tells us to do.

At the level of the ordinary foot soldier here, there's a hunger for real combat instead of fake training, and a desire to show up Saddam Hussein's boasts that the Iraqi army will teach their American counterparts a lesson.

"He's just talking," said Specialist Nicholas Jenkins, 21, from Marietta, Georgia. "All we have to do is look at what's around us."

What's around them is just the tip of the iceberg of US forces in the region. Officials acknowledge there are 15,000 US soldiers in Kuwait alone -- the soldiers' rumour mill says there are actually tens of thousands more.

Tanks, armoured troop carriers, field artillery, TOW missiles, mobile bridges that can get forces across deep trenches -- the array of hardware already on the edge of Iraq is staggering, with more than 1,000 vehicles moving together in one exercise alone.

As US President George W. Bush's game of cat-and-mouse with Sadddam unfolds, the media have been given increasing access to exercises like this. In Qatar, Djibouti and even the Marines' training camp outside Washington, reporters are getting a rare look up close.

The media access is helping the White House get the message of its seriousness across to Baghdad, which in turn says the United States has already decided on war and will launch an attack no matter what it does now.

Only President Bush knows for sure whether the US will strike. But in the desert just south of the "Highway of Death," where thousands of Iraqi troops met their fate in the 1991 Gulf war, there are many young Americans ready for Round Two.

"I'll wait here forever if it means avoiding a war," said Sergeant Haile Frye, 29. "But if I have to go kill, then that's something I'm ready to do."

SPACE.WIRE