Michael was a journalist, too, and understood what September 11 meant for me. “So when are you flying to Pakistan?” he asked.
I needed to call SABA, my photo agency, and offer to go to Pakistan. I had watched the most historic event of my lifetime on a borrowed television set in Mexico City, and I wasn’t about to miss the second half of the story.
“I have to leave,” Uxval said flatly, and with an uncharacteristic peck on the cheek, he left Marion’s apartment, left me sitting in front of the TV, left me transfixed, as I had been since the early morning.
I hated myself for being so driven. I wanted to plead with him to stay, but I needed to concentrate. I had calls to make. All flights into New York City were canceled, and I had to figure out how to get to New York and to Pakistan. Though I was young and terribly inexperienced, few photographers had worked in Afghanistan under the Taliban as I had. I wasn’t considering that I might be going to war but was instead worrying about what would happen to the civilians, to the women I had photographed sequestered in their homes in Kabul, Ghazni, and Logar.
This was the first time I had to decide between my personal and professional lives. Some part of me knew, or hoped, that real love should complement my work, not take away from it.
PART TWO
The 9/11 Years
PAKISTAN, AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ
Women and girls study and recite the Koran in Peshawar, Pakistan, 2001.
CHAPTER 4
You, American, Are Not Welcome Here Anymore
I landed in New York on September 14 and went directly to Ground Zero. There was nothing left of the towers but mangled steel and ash, lines of solemn people clutching their palms to their mouths as they gasped in horror, and countless posters in search of the missing. I was devastated; New York was home. I chastised myself for not being there to cover one of the defining moments of my lifetime. The geopolitics of my generation changed with September 11; in the media Latin America was forgotten.
I raced up to Union Square to SABA, my photo agency. Marcel, my agent, offered to split the cost of the flight to Pakistan with me, and we booked my ticket to Islamabad. He then handed me a giant Canon digital camera, the first digital camera I had ever seen, along with the manual.
“You shoot Nikon, right?” Marcel asked.
“Yes. All my life,” I said.
“Great. Well, Canon has the best digital camera on the market, and you will need digital to file to newspapers and magazines from Pakistan. Here is the manual and one wide-angle lens for the Canon. Learn how to use the camera during the flight.”
My adrenaline surged. Uxval, Mexico, the mountain bikes, the kisses, the long lunches during the week—they were all tucked away in what was becoming the giant filing cabinet in my mind.
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BY THE TIME I arrived in the hostile Pakistani city of Peshawar, dozens of journalists had already checked into its few hotels. It was September 21. Peshawar was a dusty, ominous border city—teeming with suspicious-looking, bearded men, CIA agents, and Pakistani intelligence—thirty-five miles from the border with Afghanistan. Every place in public view was conspicuously bereft of women; only the occasional white, black, or sky-blue burqa skated ghostlike through the narrow allies. It was the type of place where everyone constantly looked over his shoulder. We all knew that the United States was going to retaliate for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and we wanted to position ourselves close enough to Afghanistan so that when the borders collapsed, as they inevitably do in the chaos of an invasion, we could all rush in to report on the ground. So much of the buildup to the war in Afghanistan was a mystery to me, but it was familiar territory to my more seasoned colleagues. Were we about to have another Vietnam, with a ground war and American troops dug into trenches? Or would it be all fighter jets dropping bombs from on high? I had no idea. But I loved being close to the center.
Anti-American demonstration in Peshawar, October 2001.
I shared a room at the run-down, medium-sized Green’s Hotel with Alyssa Banta, a Filipina-Mexican-American photographer in her midthirties from Fort Worth, Texas. Older journalists with bigger expense accounts stayed at the posh Pearl Continental Hotel. Faces I had seen only on TV darted through the lobby, striding with purpose, trailed by their enormous production crews, through the atrium courtyard. Famous writers hovered over computers in a makeshift newsroom. Alyssa and I were undoubtedly two of the least experienced “war” photographers there, but the opportunities to shoot were diverse. America had become obsessed with Islam overnight. Anything that shed light on the religion that allegedly fueled the attacks against America made the front page. Editors suddenly found news value in the Taliban, in the plight of Pakistani women, in Afghan refugees living in Pakistan—all stories I had done while living in India.