The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (25 page)

A chubby man-child in a white robe stamped my passport. He didn’t ask any questions. I got on an escalator heading down, passing underneath a big banner advertisement displayed in bright blue colors: C
OME
S
WIM WITH THE
D
OLPHINS AT
A
TLANTIS
: T
HE
P
ALM.

It was seven
A.M.
, and the humid eighty-five-degree weather hovered between the floor of the parking garage and the arrivals gate. Men in robes and women in tight T-shirts and jangling gold earrings pushed luggage carts and lit cigarettes. There were two rows of taxis, one line of black sedans, and another line of pink cars with all women drivers, a special program to encourage women in business. I headed off to my hotel in the city. I’d booked two nights at the a place called the Royal Meridien, and one night at the Atlantis: The Palm.

As I left the airport in the cab, Dubai revealed itself as a maze of futuristic skylines that came in endless layers. The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa; the indoor ski slope at the Snowdome; the seven-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab. Tunneling down the highway, I passed skyscraper after skyscraper, interspersed with massive cranes for construction. The city once boasted of having thirty thousand cranes, the most of any city in the world. At the height of the boom the Emirates had a gross domestic product of some $261 billion, incredible for a country of 1.5
million people. The boom had exploded, the bubble burst. Now Dubai alone was facing a debt crisis of $88 billion. The skyscrapers were empty, and the cranes no longer in use. Dubai was collapsing and the corruption that brought it to life had come to the surface. There was a smell to it, like a marina at low tide littered with luxury yachts run aground.

Atlantis: The Palm would become the focal point of my weekend, and the most fitting spot for a pilgrimage. Few other pieces of architectural excess had come to represent the city of Dubai like the Palm. It was built on a man-made island in the shape of a palm tree, visible from space, constructed at the height of the economic boom. It cost $1.5 billion to build, with another $20 million spent for a party celebrating its grand opening in 2008.

Out on the Palm Island, Afghan government officials, using embezzled funds, had purchased luxury condos for their weekend- and monthlong getaways. As I crossed over the bridge, the island looked deserted. It was as if someone had given the design team a library full of J. G. Ballard novels for inspiration, and then told them to make it a bit more family friendly. The sand-colored condos, like the high-rises on the mainland, looked abandoned, only the occasional beach towel hanging off a balcony.

This was the role model we’d been pushing on the world. If only Baghdad and Kabul and Kandahar could be like Dubai! If they could all be tax havens and resort towns and business friendly. How beautiful it would be, to remake the entire “arc of instability,” as American war planners called the area stretching from the Middle East to Central Asia, into an archipelago of city-states like Dubai, which boasted the largest shopping mall in the world, the Mall of the Emirates, with boutiques for terrorists and tyrants and businessmen alike. What a model it was! Just ask the Uzbek who had brought up my luggage and the Paki who drove me to the Palm. The world was flat, the edges of the empire jagged and bloody, but we could smooth it all over, eventually.

The Palm appeared in stark contrast to the emptiness of the rest of the island. It was bustling. I entered underneath the grossly oversize archway,
like entering a monarch’s palace. It looked like there were five or six different kinds of conventions going on, above-the-board trade organizations as well as cash-and-carry industries. There were families, too, from Europe and the neighboring Middle Eastern states. I was welcomed exuberantly at the front desk—I’d called ahead, and though I had rarely done so in the past, gotten the media rate. I was handed a map to the facility—a water fun park, the dolphin pool, seven restaurants (including Nobu), and a massive aquarium in the lobby. I got upgraded to a corner suite on the seventeenth floor. There was a balcony, about a twelve-hundred-square-foot living room, and a four-hundred-square-foot bathroom. It was the largest hotel room I’d ever stayed in, with a decadent bathroom including a hot tub, a chaise lounge in the room, and a separate room with only sinks.

In such luxury, I spent the three days doing what I almost never do—I could count the number of drinks I’ve had in the past ten years on one hand. I comforted myself knowing that I wasn’t interviewing anyone, nor was anyone writing a profile of me. With the war now seventy-two hours away, I decided to get drunk.

The war correspondent: romantic, addicted, deranged. He first appeared in the Crimean War in 1854. In his epitaph at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, William Howard Russell was named the “first and greatest” of the bunch. Russell, who was detested by the generals, accused of being unpatriotic and of aiding the enemy, was once booted out of the headquarters to pitch a tent among the soldiers during a cholera epidemic. Russell called himself the “miserable parent of a luckless tribe.” In the Civil War, American journalists found out that conflict makes good copy: Circulation boomed, newspapers in New York sent over a hundred correspondents to cover it, and
The New York Herald
shelled out $1 million to be there. “Exaggeration, outright lies, puffery, slander,” wrote one historian on the quality of Civil War coverage. General William T. Sherman complained of reporters “picking up dropped expressions, inciting jealousy
and discontent, and doing infinite mischief.” Sherman said he’d prefer to pay journalists half his salary to
not
write about him.

World War I dampened the thrill for the journalists: “The most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. The correspondent, too, would soon become a character in the war story. He was the rogue, the adventurer, the suspected womanizer, the kind of fellow who didn’t get out of bed until noon. Evelyn Waugh sent the luckless tribe up in his novel
Scoop
: “Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up in the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand words about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spread-eagled in the deserted railway, you know? Well, they were surprised at his office, getting a story from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it on six international newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in, too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, a state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny, and in less than two weeks there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. That’s the power of the press for you. They gave Jakes the Nobel Peace Prize for his harrowing description of the carnage, but that was color stuff.”

