Hell Hath No Fury (37 page)

Shortly after the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War, many soldiers who had served in the theater began to exhibit a variety of symptoms, including memory, hair, and weight loss; insomnia; severe fatigue; and diminished powers of concentration. Initially identified by the Department of Defense as post-traumatic stress disorder, these symptoms were eventually attributed to Gulf War syndrome. In veterans of the Gulf War, the condition seems to have been triggered by exposure to a combination of factors, any one of which might have a malign effect: vaccination against chemical or biological attacks; exposure to equipment or munitions containing depleted uranium or struck by shells that incorporate this dangerous material; smoke and chemical pollutants produced by burning oil wells; and bites from sand flies indigenous to the Persian Gulf.

Between 1991 and 1993, an army doctor, Paula K. Underwood, treated more than seventy cases of Gulf War syndrome. In 2003, in the buildup to the Second Gulf War, Underwood and other army doctors worked together on a project to protect the health of the 250,000 soldiers sent to the theater and to establish an automatic screening program for them on their return.

When the Iraq War began in March 2003, the USNS
Comfort
was once again in the Persian Gulf. Seven of its 157 nurses had served in Desert Storm. Military nurses and doctors were also busy on land, in Iraq and Kuwait. The Forty-seventh Combat Support Hospital, in the Kuwaiti desert, was a three-hundred-bed medical complex, covering twelve acres and boasting state-of-the art facilities in air-conditioned tents that were pressurized to keep out the dust. Conditions in some of the makeshift hospitals in Iraq were more testing. The Eighty-sixth Combat Support Hospital near An Nasiriya was often filled with choking dust, stirred up by the desert wind, which forced its staff and patients to don surgical masks.

Reference: Karen Zeinert and Mary Miller,
The Brave Women of the Gulf Wars: Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom,
2006.

WALKER, MARY EDWARDS

US Feminist and Civil War Doctor, b. 1823, d. 1919

A forceful proponent of women's rights and dress reform and one of the first female journalists in America, Walker was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for her service as a physician in the Civil War and refused to return it when the award was revoked in 1917.

Born in Oswego County, New York, she was a pioneering advocate of women's rights and adopted the wearing of “bloomers” long before the craze for bicycling made them fashionable. In 1855 she became one of the United States' first female physicians when she graduated from Syracuse Medical College. She married a fellow student, Albert Miller, wearing trousers and a dress coat at the ceremony, in which she did not promise to obey her husband. Nor did she take his name when they set up a medical practice together. Unfortunately, their patients did not take to a female physician, and neither the marriage nor the practice lasted long.

In 1861, at the start of the Civil War, Walker offered her services to the Union army but was not accepted. Undaunted, she worked as a nurse in the Patent Office Hospital in Washington and treated wounded soldiers at the First Battle of Bull Run(1861). In 1862, however, she was engaged by the army as an assistant surgeon with the Fifty-second Ohio Infantry, the first woman doctor to serve with its medical corps. Walker took risks in crossing Confederate lines to attend civilians and also undertook spying missions. In 1864 she was captured by Confederate troops and imprisoned for four months before being returned to the Union lines in an exchange of prisoners. She worked the closing months of the Civil War in a women's prison in Louisville, Kentucky, and at an orphans' asylum in Tennessee. During the war she habitually wore a man's uniform jacket and a pair of trousers under her skirt, and she carried two pistols.

When Walker received the Congressional Medal of Honor in January 1866, the citation noted that she had “devoted herself with much patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded soldiers, both in the field and in hospitals, to the detriment of her own health.” After resigning from the army, Walker worked as a journalist in New York, lectured on women's rights, and wrote two books—
Hit: Essays on Women's Rights
(1871), a fictionalized autobiography, and
Unmasked, or the Science of Immorality
(1878)—and many broadsides against tobacco and alcohol. On formal occasions she invariably appeared in men's full evening dress and silk top hat, although she wore her hair in curls to show that she was a woman. This did not prevent her being arrested on several occasions for “masquerading in men's clothes.” One of her best-known sayings was “Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed their freedom.”

In 1897 she founded a colony for women called Adamless Eve. When in 1917 the US government reacted to widespread abuse by revoking the award of some nine hundred Congressional Medals, Walker refused to return hers and wore it until her death two years later. In 1977 President Carter restored the medal, making her the only female recipient, and it can be seen today in the Women's Corridor at the Pentagon.

Reference: Mercedes Graef,
A Woman of Honor: Dr. Walker and the Civil War,
2001.

9

RECORDING ANGELS

Singers, Entertainers, Artists, Propagandists, and Chroniclers of War, the Good and the Bad

I'm going to Spain with the boys. I don't know who the boys are, but I'm going with them.

