Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (5 page)

Iraq

INKBLOTS OF BLOOD

I
N COLLEGE I’D
read a lot about the Vietnam War and the foreign correspondents who covered it. Their tales of night patrols and hot LZs made reporting sound like an adventure, one that was also worthwhile. News, however, is a hard business to break into. After college, I applied for an entry-level job at
ABC News—
photocopying, answering phones—but after months of waiting, I couldn’t even get an interview. Such is the value of a Yale education.

I finally got a job as a fact-checker at
Channel One,
a twelve-minute daily news program broadcast to thousands of high schools throughout the United States. I knew that fact-checking wasn’t going to get me anywhere close to a front line, but I needed to get my foot in the door somehow. After several months of working there, I came up with a plan to become a foreign correspondent. It was very simple, and monumentally stupid.

I figured if I went places that were dangerous or exotic, I wouldn’t have much competition, and if my stories were interesting and inexpensive,
Channel One
might broadcast them. A colleague of mine agreed to make a fake press pass for me on a Macintosh computer, and loan me one of his Hi-8 cameras. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I’d watched a lot of TV news growing up, and had some idea how stories were put together. The rest I figured I’d learn along the way.

I quit my job as a fact-checker, but didn’t inform the producers who ran
Channel One
of my plan. I figured they’d tell me not to go, or refuse to look at whatever material I shot. In December 1991, I flew to Thailand and met up with some Burmese refugees who were working to overthrow their country’s military dictatorship. Apparently, my fake press pass was convincing because they agreed to sneak me across the Thai-Burmese border so I could shoot a story about their struggle.

Their camp was in dense jungle. Throughout the day, you could hear mortar fire in the distance from an unseen front line. I found it all very exciting, and loved being in a position to ask questions and shoot pictures. None of it seemed very real to me, however, until I went to the field hospital where young soldiers, many just teenagers, lay with bloody wounds and missing limbs.

A doctor in surgical scrubs was operating on the leg of a young man whose face was badly bruised; his eyes had turned milky white. I saw the doctor reach for a stainless-steel saw, and at first didn’t understand what he was going to do with it. When he began cutting the teenager’s leg off, I nearly passed out. The soldiers who were escorting me laughed.

Channel One
bought the video I’d shot, and when I arrived back in Bangkok, I knew that this was the career I wanted. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I called my mom and told her, “I think I’ve found my bliss.”

SHORTLY AFTER I
get back from Sri Lanka in the middle of January 2005, I notice that, professionally, something has changed. TV reporters call me requesting interviews about the tsunami. Colleagues tell me what a good job I’ve done. I appreciate the compliments, and don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the praise makes me uncomfortable. I’m glad people are interested in the story, but when they ask me what it was like, I’m not sure what to say. I don’t know how to sum it up in a sound bite. I don’t know what to do with the sudden spotlight. It’s easier just to go back overseas, so I volunteer to go to Iraq.

Elections for a new interim government are scheduled to take place at the end of January. They’ll be the first real elections Iraq’s had since Saddam.

This is my second trip to Iraq for CNN, and I’m still not sure what I’ve really seen. “Everyone has a different war,” a soldier once said to me. “We all see our own little slice; no one ever sees it the same.” Roger that.

Iraq is a Rorschach test. You can see what you want in the inkblots of blood. Number of attacks is down, lethality is up. Kidnappings fall, IEDs rise. More Iraqis are trained, more police desert. Fewer Americans die, more Iraqi cops get killed. One step forward, a bomb blast back. So many words written, so many pundits positioned. The closer you look, the harder it is to focus.

On the morning flight from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad you see all kinds: the desperate, the downtrodden, the curious, the convinced, true believers, truth seekers, patriots, and parasites. In Iraq they hope to find money or meaning, or something in between. The plane is Jordanian, the pilots and flight attendants South African. In Iraq, they know there’s money to be made.

War is hell, but hell, it’s also an opportunity.

The flight proceeds normally, until the last few minutes. Rather than making a long slow descent to the runway, the plane banks sharply, turning in a corkscrew motion directly over the Baghdad airport.

“The final part of our descent will be from overhead the airfield in a spiral fashion,” the pilot announces. “It may feel a little uncomfortable on the body but it’s a perfectly safe maneuver.”

