Friday, October 10, 2003

Back to Iraq  

This is not how I thought I spend my last night home. I am on back in my nearly empty house hooked up to a portable electro cardio gram machine. I am trying to think calm thoughts, trying to breathe in and out, trying to get my heart rate back to a normal level.

This test has come at an inopportune time. I am in the middle of moving to a new house. This new house is just a hundred yards from my current one, but the short distance has somehow fooled me, diminished my powers of estimation. Instead of an easy move, this has become a nightmare. Because the distance between the two points is miniscule, so I believed would be the work. This is a fallacy of major proportions. The donkeywork in a move as, everyone knows, is in the packing and unpacking. The distance is irrelevant. I am paying for my miscalculation. Instead of carrying boxes and furniture to a moving truck and from one--I am a Chinese acrobat balancing accumulations of my recent life upon my back, duck walking the length of a football field to our new home. The aerobic exercise, although good for my health, is not particularly welcome. I have asked for additional life insurance and my carrier has responded by requiring a picture of my heart. It is, I feel, as warm and robust as the Grinch’s after his Christmas conversion—and nearly as strained in it’s effort to keep the presents of Hooville from sliding into the abyss. The nurse is making small talk, but I’m not listening. My heart must hide its efforts. I need to generate consistent little peaks, oil wells, a whole line of Eiffel Towers to convince my insurance company that I am a good risk--a healthy, almost 41- year old man. One who has to travel back to Iraq tomorrow.

* * *
At the airport my girlfriend and I say goodbye again. I have left her in our new house surrounded by boxes and the mess of a half-completed remodeling job. She has only a partial bathroom and no kitchen. It is not a very nice way for me to go. When she met me I was on a sabbatical from this kind of work. Teaching journalism rather than practicing it. I appeared stable at the time. Not the kind of guy that always had two bags packed--ready for both hot and cold climates. It was the ultimate bait and switch. Now in just over two years she’s seen me off to war zones four times, endured with me the near miss of a Taliban mortar shell, capture by Saddam’s Fedayeen militia and months and month away from each other. She is a strong person, but that is a lot to ask of anyone. Yet she has also been with me long enough to know it is not just an excuse when I say I don’t really have any other skills.

* * *

At the airport I call an old friend and colleague that I hadn’t spoken to in years. He recently sent me an email saying he is dying of pancreatic cancer. When we talk he tells me it is an extremely rare and particularly lethal form. “Statistically,” he tells me, “there’s a five times greater chance of dying in and automobile accident than in contracting this disease.” The sad irony is that this man is Jack Smith. As a private in Vietnam, Jack was nearly killed in the Ia Drang Valley in the bloodiest battle of the war—the same fight depicted in the book and movie, “We Were Soldiers Once.”

Later as a correspondent for ABC News, Jack narrowly escaped with his life in other war zones including Beirut, where an artillery rocket breached the wall of his hotel room. He was not in it at the time. He became and avid rock climber and mountain biker—eventually leaving ABC after more than 25 years and moving from Washington, D.C, to California’s Mill Valley with his wife Pam.

“When I first got the diagnosis, I was angry,” he tells me. “Why me—I came out here to live the last third of my life—to lead an active lifestyle. Not to die.” But now he says he is focusing on what is important—the time he has left with family and friends. When I was a young producer at ABC I would sometimes supervise the editing of Jack’s stories for “This Week with David Brinkley.” They would always be thoughtful, well-written pieces that creatively explored the complex issues discussed on the show every week. He would stay up late on Saturday night writing them, I would stay up later until Sunday morning, cutting them. I would have to listen to his voice track over and over again as we covered it with video images. It was one of the most distinctive voices on television, silky smooth but with a unique resonance, easy to listen to, even into the wee hours in a dark editing booth. When we finally end our call and say goodbye, I wonder if it will be the last time I hear it. I gather my things as they call my flight.

* * *

I am pleasantly surprised. Baghdad is neither new nor vastly improved, but it is much better than I remember it. An easy point to score considering last time I was here bombed out vehicles and burning tank wreckage lined the streets. But that was only five months ago. Now the place has a colonial feel. With two gulf wars past, we have grown accustomed to the sight of U.S. soldiers and Marines in the desert. It is different to see them patrol the streets of Baghdad in Humvees or baked by the Middle Eastern sun in their body armor and Kevlar. They are locked and loaded, sucking on Camelbacks as they move in five-man squads through the marketplace. At the Republican Palace, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked twenty somethings on loan from the State Department or Pentagon—staff the makeshift Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) offices that simultaneously administer Iraq’s overwhelming current civil needs while hammering out the blueprint for a post Saddam future. Many of the Iraqis I’ve talked to say they’re discouraged so far. With 60-percent unemployment and rampant crime (25 reported carjackings a day in Baghdad) it is a difficult time. But there has also been undeniable progress like news schools and sewage treatment facilities. Highly educated and immensely proud (one of our drivers teaches economics and Baghdad University) most Iraqis I talk with say they want a faster transition to self-rule. They make no bones about it, they are happy that Saddam and the Bathists have been ousted, but they are not comfortable being occupied by foreign troops.

