I looked up into the black sky, sobbing. “OK. I will come home soon.”
I promised I would go back, but when the paper asked me if I wanted to pull out of Iraq, I didn’t. I knew that trauma accompanied the work of a conflict photographer—we had all heard about the drinking, drugs, and suicides of the previous generation of war correspondents—and I wanted to take control of my own response. I was in touch with my feelings enough to process what they meant; I did not want my response to kidnapping to be escape. Matthew and I discussed options, and we decided we would give it a week or two more and then leave. I was shaken but not deterred by what I knew had become my mission in life. I accepted fear as a by-product of the path I had chosen.
I did, however, create a will. The kidnapping in Iraq was the first time I really thought I was going to die, and though I didn’t own anything other than my pictures, I had finally recognized my own mortality. After the kidnapping, back in the United States, I made an appointment with a lawyer I met through a mutual friend in New York to declare that I would leave my money to my mother and the income generated from resales in my archive to my sister’s children. It was all laid out, but I needed to sign the final documents. I arranged for two of my editors at Corbis to stand as my witnesses.
That day Corbis had just received a new shipment of body armor for its photographers to take to Iraq. I was trying on a flak jacket and helmet. It seemed only appropriate to sign my death papers while wearing my protective gear—a good omen, I told myself.
So I signed my first will in a flak jacket, holding my helmet in my left hand.
? ? ?
MATTHEW AND I HAD endured so much together, but the question of us, our future as a team beyond Iraq, loomed large. I had dealt with relationships at home and had dealt with relationships in the field but had never tried to combine those two very distinct worlds. I also couldn’t fathom how he or I would be capable of returning to an old lover after all we had been through.
We spent one final weekend at the Four Seasons Hotel in Jordan, where so many journalists shacked up in luxurious rooms and rolled around in thousand-thread-count sheets, wrapping up their illicit affairs before heading back to their real lives. The brunch room was a who’s who of infidelity. Matthew went home to the United States, and I went off to Thailand by myself to decompress, to wade and swim in the still, blue sea.
Each morning on a minuscule island off the coast of Koh Samui, Seoul, my narrow-framed boatman with leathery skin and sunken cheeks and dressed in a colorfully decorated sarong, met me on the shore in front of my beach hut to take me to a nearby desolate island, where a long white stretch of pristine sand was surrounded by clear, calm turquoise waters. Seoul didn’t speak much English, and I was thrilled I didn’t have to make small talk with him every day. I was coming down off the wire of anxiety, stress, and near-death experiences, and I felt a cavernous emptiness. The adrenaline that had soared through my veins for months suddenly dissipated, and I was aimless, like a wayward dog, reading book after book to try to fill my mind with other people’s experiences to replace my own. My heart ached. Seoul picked me up each morning, dumped me on the lonely stretch of beach where I read and swam each day, and returned around 3 p.m. to take me back to my hut. I paid him the equivalent of about $5 for this specialized service.
One morning, five days into my stay in Thailand and five days into the chaos of my mind, wondering whether Matthew would come back to me or stay in his comfortable relationship back home, Seoul spoke:
“Madam?” he asked.
“Yes, Seoul?” I answered, turning my eyes briefly to him and then engaging the horizon again.
“Why no husband?” Seoul asked.
I turned back to Seoul and smiled. “I am busy, Seoul. No time for husband.”
One year later, after months of vacillating between his two prospects, Matthew married his first love. He returned to familiarity, to security, and to a life with a woman he adored. The reality was that I could offer little to a man other than passionate affairs and a few days a month between assignments. Romantic feelings in a war zone were exaggerated by the intensity of every day; one month in Iraq alongside someone was equivalent to six months in the normal world. Our love never would have flourished anywhere but in Iraq.