Middle East Adventure Travel - The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2003

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The Rough Guide to Iraq (Cont.)

THE TERM "WAR CORRESPONDENT" is used liberally these days, pasted upon anyone who has been in a conflict zone and lived to tell about it back home. Geraldo Rivera is a war correspondent, or so the teasers on Fox News tell us. So is any reporter with an exotic dateline and a flak jacket. The term has been applied to me on occasion, because I've covered wars in Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan. I've never felt comfortable with the label; it implies a psychological profile that I don't believe I have. I don't enjoy the risks you have to take in war zones. If I must go forward, I try to follow others whom I trust.

The pool of real war correspondents is very small, probably around 40 in the world, and most of them are photographers. They run terribly high risks, but the truth is that it is safer to take high risks in the company of James Nachtwey (a Time photographer) or John Burns (a New York Times reporter) than moderate risks in the company of someone with less experience. Perhaps the most important reason I went forward to Baghdad was that I was following Gary Knight and Laurent Van der Stockt.

The supporting cast was eclectic. Gary's traveling partner was Enrico Dagnino, a 43-year-old Italian photographer who'd spent his youth being thrown out of private schools and stealing cars; along the way he'd gotten a tattoo on his forearm of a skull with a mohawk. Enrico had had the foresight to smuggle a supply of hash into the country, and when most of it had been smoked—a dark day for several members of the convoy—he probed local markets during occasional stops in small towns. While some of us waded through groups of Iraqis asking, "Cigarettes? Cigarettes?" Enrico was saying, "Hashish? Hashish?"

Going deeper into the war was the easy way. Living with the second-guessing that might afflict me if I retreated and my colleagues went on—that would have required real courage.

At 46, Laurent Rebours, a French photographer for the Associated Press, was the oldest in the group. He could be jovial one moment and furious the next. I once overheard him talking to one of his editors in New York. He was, as usual, shouting. "The good news is that my computer is now working," he bellowed. "In a rage, I hit it and said, 'Fuck this machine,' and now it's working."

The three other Frenchmen in our group were all freelance photographers, traveling together in a Honda SUV. My fellow Americans were Ellen Knickmeyer, 40, a reporter for the AP; Kit Roane, 34, a reporter for U.S. News & World Report; and Wesley Bocxe, 42, a madcap freelance photographer who reminded me of the actor Steve Buscemi. Several days into the journey, Kuni Takahashi, a 37-year-old Japanese photographer for the Boston Herald, abandoned the Marine unit he'd been embedded in and embedded himself in my Hyundai.

Driving north, making sure that the open road had Americans ahead of us, we soon reached the tail end of a Marine convoy. The sentries at the rear aimed their weapons at us, but we slowed to a crawl and stopped 150 yards from them. Gary got out and walked up, and one of their officers agreed to let us follow them for the rest of the day.

We stopped at dusk. As helicopter gunships circled overhead, scouring the desert for enemy soldiers, military culture met journalist culture.

"You're not carrying any frigging weapons?" one incredulous Marine asked me.

Those are the rules, I explained.

"What kind of frigging rules is that?" he replied. "Not even a nine-millimeter?"

Our supplies of food and water were running low, but we soon learned to barter. The Marines had no way to contact their wives and families back home, so we swapped sat-phone access for supplies. As the Marines began surprising their loved ones by calling from the middle of the Iraqi desert, two cases of combat rations—MREs, or meals ready to eat—were speedily loaded into my SUV.

The conversations were often heartbreaking. "Don't cry, babe, please don't cry," they'd say. "I love you, I love you, I can't tell you how much I love you." The endearments were repeated endlessly, carried away by the desert breeze.

I needed to call home, too. The incident with the ITN crew had been followed by the deaths, injuries, and capture of several other reporters. My editors instructed me to forget Basra and do whatever I thought wisest. They were worried about my safety. So was my family.

I suppose that one of the hints that you're losing control of your life is when you start shamelessly lying about it. The alcoholic lies about how much he's drinking; the journalist lies to his family about the risks he's taking. I called one of my brothers and told him everything was fine. "I'm with the Marines," I said. "Tell Mom and Dad and everyone else that I'm surrounded by Marines and I'm as safe as can be."

Of course, I didn't say that Marines were being ambushed up and down the road and that, in truth, I wasn't traveling with them but behind them. I didn't say I was scared.

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