—US war reporter Martha Gellhorn on the Spanish Civil War, 1936

E
VERY WAR NEEDS
its interpreters and chroniclers, those who write, sing, or speak on behalf of all the others out either on active service or left behind at home. Women have undertaken a far greater and more varied share of this work than is generally realized. Like CNN's
Christiane Amanpour
(see Chapter 9), they have made their mark in many areas and penetrated almost every arena of war, leaving intensely personal records of their experience that have survived the test of time, like the haunting songs of “the Forces' Sweetheart,” British World War II vocalist
Vera Lynn
(see Chapter 9), or the gritty prose of war reporter
Martha Gellhorn
(see Chapter 9).

Many of these reporters, artists, and activists were reaching out for a life otherwise barred to them by virtue of their sex. Most of them were active in the modern era, when the constraints against women's education, choice of profession, and freedom of movement were beginning to break down. The honor of being America's first female war correspondent went to the pioneering
Peggy Hull Deuell
in World War I (see Chapter 9). However, it was not until the eve of World War II, when many barriers to women's advancement were beginning to crumble, that women in any numbers were able to work as war correspondents or “warcos.” Inevitably they still had to overcome much lingering prejudice in World War II, from the belief that war was a wholly male activity that they were unable to grasp, to the pseudo-chivalric argument that they were too frail and weak to stand up to the hardships that the task entailed.

A third school of thought focused on the practical difficulties presented by the presence of women in theaters of war. Most of this seemed to focus rather pruriently on the vexed matter of having to provide them with latrine facilities. When in 1944 this was advanced as a reason for preventing the formidable
Helen Kirkpatrick
(see Chapter 9) from reporting from the beachhead in Normandy, one of her supporters pointed out that she could “dig a latrine faster than anyone in this room.”

The growing number of female war correspondents in part reflected the vital contribution women were making to the war effort in the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, it was only with the greatest reluctance that the Allied high command contemplated admitting female war correspondents to the front line. On January 22, 1943, the remarkable
Margaret Bourke-White
(see Chapter 9) crashed this barrier with her aerial camera firmly in her grasp when she became the first woman to fly on a combat mission with the United States Army Air Force.

The ability of women such as Bourke-White, Kirkpatrick, and Gellhorn to focus single-mindedly on their work and also to be in the right place at the right time often enabled them to scoop their distinguished male counterparts. In Gellhorn's case it also played a part in the collapse of her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, whose grandstanding antics as a war correspondent were overshadowed by the more steely journalistic skills of his wife.

Also playing their part in recording conflicts near and far are women with more complex and sometimes compromised histories:
Tokyo Rose,
the voice of Japanese wartime radio propaganda (see Chapter 9);
Mildred Elizabeth Gillars,
the American propagandist for the Third Reich (see Chapter 9);
K'tut Tantri,
a woman of many aliases and the eccentric voice of postwar Indonesian nationalism (see Chapter 9); and a figure of the more recent past, the Russian journalist
Anna Politkovskaya,
investigative reporter of the war in Chechnya and victim in 2006 of an assassin's bullet (see Chapter 9).

In the final analysis, the experience of battle is like having sex—something almost impossible to communicate to an outsider. After she had seen firsthand the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs in the early 1990s, Susan Sontag summed it up:

We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is, and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels.

AL HAIDERI, SAHAR HUSSEIN

Iraqi Journalist, 1962–2007

A brave example of a new generation of Iraqi journalists, Haideri took advantage of the accelerating violence in her country during the American occupation to write about issues that were increasingly difficult if not impossible for the international media to cover. For this boldness she paid with her life.

A print and radio journalist, she wrote for the Aswat al Iraq (Voice of Iraq) news agency and local press as well as contributing articles to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). Born in Baghdad into a professional family and educated at Baghdad University, her career as a journalist began only after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 when she joined a training program run by Reuters and IWPR.

Based in Mosul in northern Iraq, she filed her first story in 2005. It dealt with attempts by local insurgents to impose Taliban-style restrictions on women in Mosul and described how female lecturers and civil servants were being targeted. However, staying at home was not an option she considered for herself. She chronicled the violent struggle for control over Mosul—she was herself a Shia whose husband was a Sunni—and in particular how this affected the women of the city.

Some of her reports had, to Western eyes, an almost surreal quality. She wrote about the covering of the heads of female mannequins in shop windows and the serving of tomatoes and cucumbers on different plates because they were supposedly of different genders. One particularly poignant feature was about the chief of a Mosul morgue, considered to be inured to death until the arrival of a charred corpse on his investigation table, unrecognizable but for the class ring on one finger. It was the ring he had bought for his son at graduation.

Haideri was as scathing about police corruption as she was alarmed by sectarian extremism. She was obliged to publish a number of stories under pseudonyms and took every opportunity to leave Mosul to visit Syria or attend training courses in Jordan. She was saved from a kidnap attempt by a US patrol and wounded in the stomach in a firefight. In 2006 she moved her husband and four daughters to Syria for their own safety. In 2007, she told the
UK Press Gazette,
“Our psychological state is unbalanced because we live and think in fear and worry. But I never thought about quitting journalism, as journalism is my life.” It is a very dangerous life. When Iraqi journalists attempt to cover car bombings or other atrocities, they come under threat from US troops at checkpoints who tend to assume that any person of Arab appearance who approaches a bomb scene instead of running away from it, must be a suicide attacker. The Iraqi government in turn banned journalists from the scene of bomb incidents, ostensibly to protect them from secondary explosions, but effectively to keep all information in their own hands.

