I had never dated an American male. Before Iraq, I don’t remember actually having dated anyone who spoke English as a first language. But somewhere between the bombs and the early morning coffee-and- banana breakfasts at the bureau and the long days in the backseat of the car driving around Baghdad while reporting stories—the weddings, the funerals, and a surreptitious stop at the amusement park in the Al-Mansour district to ride the Ferris wheel that towered over Baghdad—I fell for a colleague.
Matthew had come from Atlanta to work in Iraq. He looked like the quintessential American, with a perfect white smile, light brown hair, an angular jaw, and the typical foreign-correspondent stubble. He wore rimless glasses smudged with fingerprints. He was always smiling, as if friendliness would mask his ambition.
We became a good photographer-writer team. Almost everything we did landed on the front page. For several months we were inseparable, collaborating on articles, talking through ideas, inspiring each other. Week after week we stayed up late into the night, going over the leads of his stories on deadline, sneaking from room to room through the outdoor balcony. We shared the same cultural references, the same sense of humor, the same enthusiasm for our work. It was effortless, unlike my disintegrating relationship with Uxval. Matthew and I both had tenuous commitments to other people, but it never occurred to me that they could endure, given the depth of our feelings for each other.
When Uxval arrived in Baghdad to visit me, I went through the motions. It all would have been so romantic—his heroic arrival in Baghdad in the middle of my long, intense shooting stint. But I felt nothing. I told Uxval to go back to Istanbul, move out of our home, and move back to Mexico City. I gave him all the cash I had on me—around $2,500—to help pay for his trip home. And with this petty alimony he disappeared. It was the first time in years I felt free.
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TWO OR THREE BOMBS went off every day. We got used to it. My judgment of danger became increasingly skewed. I lost a sense of fear. I was no longer running away from explosions but running directly toward them. I just wanted the lasting, indelible images of the war to sear the front pages of the newspaper so our policy makers could see the fruits of their decision to invade Iraq. I wanted this at any cost.
Car bombs and roadside attacks against American troops had grown so frequent that the soldiers were terrified and shot almost preemptively, blindly. The Americans set up impromptu checkpoints along the roads and erected stop signs in English—a language and script not all Iraqis understood. Cars that failed to stop before the checkpoint were fired upon. I witnessed two entire families killed at the same checkpoint within twenty minutes of each other.
The Iraqi insurgents grew more organized, unleashing a new kind of fury against their invaders. In late March the American Blackwater security contractors were murdered, set on fire, and strung up with electrical cables on a bridge in the western city of Fallujah. It seemed like a turning point in the war. Blowing up soldiers and fleeing was one thing; desecrating civilians and displaying them for the world to see was another.
One morning I put on my abaya and wrapped my hair under a black head scarf and climbed into the backseat with Matthew. I often based how conservatively I dressed, or how much I covered, on the level of danger. We were traveling down a known smugglers’ route, so I opted for the most all-concealing hijab I could wear, just short of covering my face. We had decided to chase a story on a rumor that an American helicopter had gone down near Ramadi. We pored over a map with our drivers and security staff and called other journalists and drivers for advice. We wanted to travel on the side roads, because the marines had closed off all main roads in preparation for a siege of Fallujah, and Fallujah was on the road to Ramadi.