It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (38 page)

And while I thought I was stable, seemingly meaningless statements or normal emotional reactions from friends or family turned me into a quivering mess. The four of us shuffled from a brief appearance on the
Today
show to an hour-long session—like therapy—with Anderson Cooper on CNN. We trudged dutifully from interview to interview because we felt, as journalists, it would have been hypocritical to turn down interviews with our peers. We spoke collectively about the guilt and sorrow we felt for possibly ushering our young driver, Mohammed, to his death. I spoke openly about being sexually assaulted but not raped; it was important to me to set the record straight, publicly, about what happened to me in captivity. We had been completely at the Libyans’ mercy. But we had lived. I felt lucky. I had interviewed suffering people all over the world, and they never felt like victims. They felt like survivors. I had learned from them.

Everyone asked us the inevitable question and my answer was yes. I knew I would cover another war. The hardest part about what happened to us in Libya was what we had put our loved ones through, but that had long been the excruciating price of the profession—my loved ones suffered, and I suffered when they suffered. Journalism is a selfish profession. But I still believed in the power of its purpose, and hoped my family did, too.

 • • • 

A
MONTH LATER
I met with three editors from Aperture Books in New York City. Prints of my work had been laid out on their conference table. We discussed the possibility of collaborating on a coffee-table book, something I had always dreamed of doing with my photographs but had never felt ready for. We were flipping through prints from Darfur, Iraq, and the Korengal Valley when I found myself distracted by the red light flashing on my BlackBerry. I did what I never did during a meeting: picked up my phone.

The top e-mail on my phone was forwarded from Major Dan Kearney, who had led Battle Company and Tim Hetherington, Balazs Gardi, Elizabeth Rubin, and me through the Korengal in 2007. The subject line read:

Tim Hetherington killed in Libya.

My heart stopped. I was sure I was reading wrong. I looked at the body of the e-mail.

Tim was killed in Libya. Please keep him in your prayers. I know the BATTLE Family will come together to support.

He was a brother I miss dearly.

MAJ Kearney

How could Tim have survived more than a year in the Korengal Valley, arguably the most dangerous place on earth, only to be killed in Libya? I did not want to believe the e-mail. As usual, I needed to say the words out loud to believe them. Tears rolled down my cheeks.

“Tim Hetherington was just killed in Libya.”

Everyone gasped.

I scrolled down over more e-mails, trying to get some sort of explanation as to how this could have happened. Another e-mail had this heading:

Chris Hondros killed in Libya.

It couldn’t be possible. Suddenly all the anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and sadness I had escaped after being released from Libya washed over me, flooding me with emotion. I fell apart in the austere conference room. The three people I was meeting with at Aperture excused themselves, telling me to stay in the room as long as I needed to.

It was not as though I hadn’t experienced the loss of friends or colleagues before: Marla Ruzicka was killed by a car bomb in Baghdad in 2005; Solid Khalid was gunned down on his way to the
New York Times
bureau in Baghdad in 2007;
Times
photographer and mentor João Silva stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan in October 2010, losing both his legs and suffering debilitating internal injuries; Raza had died shortly after we lay on adjacent concrete slabs in a roadside clinic in Pakistan after our car accident; and of course Mohammed, our young driver, had died in Libya, too. But given all the death we had witnessed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Darfur, Congo, Lebanon, Israel, and during the Arab Spring, death and injury had rarely come to the foreign journalist community—until now. Something in me snapped.

