Just like that.
I ran around to the back of the hospital and put my face in my hands. That phone call could have been for me, for Ivan, for Elizabeth. I didn’t even have any phone numbers for Elizabeth’s family. We were all there minutes before the car bomb detonated. Now there was some random taxi driver with the body of a colleague folded and dismembered in his trunk, asking what to do with it. How did one transfer the body of a friend out of a country we all snuck into illegally, when there were no functioning embassies, no police, no diplomats, and the only open border accessible from northern Iraq was with Iran? It seemed so obvious, but I didn’t know war meant death—that journalists might also get killed in the war. I hid behind the hospital, ashamed of my weakness, my tears, and my fear, wondering if I had the strength for this job, and wept inconsolably.
The war had begun.
? ? ?
ONE DAY in early April I was lying on my bed, eyes closed, in a rare moment of rest. Suddenly car horns and yelling rang through the hotel windows. I figured it was a wedding and dug myself deeper under the sheets. The commotion kept going. I walked across the hall to my colleague’s room and looked out from his balcony. The entire city of Sulaymaniyah had gathered along the main avenue beneath our hotel.
We turned on CNN. A bold banner scrolled along the bottom of the screen. Baghdad had fallen. Saddam Hussein was gone. I threw on my work clothes, grabbed my cameras and lens pouches, and ran downstairs.
Outside, American flags flapped in the breeze, Iraqi Kurds kissed photographs of President Bush, and kids danced under massive cardboard replicas of B-52 bombers painted in the colors of the American flag.
“We love Amreeekaa! We love George Bush!”
I had been opposed to the invasion, but for a few moments I felt proud to be American. It seemed impossible that the war could be nearing its final stages so quickly! I wondered how much longer I would stay in Iraq.
In the aftermath we raced to get to Mosul, Kirkuk, and Tikrit, the three major cities between northern Iraq and Baghdad. The landscape shifted from green and mountainous to sun bleached and sand colored. The best reporting often happened in the fragile days after a government fell and the country opened up to the media. We scrambled to work before restrictions on media access shut us out. We trekked from the prisons to the intelligence offices, from abandoned factories to Saddam’s palaces—looking for classified documents, traces of weaponry, signs of chemical warfare, and any information on the regime’s secrets. We all wanted to be the one to unearth the magical evidence. We all wanted to find the WMDs, even if we’d never thought they existed in the first place.
In Kirkuk, Kurds had faces painted with red, white, and blue. American troops rode through the city, hanging out of open Humvees, bathing in rose petals and kisses. The municipal office in Kirkuk became a temporary hangout for the U.S. Army. Soldiers sat in the main reception area beneath a giant, already defaced portrait of Saddam. When I arrived, only his eyes were scratched out; by evening Kurds were gouging out his cheeks, his teeth; by morning the face was gone.
Iraqis descended on every building like ants, stripping each of them of its possessions. Men rode down the street with massive air-conditioning units—under Saddam, owned by only the wealthiest Iraqis—on their bicycles. Furniture was piled high on people’s heads. Chairs, couches, beds, and tables all appeared to be walking around the streets. Young men swam in the artificial lakes surrounding Saddam’s massive marble palaces while families picnicked on the lush grounds and toured the stately palace atriums.
We headed to Mosul to meet with General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which had set up a major base in one of Saddam’s palaces. Security was lax. Many Iraqis loved the Americans then, and Americans loved Iraqis then, too. I was so homesick for conversation not filtered through an interpreter that I spent the afternoon flirting with the strapping and dirty eighteen-year-old soldiers, regressing to my high school vocabulary and demeanor and paging through well-read copies of Maxim magazine. A cafeteria with hot food was erected in the rose garden. Dozens of high-level officers sat behind computer screens and satellite feeds running off generators. It was an incredible display of technology in a country that had little running water and unreliable electricity since the invasion. It was also a symbol of victory: hundreds of U.S. troops operating out of one of Saddam’s homes.