Of course, if it were perfectly safe they wouldn’t be doing the maneuver, but it’s the best protection they have against getting shot out of the sky by a rocket-propelled grenade.

WELCOME TO FREE IRAQ
. That’s what it says on the T-shirts they sell at Baghdad International Airport. Freedom’s great, but so is security, and right now most Iraqis would trade a lot of the first for even some of the second.

In the Arrivals terminal, a Filipino clutching a machine gun shouts instructions to a gaggle of Halliburton employees who’ve just arrived. Printed on the back of the Filipino’s baseball cap is the name of the security company he works for:
CUSTER BATTLES
. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Every reporter likes to believe that what they’re seeing and feeling is unique, that it hasn’t already been seen and felt a thousand times in other places, other conflicts. I try to keep the stories separate, not allow what I’ve seen in one country to change how I see things someplace else. It’s not always easy. I set up barriers in my head, my heart, but blood flows right through them. A corpse I see in Baghdad will remind me of a body back in Bosnia. Sometimes I can’t even remember where I was or why. I just remember the moment, the look, a sudden snap of a synapse, a blink of an eye, and I’m in another conflict, another year. Every war is different, every war the same.

SARAJEVO. MARCH 1993.
Bosnia wasn’t my first war, but at the time, it was the deadliest one I’d seen. It had taken me nearly a year after Burma, but
Channel One
had finally hired me as a correspondent. I was twenty-five, still shooting my stories on a home video camera, and traveling all alone, but at least now they were picking up the bills.

It was the first year of the war in Bosnia, and Sarajevo was under siege. Serbs in surrounding mountains lobbed shells into the city, mortaring the marketplace where old men sold their broken watches and tried to hold onto their dignity. A shell would land, blood splattered the street. You could feel the impact blocks away. There were snipers as well. Their bullets cut through the air, silent, spinning. No tracer fire, no warning. Just snap, crackle, pop, and a body would crumple to the ground.

Anyone who tells you they aren’t scared in a war zone is a fool or a liar, and probably both. The more places you’ve been, the more you know just how easy it is to get killed. It’s not like in the movies. There are no slow-motion falls, no crying out the names of your loved ones. People die, and the world keeps spinning.

I flew into Sarajevo from Zagreb, Croatia, on a UN charter.
Channel One
had just given me a brand-new flak jacket, but I hadn’t bothered to take it out of its plastic wrapping until the plane was just about to land. When I did, I noticed something sewn inside. It was a warning label:
THIS VEST DOES NOT PROTECT AGAINST ARMOR-PIERCING PROJECTILES, RIFLE FIRE, SHARP OR POINTED INSTRUMENTS
.

It was useless against snipers, effective only against pistols, close-range stuff. In Sarajevo, they killed you from far away.

I put the vest on anyway and walked alone into the sandbag maze of Sarajevo’s airport. On the flight, there had been only one other passenger: a young German kid with a camera. He looked more scared than I did, and seemed to have even less of a clue about what he was getting himself into. He never even left the airport. I heard he flew back to Zagreb that same day.

I was afraid to sleep in the bed in my room at the Holiday Inn. I kept thinking some shrapnel might kill me during the night. So I’d lay on the floor, trying to sleep, listening to the dull thud of mortars landing on nearby buildings. Like a mangy dog, the Holiday Inn had sunk its teeth into Sarajevo, and wasn’t letting go. Most of the glass in the hotel was already cracked or broken. It had been replaced with heavy plastic sheeting. During the winter, the wind whipped and whistled down the darkened corridors.

Everyone still called it the Holiday Inn, though I heard that the chain had revoked its franchise. Given the constraints imposed by the Serbian stranglehold on Sarajevo, the hotel just couldn’t maintain the high standards demanded by the parent corporation. The bed mints had run out a long time ago.

During the 1984 Winter Olympics, the location of the hotel was ideal; it was in the heart of the city, near the river, with views of the mountains. During the war, however, the location couldn’t have been worse. The ski slopes that once hosted competitors from around the world were now home to snipers. The boxy Holiday Inn was a top-heavy target. It faced the front line, and at night, tracer fire whipped past the windows like shooting stars.

