It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (18 page)

“YOU FUCKING BITCH!”

One of the soldiers began screaming at me, waving frantically, with his gun dangling from one arm.

“Get the fuck out of here, you fucking bitch,” he said again. He had an M16 automatic rifle, and he waved it in the air. The other soldiers still had their guns pointed at me. They could have shot me in that moment and made up some excuse, that they didn’t know I was a journalist. And I knew it. I went back to the car. The Americans wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, but a convenient form of democracy that allowed them to censor the media. Iraqi insurgents had begun attacking Americans. And American journalists—who had every right to take pictures of these public scenes—were beginning to face censorship. We were allowed to cover only what the people with guns wanted us to see.

 • • • 

I
STAYED IN
I
RAQ
for most of the summer of 2003, as the tenuous peace following the fall of Saddam continued to unravel. Bombings became more and more commonplace, and I grew inured to the violence. That November, the morning after I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, I was back in Istanbul, lying in a hangover slumber in Uxval’s arms. The familiar sound of a bomb jolted me awake. It was a sound I had grown used to in Iraq. But I didn’t believe it.

Uxval shook me. “That was a bomb!”

“Are you crazy?” I was annoyed.
As if he knows what a bomb sounds like
. “We are in Istanbul.” I had finished my last glass of wine only a few hours ago.

He jumped out of bed, ran to the front room, and craned his neck in search of smoke.

“There is debris in the air. That was a bomb. Get your cameras.”

Within minutes we were out the door. It was the fastest I had ever arrived at a bomb scene, because it was only a few streets over from mine. The tiny street was normally dark, shadowed by the grand nineteenth-century buildings of the old city, but today it was bathed in dusty shafts of light. The faces of the buildings had been torn off. Bloodied, motionless bodies lay contorted and half-naked in the rubble. Broken pipes spewed water in every direction; black soot and ash charred the road and the other buildings. Metal poles and pieces of wood fell across the street curbs. Crowds of Turkish men started to gather. I photographed.

A body lay across the sidewalk. I didn’t realize it was a body at first, because it was missing a head. Another body, a man, looked as if he had been blown out the front door of a shop. His shirt was on, intact, and his shoes were on his feet, but his pants were gone. He was wearing blue plaid boxers.

I worked quickly, before the Turkish police came to remove us all from the scene. Men rushed past me carrying a man on a makeshift stretcher. He was barely conscious, his face pale and green, blood streaming from a hole in his leg. The police arrived, and they came right for me—the woman. In the Middle East I was always the first one removed among my male colleagues. I rushed home to file.

Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bomb. The target near our home was a synagogue.

A few days later the headquarters of HSBC, the British bank, was bombed in a neighborhood about twenty minutes away. Uxval and I again grabbed our cameras, which were ready this time, and ran toward a taxi stand down the street. As we were running, there was a massive explosion only a few hundred yards to our right, and we pulled out our cameras to shoot. A fresh plume of smoke and debris rose up to cloud the pristine blue sky.

Traumatized pedestrians who had just narrowly escaped death were fleeing the scene toward us, many with blood trickling down their faces. Uxval said that the explosion had come from the British Consulate.

Some people were still in the same position they had been in when the bomb went off. One man in a suit stood on a second-story windowsill of a now-faceless shop building. Dismembered bodies lay everywhere, under layers of bricks, broken sidewalk, dust, and ash. Survivors checked them for pulses. The outer wall of the British Consulate had collapsed on top of a car, and dozens of men frantically tried to dig it out from under the rubble.

I tried to dodge the police as I continued documenting the scene. They pushed me away again. I tried a different angle. I knew I had to shoot as much as I could—this was terrorism on a world scale. They zeroed in on me again, the woman. I watched a handful of Turkish male photographers shoot freely inside. Uxval was inside.

And then, suddenly, I desperately wanted to call my mother. I reached into my camera bag in search of my cell. It was gone. Someone had stolen my phone amid this death and horror. While bodies lay bleeding on the cement. The very thought broke me down. I felt sick to my stomach. I walked over to a telephone booth and shut myself inside. I couldn’t stop crying. Istanbul, my haven that wasn’t. The fence I had halfheartedly slung up between my work and my home had finally collapsed.

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.

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.

 • • • 

T
WO 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.