Tim and Chris were friends of mine. They weren’t close friends in the typical sense of the word, but nothing in any of our lives was typical. We shared friendships born of long, intimate talks in lonely, morbid places and epic, intoxicated dinners back in the real world. Their sudden deaths hit me profoundly, in a way that my own experience in Libya failed to affect me. For the first time I felt the weight of the years of accumulated trauma. Perhaps it was because I realized how precarious life was and how arbitrary death was. Those e-mails could have easily been about me, Tyler, Anthony, or Steve. There were scores of inexperienced young photographers running around the front lines of Libya, but it was Tim and Chris, two of the most experienced photojournalists in the world, who met their fate in Misurata, in a mortar attack. It didn’t make sense. Did our lives depend on statistical probability? Was it that the longer we covered war, the more close calls we sustained, increasing the chances that something would go wrong? Our lives were a game of odds. I sat paralyzed in the Aperture conference room. I needed to collect myself and walk home, but I couldn’t do it. I messaged Paul and asked him to meet me. I needed him to come pick me up at Aperture. I couldn’t find my way home alone.

 • • • 

T
HE WEEK OF
April 20, 2011, was a reckoning. Dozens of photographers, journalists, and editors came together in a way I had never witnessed before, flying in from all corners of the globe to grieve collectively. But before I could confront the overhwhelming sadness, I needed strength. I boarded an Amtrak train for Washington, DC, and took a taxi to Walter Reade Army Medical Center, where I found my friend the photographer João Silva among dozens of other wounded and maimed veterans of war. I hadn’t had a chance to visit him since a land mine severed his legs from his body and forced him into months of serial surgeries, but I knew that I craved his inner strength. Even after his injury, after one of his closest colleagues and friends had taken his own life and after another had been killed beside him, João remained resolved to cover war. His unfaltering belief in what we dedicated our lives to and his sage generosity of spirit and experience—despite the fact that he had lost half his body to war—rivaled the fortitude of anyone I knew. I simply needed to be with him to face reality head-on, to sit beside him in the very place that epitomized the devastation of war. I needed to hear how he kept going.

 • • • 

T
HAT SAME EVENING,
I took the train to New York and reunited with Elizabeth and many other colleagues from throughout my travels. Groups of us met up, night after night, and traded stories about Tim and Chris, often clenched in long embraces, expressing years of pent-up sorrow from, for many of us, exactly a decade of covering war. Along with our editors, who functioned as adopted parents, we had formed an iron bond, inexplicable to those outside our circle. The colleagues I had spent the decade with—sharing meals of stewed lamb with mounds of rice woven with sweet raisins and grated carrots in Afghanistan, or stale bread in cities overrun by insurgents—had become an essential part of who I was; they were family, and the only people with whom I found consolation at such a desperate emotional time.

One night that week a group of us close friends got together for dinner on New York’s Lower East Side: the photographer Samantha Appleton; Marion Durand, a photo editor at
Newsweek
and the wife of the Magnum photographer Chris Anderson, who’d stopped covering war after the birth of their son; the brilliant photo editor Jamie Wellford; Tyler and his girlfriend, Nicki; and me. Samantha, Marion, and I arrived first and ordered a bottle of wine. Tyler, Nicki, and Jamie showed up shortly thereafter, their faces blotchy and swollen. No one seemed to be able to stop crying.

I was shocked by Tyler’s appearance. I saw in his face the same devastation I was experiencing: These deaths broke him in a way that Libya hadn’t. Hondros was one of Tyler’s oldest friends. He had ushered Tyler into the world of photojournalism when they were young men fresh out of college, living in Ohio and working for the
Troy Daily News
. Their careers developed in tandem as they covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Libya. They’d amassed accolades together, grew into accomplished men together. We all sat and looked at one another and cried openly, a display of emotion that was uncharacteristic of our profession. The bravado was gone.

Two days later we went to Chris’s funeral in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, at the church where he was supposed to have married that summer. Instead of walking down the aisle with his beautiful Christina, he was carried down the aisle in a casket, his mother and his bride-to-be walking a few steps behind. Bach, Beethoven, and Mahler echoed off the cathedral walls. The simple image of one of us in a wooden box, after leading such a full life, was too much to bear. The finality was inescapable. Friends, colleagues, relatives, and people who never personally knew Hondros squeezed inside and spilled out onto the sidewalk. During the eulogies I stood with Michael Robinson Chavez, a photographer I had met in Iraq and who had become a dear friend over the years, and David Guttenfelder, another photographer and friend. We were wrecked.