Haideri, however, was not killed by Americans but by Iraqis. On June 30, 2007, as she was leaving her house in Mosul, she was confronted by gunmen from an extremist group, the Ansar al-Sunna, who executed her. Later a statement was issued, claiming that she was killed because she had published “falsehoods” and supported the authorities. In fact she published the truth and supported the people of Iraq. She was one of the 108 journalists killed in Iraq—86 of them Iraqis—between 2003 and June 2007.

Reference: Ali A. Allawi,
The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace,
2007.

AMANPOUR, CHRISTIANE

British-Iranian International War Correspondent, b. 1958

As CNN's chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour has filed reports from most of the world's trouble spots, including Iraq, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, and has interviewed innumerable world leaders. Former US President Bill Clinton dubbed her “the voice of humanity,” but the administration of his successor, George Bush, was less fulsome, accusing her of being overly emotional and biased.
Time
magazine called her the most influential foreign correspondent since Edward R. Murrow.

Shortly after her birth in London, her British mother and Iranian airline-executive father moved their family to Tehran, where they led a privileged life until they were forced to flee the Islamic revolution of 1979. At the age of eleven, Amanpour had returned to the United Kingdom to receive a Catholic education and later studied journalism at the University of Rhode Island, from which she graduated in 1983. Thereafter she worked as a journalist for an NBC affiliate, WJAR-TV, in Rhode Island before joining CNN.

In journalism, timing is all, and in 1989 Amanpour was posted to Frankfurt in West Germany, where she reported on the democratic revolution that was sweeping across the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. However, it was her coverage of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 that brought her into the public eye. She began to file live reports shortly after the arrival of US troops in Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield, as one of one hundred women journalists in the television pool. Although women had filed filmed reports during the Vietnam War, few provided the amount and depth of coverage that Amanpour, equipped with gas mask and helmet, gave CNN viewers worldwide.

In 1991 she covered the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the subsequent fighting in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. In 1992 she reported on the conflict in the Balkans that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia and covered the US-led peacekeeping mission in Somalia, Operation Restore Hope. In the 1990s, Amanpour returned repeatedly to the Balkans and at the start of the new millennium was present at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes at the international court in The Hague. In 2005 she was in the region again to mark the tenth anniversary of the massacre in Srebenica.

In the summer of 2004, she was in Baghdad for the opening of the war-crimes trial of Saddam Hussein. Amanpour was later sharply critical of the media's self-censorship during the Iraq War, believing the coverage had been skewed by Pentagon bullying and the disinformation campaign mounted by the Bush administration, aided and abetted by a compliant Fox News. The war had been a disaster, she claimed, a frank admission to make in a country that had made her famous and for whose “American Way” she professed to having always harbored an outsider's respect.

In a speech in 2000, after accepting the Edward R. Murrow Award for distinguished achievement in broadcast journalism, Amanpour concluded by quoting
Martha Gellhorn
(see Chapter 9): “In all my reporting life I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and I have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don't need to worry about that.” In a world of instant communication, however, the ripples can come thick and fast, and Amanpour has received a stream of rewards (she is said to be one of the highest-paid women in broadcasting) and awards, including nine Emmys, the 1997 Woman of the Year in Iran, and the Golden Nymph Award at the Monte Carlo Television Festival in 1997.

Since 1998, Amanpour has been married to James Rubin, a former State Department spokesman in the Clinton administration who now works in the media.

Reference: Christiane Amanpour's RTNDA 2000 speech is available at www.unf.edu/jaxmedia/amanpour.htm.

BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET

American World War II Photojournalist, b. 1904, d. 1971

A woman in a man's world, Margaret Bourke-White was one of the most influential photojournalists of the twentieth century. A pioneer of the photo-essay, she was in Moscow to record the first bombs falling on Moscow in Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and later became the first woman photographer with the US Army Air Force. While she was still at the height of her powers, her working life was cut short by the onset of Parkinson's disease.

She was born in New York City, the daughter of an engineer father, Joseph White, and a progressive, demanding mother, Minnie Bourke, who was involved in publications for the blind. As a child she was taken by her father to visit a steel foundry, and images of heavy industry were to remain an inspiration for the rest of her life. Her father, a keen amateur photographer, was also the source of her interest in photography. After graduating from Cornell in 1927, she launched herself as an architectural photographer from a studio in her one-room Cleveland apartment. The money she made by day photographing the homes of the wealthy subsidized her nocturnal and weekend activities recording the working life of steel mills.