The scene in front of the British Consulate minutes after a car bomb exploded, killing at least thirty people, including Consul General Roger Short, November 20, 2003.
Chang Lee of the New York Times captured me photographing a father and his injured son as they are turned away from medical care at a joint American-peshmerga military base in Kirkuk in the days following the fall of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, April 2003.
CHAPTER 6
Please Tell the Woman We Will Not Hurt Her
By 2004 the streets of Baghdad were more familiar to me than those of Istanbul. I came to think of Baghdad as my home. The New York Times house there had two stories, with four bedrooms upstairs, two downstairs, and two more in the basement. The upstairs bedrooms had nice light, and two were connected by an outdoor balcony. The house was large enough to accommodate five foreign correspondents—including a bureau chief, who decided what correspondent would cover what stories—three or four photographers, and a staff of interpreters and drivers. Unlike U.S. government employees, who lived behind the checkpoints and blast walls of the infamous Green Zone, the journalists lived in the city, the Red Zone, among the civilian population, and relied on Iraqis for everything. Downstairs there was a dining room and an office where the Iraqi staff and the foreign correspondents made calls and toiled away on computers. The kitchen was ruled by a chubby, gay Iraqi cook and an equally chubby cleaning lady who we eventually learned was having an affair with one of the drivers. I went in there only to make coffee and grab a banana before heading out in the morning. The rest of our meals were served at the dining table, where we usually ate dinner together every night.
The roof took on a life of its own. When bombs became frequent, we all ran up the three flights of stairs to the roof to see from which neighborhood the smoke would rise; if the explosion seemed big enough, we would immediately grab a driver and jet out in whatever car was available. Newspaper reporters and photographers had to get to the event as quickly as possible, before the authorities roped off the bodies and before a rival newspaper grabbed some vital piece of info. That was normal for newspaper journalism. What was not normal was the frequency with which such urgent explosions compelled us to respond. Life felt like a pinball machine, some explosion perpetually flinging us this way or that. When we realized that the war wasn’t going to end anytime soon—and certainly not after President Bush announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”—we installed a makeshift gym with a cheap elliptical machine, a bench, and some weights on the roof. It almost never rained in Baghdad.
Eventually the Times house became a fortress, with concrete blast walls more than fifteen feet high surrounding the perimeter and a staff of fifteen armed Iraqi guards standing watch twenty-four hours a day. We imported two expensive treadmills from Jordan. Our lives became progressively more sheltered and separated from the city we had grown to love. Unlike the early days of swimming and salsa parties at the Hamra, these days we stayed indoors when we weren’t on reporting trips. They, too, grew more and more infrequent. Baghdad became too dangerous for us to even do our jobs. Every time we wanted to report a story we had to arrange an additional car with another driver and two armed guards to follow us, in case one of our cars broke down or we faced any trouble along the way. All this meant that we spent most of our free time with other Times correspondents.
A colleague once said that journalists got one romantic free pass in a war zone, a get-out-of-jail-free card: one mistake, one regret, one person we are ashamed to acknowledge. There was a fair amount of sex in Baghdad: a lot of cheating, a lot of love, and a lot of mistaking loneliness for love. I was guilty of this miscalculation, guilty of confusing the intensity of war with genuine feelings. The reality was that most male war correspondents had wives or faithful girlfriends waiting at home for months on end, while most female war correspondents and photographers remained hopelessly single, stringing along love affairs in the field and at home, ever in search of someone who wasn’t threatened by our commitment to our work or put off by the relentless travel schedule.