Paul stayed with me in New York that week. His bosses at Reuters allowed him to take time off to console me after Libya. And I finally felt that it was the right moment to step back from all the drama and death of the past decade and make love, without worrying about the consequences.

CHAPTER 13

I Would Advise You Not to Travel

Three weeks later, in New Delhi, the little blue line appeared in the window—making a positive out of the negative sign. Already? April was the first month Paul and I had physically spent time together since I went off the pill. I counted backward, calculating that conception must have happened the week Tim and Chris were killed in Libya—the week I had let my ever-present guard down. I cursed the genetics of my reproductively inclined Italian family and crawled back in bed with Paul, placing the plastic stick with our future on the pillow next to his head. I hated him at that moment. He had been pushing and prodding me to get pregnant since the day we got married. He even announced his intentions during a live interview with CNN anchor Ali Velshi while I was missing in Libya. On the third day of our captivity, Paul told Velshi that the
New York Times
had speculated that we might have been abducted by Qaddafi’s soldiers, but no one really knew if we were alive or dead. Velshi asked what Paul would say to me when we had the opportunity to speak again and Paul replied, “I’m going to say, you know, you gotta come back here because, you know, we gotta have kids.” Paul knew I would have been mortified at the thought of my husband announcing on live TV that he wanted to get me pregnant, but it was an emotional moment. Usually he made no secret of his desire to start a family. He even contrived with my oldest friend, Tara, to decipher my ovulation chart in the weeks after Libya and put the dates as a reminder in his BlackBerry. He did all this with his characteristic sense of humor and never flagged in his support for my work. But he knew he had to push me.

When Paul finally woke up, I showed him the pregnancy test, and we took another just to be sure: positive again. “You got your wish,” I said. “I can’t believe it happened so fast. I think my life is over.”

Paul knew better than to answer. He had his coffee, got dressed, and went down to the bookstore at Khan Market, near our house in New Delhi, and bought
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
. He came home and presented me with this encyclopedic book of gestation. I took one look at it, with its grinning, baby-bump-flaunting woman on the cover, and was terrified. I was not at all ready to give up my life, my body, my travels. I stared at the glowing woman with a watermelon-sized stomach. Was that really going to be me in nine months? That huge? And she was so happy. Wasn’t
that
woman conflicted about her career? How was I going to keep shooting? My thoughts shifted to my colleagues—mostly men. What was everyone going to think?
Kidnapped in Libya, husband made an announcement on CNN that he wanted to start a family while wife was still missing, and less than two months later she’s already knocked up!
Surely it was the most predictable outcome of my entire life. I tried to imagine my life as a mother—struggled to envision a female role model in conflict photography—and I couldn’t think of a single female war photographer who even had a stable relationship. There were journalists who had taken time out to have children, like Elizabeth, who had a baby and managed to keep writing; photographers were different. What would the MacArthur Foundation say? They honor me with an incredible fellowship to foster my career as an international photojournalist, and I get pregnant.

A few days later I sat in the OB/GYN waiting room at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals in New Delhi. The ground floor was swarming with Afghans who traveled to India for medical tourism—men with long gray beards looking disoriented and out of place in such a modern hospital, trailed by women in full
hijab
. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t handle sitting in a room full of Afghan beards and head scarves as I waited for my first official visit to the doctor as a pregnant woman. Bollywood videos played on a flat screen mounted on a pink wall festooned with stencils of pastel-colored mushrooms, flowers, caterpillars, and ladybugs. Screaming Indian and Afghan children tore across the waiting room floor. Their parents sat idly by, smiling proudly and exercising zero discipline, as I waited for Dr. Sohani Verma’s secretary to call my name. I prayed that the two pregnancy tests were wrong as I clenched the results of blood tests she had requested in my hands. The secretary called out my name. The doctor was a stern, old-fashioned Indian woman in a sari. She looked over my chart and introduced herself.