He already had the red Cartier box with silver trim in his hands, and he was crying. “Will you marry me?”
He was the first man I’d ever considered spending my life with, but I couldn’t believe he would want to marry me, the woman who was forever told she was an inadequate girlfriend by all her past lovers. I had long convinced myself that my cameras and I would grow old together alone in some remote corner of the planet.
“Me? Are you sure you want to marry me? I am never home,” I said. We were both crying, kissing. “You don’t have to marry me, you know.”
“Baby, I love you,” he said. “I want to spend my life with you.”
We set the wedding date for July 4, 2009.
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IN MOST WAYS my life and my career didn’t change after my engagement. The countries I covered continued to be torn by violence and humanitarian catastrophe. And at age thirty-four, after ten years in the business, I wanted to cover these stories as much as I did when I was twenty-four. The only difference was that I didn’t have to fight for assignments or live hand to mouth, and this relative comfort nurtured my passion for photography. I even started shooting regularly for National Geographic magazine, an honor for any photojournalist. My ambition actually seemed to grow with time. Quite often the most ambitious or prestigious assignments were the riskiest ones. I spent much of 2008 and 2009 in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the War on Terror still raged.
Paul was surprisingly selfless and objective about my choice of stories. He trusted my inner voice as much as I did. When I presented him with the risks involved in an assignment, he was always levelheaded in his feedback, asked the important questions, and only selectively questioned my journalistic judgment. That summer, when I was asked to cover the growing presence of the Taliban in Pakistan, he replied, as always, calmly: “Nice. How are you planning on doing that? By meeting the Taliban?”
Paul knew the answer to his own question. My old friend Dexter Filkins was reporting the story for the New York Times Magazine, and to do the story right we had to meet face-to-face with one of the world’s most fundamentalist jihadi groups, one that had repeatedly threatened to capture and behead Westerners. Dex had arranged for safe passage to meet one Taliban commander, but there were many Taliban groups in the tribal areas. Just because one had ensured our safety didn’t mean we couldn’t fall into the hands of another that wanted us dead.
But as with Elizabeth, I trusted Dex. In our professional circle many saw him as a reckless foreign correspondent who would do anything for a story. But I think much of that stemmed from envy: He was a great journalist. He always wore the same white Brooks Brothers button-downs, khaki pants, and loafers, which, especially in Iraq or Afghanistan, made him look like a CIA agent. This didn’t seem to worry him. In Iraq we had spent countless days working together, and evenings talking, and I found him a fun and loyal friend. I respected and admired his work. I also knew that any story he did might land on the cover of the magazine, or the front page of the newspaper, and have a better chance at actually influencing American foreign policy. More often than not, it was that combination that swayed me to do a story.
I was convinced by my case, and so was Paul.
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I HADN’T BEEN to Peshawar since 2001, when I was twenty-seven and trying to rig up assignments from Green’s Hotel as the United States prepared to bomb Afghanistan. This time Dex and I were staying at the relatively luxurious Pearl Continental Hotel. Through a network of photographers who had spent years working in Pakistan, I was connected with the wonderful Raza. Almost fifty years old, with stringy, graying hair combed over to the side and a weathered, smiling face, he was one of the savviest drivers I had ever worked with. Raza dressed me up as his wife and sneaked me into the Swat Valley to photograph secret girls’ schools that had recently opened after the Taliban closed schools in the valley; he bullied imams into allowing me—a female infidel—to photograph prayers at mosques in Peshawar; and he snuck me into the gun market for a few quick shots before fleeing, because we feared we might be spotted and attacked.