Channel One
hadn’t bothered to rent me an armored vehicle, but they did get me a two-door Yugo. Not exactly an equal substitute, but it was better than nothing. I hired a local reporter named Vlado to show me around. He kept calling the Yugo a “soft-skin” car, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. The morning after I arrived, I came downstairs to find that someone had stolen the car’s windshield wipers. Just the wiper blades. They left the sticks that held them. They were bent forward, jutting out from the base of the windshield. As we drove, they rotated like spinning horns. It made us laugh at first, but after awhile there was something sad about them. The next day, Vlado ripped them off entirely.

The front entrance to the hotel was boarded up, and to get in you had to go through a side door. Vlado would drive us around the back of the hotel, trying to keep the car protected from snipers for as long as possible. Just before he reached the side entrance, he’d have to jump a curb, and every time he did, I was sure the tires would blow out.

The day before I left, I was out on my own, a few blocks from the hotel. I thought I was in a protected spot. I was planning on doing what TV reporters call a “stand-up”—in which they talk to the camera—and I’d just set up my tripod when I heard a loud crack. I turned and saw a tile fall off a nearby column. By the time it hit the ground, I realized that it had been struck by a bullet. Someone had taken a shot. I didn’t know if they were shooting at me or someone else, but it didn’t matter. I ran behind a nearby building, and the sniper peppered the area with automatic fire. I captured some of it on camera, and narrated what I was seeing. I was white as a corpse. When I looked at the tape recently, though, I saw something I hadn’t remembered. I noticed the faint hint of a smile on my face.

SOMETIMES THE PLACES
that are the most dangerous don’t feel that bad at all. In Baghdad there are moments when you think nothing can touch you. Encased in Kevlar, puffed up like some B-movie cyborg, you peer through double-paned bulletproof glass at the dust and decay, the cement blast barriers. You watch people on the street and wonder who’s good, who’s bad, who’ll live, who’ll die. You’re surrounded by guys with barrel chests and ceramic plates hidden underneath their shirts, machine guns ready, safeties unlocked. Who knows what else they have in their bags?

You’re trapped in a bubble of security; you can’t break out—with guards and guns, and no time to linger on the street, it’s hard to tell what’s really going on. Bulletproof glass protects but it also distorts. Fear alters everything.

It’s late January 2005, and I’ve come to Iraq to cover the interim elections for CNN. We’re driving in from Baghdad’s airport, on a road the army calls Route Irish.

“They say this is the most dangerous road in the world,” my driver says.

“They always do,” I say, and I realize I sound like a jerk.

Every war has a road like this one, the most dangerous, the most mined. I don’t know how you can judge.

Baghdad’s Route Irish connects the airport to the Green Zone. It’s an eight-mile haul but there’s a two-mile stretch that’s particularly bad. Snipers, improvised explosive devices, ambushes, suicide attacks—you name it, it’s happened on Route Irish. U.S. soldiers patrol the road and the surrounding neighborhoods, but the attacks keep happening.

After
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002, news companies began to take security much more seriously. In Baghdad most major American news organizations contract with private security firms. Big guys with thick necks meet you at the airport and give you a bulletproof vest before they even shake your hand.

The company that CNN contracts with provides former British Special Forces soldiers—tough professional men who’ve done things you can’t imagine, in places you’ve never heard of. They don’t talk much about where they’ve been, but they’ll tell you right away: Baghdad’s the worst they’ve seen.

The city is crawling with security
contractors,
a ghost army of more than 10,000 private guards. In other times, other places, they’d be called mercenaries, but here
contractors
is the preferred term.

“Look at that GI Joe,” one of my guards says, pointing to a contractor manning a roadblock. “Isn’t he all decked out.”

You see all kinds: from former Navy SEALS who know what they’re doing, and keep a low profile, to weekend warriors you don’t want to get anywhere near. The latter swagger around the city tricked out in ninja gear: commando vests, kneepads, pistols on hips, knives in boots, machine guns at the ready. A little overweight, a lot down on their luck, for them Iraq came along at just the right time. A year here, and they can earn two hundred thousand dollars. The ones who worry me the most are South Africans—Afrikaners: big buzz-cut blonds with legs like tree trunks. They come for the money and the frontier freedom. One of my security guards complains that they’re out of control.