By World War II, legendary correspondent Ernie Pyle made the cover of
Time
magazine for his reporting on American soldiers. “Fuck my shit,” he said privately, using a dropped expression picked up from GIs. “Fuck my shit. That’s what war adds up to.” Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper in 1944. The news of his death reached war photographer Robert Capa in a cramped Army press headquarters in Leipzig, Germany, where he
slept in the middle of the night. “Ernie got it,” he heard, as the whisper of the news passed through the room. “We all got up and drank ourselves stupid,” Capa remembered.

The war, though, had given a purpose to Capa’s life. “There’s absolutely no reason for me to get up in the morning anymore,” Capa wrote about the summer of 1942, living alone in a New York apartment. Overdue bills, a summons from the Justice Department, a nickel to his name. Another envelope pushed through the door: Ah, an assignment! Fifteen hundred bucks from
Collier’s
magazine to go to England to cover the war. The war got him out of bed. He has an affair with a woman in England the week before D-day. He couldn’t commit to her. He was always grieving for the dead woman he once loved—she got crushed by a tank covering the Spanish Civil War with him in 1937. She was twenty-six years old. Capa landed with the first wave of Allied forces on Normandy—he spent ninety minutes ashore, taking one hundred six photos. Only eight survived, an error by a photo assistant in London while the photos were developed. The pictures were blurry, a fact he captured in the title of his autobiography,
Slightly Out of Focus.
He was the first celebrity war photographer and he embodied the romance of the profession—he dated Hollywood stars and hung out in Parisian cafés with other artists and writers. “I would say the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom to choose his spot, and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed is his torture. The war correspondent has his stake—his life—in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler.”

Capa kept gambling. In 1954, he was asked to go to Indochina. He didn’t really want to go, but he went. He was on a patrol with French soldiers. He walked ahead of them down the road to get the picture. He stepped on a landmine. He was forty years old. “Is this the first American correspondent killed in Indochina?” asked the Vietnamese doctor who pronounced him dead. “It is a harsh way for American to learn.”

In the Vietnam War, the correspondents openly questioned the government—as critics of not just policy, but of war itself. Explicit accounts and photos seemed to jeopardize the entire war-making enterprise. Careers were made: Halberstam, Arnett, Sheehan, Herr, Rather, Apple, Hersh, and the list goes on. My Lai, for the first time, was an account of an American atrocity as news. There was an honor roll of dead correspondents: Larry Burrows and three others lost in a helicopter crash over Laos. A twenty-three-year-old
Newsweek
photographer killed in Khe Sanh. Sean Flynn and a friend disappeared in Cambodia. Eighty-three journalists total. The war ended, leaving its mark on journalism. The skeptical coverage was supposed to be the model for the next generation. War had been exposed as the Giant Lying Machine, in Halberstam’s words. It was all, it seemed, a scam.

In the nineties, the conflicts were bloody and didn’t usually involve American boys. A new phrase was popularized in the lexicon of journalism: the war junkie. It was rare to find a reporter to admit to being one, at least in public. There was more honor in self-identifying as an alcoholic. It was not appropriate to speak of the perverse fun of war. It must be buried under other motives. The war correspondent had to wrap himself in the language of human rights. He must
bear witness
, performing some kind of pseudo-religious rite. He was forced, in public, to talk about war as damning, ignoble, awful, tragic. Yet he kept going back for more. The irony had slowly crept in. A British journalist’s account of his time in the Balkans twins his heroin addiction with his compulsion to cover the conflict. He kicked the heroin. The book became an instant classic. I saw him in Baghdad a few years later. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges summed it all up: “The rush of battle is one of the most potent and lethal addictions, for war is a drug, one I have ingested many times.”

At twenty-two, I landed an internship at
Newsweek
magazine. Three years later, the magazine sent me to Baghdad, a war started with the full support of many in the press. I’d learned from all the literature that I had
read that war always ended in violence, pain, self-destruction, madness, and tragedy. I confirmed this well-proven thesis for myself.

Here’s what else I learned: The correspondent’s identity becomes inseparable from war. His essence, his habits, his worldview, prestige, personal life. A former colleague at
Newsweek
explained: “They,” he told me, “are invested in being war correspondents. They are invested in the myth of it. They wake up every day and they buff their armor. They make it nice and shiny.” Advice got passed down to me, one war correspondent to another: If you’re young and willing to die, there are lots of career opportunities. Never follow photographers. Photographers will get you killed. There are not old war photographers; there are dead war photographers. If you ain’t being shot at, it ain’t reporting. Women don’t really understand it. You have an excuse for failed marriages and failed relationships. A bureau chief for a major American newspaper sat in his office in Baghdad, watching Italian porn beamed in on the satellite television, listening to the lulls between booming car bombs. My wife just doesn’t understand what I’m going through, the veteran war correspondent told the twentysomething girl while putting his hand on her leg. In another memoir, a reporter used the acknowledgment section to blame the war for his unfaithfulness. He lost the woman he loved, dick caught in the vice of robust American interventionism in the Middle East. A friend of mine wrote a draft of a novel mocking the war junkies. In real life, he got kidnapped once by the Taliban for three months. The FBI agent who helped secured his release told him, “You know this means you’re going to get a lot of pussy.” The opening line of the novel that will never be published:
Baghdad. Bullet. Brains. Splatter.
Full stop.
War is beautiful.
His wife divorced him, too. He was doing eight balls at the pub. Don’t you know what he’s been through? the lawyer asked her during the divorce—he was in Fallujah. Hah, she laughed. Fuck Fallujah, and fuck you. More advice: Your editors pretend to care about your well-being, but they actually don’t. Don’t get kidnapped. Don’t fuck up. Don’t believe the lies. You’re not one of them. There was a simple truth, my colleague
explained: War corrodes and kills everything it touches. It destroys what’s inside you. War makes you sad.