* * *

Crossing the border from Jordan into Iraq, I meet a young Filipino-American private named Conrad Vasquez (shown in the photo at the top of this post). He has an M-16 with 40mm grenade launcher slung over his chest. He is highly professional and remarkably good-natured considering he has been here going on eight months now. He says border duty is a vacation after a tour in the infamously hostile city of Fallujah, one point of the so-called Sunni Triangle filled with Saddam die-hards.

I ask him if he wants to use my phone to call his family.

“No sir,” he says, “it’s just me and my sister and she’s serving in Baghdad.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“My mother died of a stroke and my father…well he was killed in the Philippines.”

“How?”

“Well sir, have you heard of Abu Sayef.”

“Of course, the Philippine fundamentalist Islamic group with reported ties to Al Qaeda.”

“Yes. Well sir, he was a member.”

“So are you Muslim,” I ask.

“No sir. I’m Catholic. But the people around here are very respectful when they heard my father was.”


* * *

The twenty hours of flying and 12 hour overland drive from Amman, Jordan combined with the rush and stress of the house move prior to my travel, has hit me with a cold. The cold has temporarily stolen my voice and now prevents me from asking questions to a five member Republican U.S. Senate Delegation appearing for a press conference at the Iraqi Convention Center. The delegation is led by Appropriation Committee Chair Mitch McConnell who is making a plug for President Bush’s $87-billion Iraqi security and reconstruction request. Only $21 billion he tells us, actually will go for reconstruction—the rest is the price tag for keeping and supplying U.S. forces in Iraq. That’s why, he says, the fastest way to get U.S. forces back home is to pass the spending package and get Iraq back on it’s feet—so they won’t be necessary anymore. Another Senator, Greg Thomas from Wyoming, chides the media for not doing enough positive stories on Iraq. It is a common criticism, though one I have trouble digesting. The media frequently obliges the accomplishments of the CPA. Every American television network covered the on-time opening of the Iraqi school year with thousands of students treated to rehabilitated buildings, new desks and textbooks. But when American troops are killed in Iraq—no one can argue which story should take precedence. It is the first principle of journalistic ethics, “learn the truth and report it.” Responsible media don’t pursue these casualties as just a policy scorecard, but as an indication of the actual human costs of this endeavor as well as a documentation of the sacrifice made by those individuals.

* * *

After the event our driver Sabri takes us back to our bureau. Sabri was a major and former MIG jet pilot in the Iraqi Air Force. He weaves our GMC Suburban through the crowded streets of Baghdad as if he still had a control stick. As I peer out the window it seems almost like any other large city in the Middle East: crowded marketplaces, lots of noise, smells, traffic and heat. Dusty date palms with their green fronds breakup the otherwise beige horizon

* * *
Back at the hotel, I talk with John Zito, current bureau chief and a colleague from the war in Afghanistan. It is Zito, most here credit for the calm choreography that seamlessly moved the entire bureau and all twenty employees to a new location after the old NBC Bureau at the Al Aike Hotel was bombed a few weeks ago. The attack killed a local security guard and injuring and NBC soundman. Because of John, NBC was able to file several stories on the incident the same day—even though their facility was in shambles.

John tells me that covering Baghdad today has its own peculiar rthyms. An explosion goes off, he says, and everyone tries to pinpoint the location using a triangulation of official sources, ground sources and the Arab satellite news channels Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya (rumored to have sources and fixers on every street corner—basically, anyone with a portable Thuraya satellite phone.)

“Sounds a little like chasing cops and ambulances for a big city metro beat back home, “ I say.

“Yeah,” he smile, “in a way, it’s a lot like that.”

Discuss

Kevin 12:28 PM

The blog is re-opened.  

The blog is reopen for business. It has been seven months since this site went silent. Time for everyone to get back to work. To all of you who have made this place so interesting with your informed and intelligent discussions, I thank you. For all who have been so kind as to inquire about my welfare—I also thank you and apologize for not being able to respond. When CNN politely (I mean this sincerely) asked me to stop blogging I felt it was my obligation to do so immediately and completely. CNN was signing my checks at the time and sent me to Iraq. Although I felt the blog was a separate and independent journalistic enterprise, they did not. Period. We move on.

Now I am freelancing again, but currently on-assignment in Iraq with MSNBC. I had been a long time staff member with NBC News and feel comfortable back with my old friends. MSNBC has also agreed to allow me to continue with my PERSONAL and may I stress, NON-AFFILIATED weblog. However, there are a few understandable stipulations which I want to relate to you:

1) I’m here because NBC News has hired me to be here, therefore the observations and experiences in Iraq that I relate to you this blog would probably not happen without them.
2) They have the right of first refusal on anything that I write that relates to this assignment. That means I run it by them and if they want it they will publish it on MSNBC.COM. It will be republished here.
3) If it’s something they’re not interested in or not directly related to an assignment they’ve paid me to do—it can appear here first. I think that’s fair and bypasses any of the editorial oversight and ownership issues that we encountered in the first run of kevinsites.net.

That being said, I look forward to a renewed dialogue on the very serious as well as the inane. We hear so much about the “synergy” of media companies with the so-called vertical integration of different communication businesses, well here’s the chance for individual “synergy” to impact media coverage. I’d like to know what you see as the shortcomings of media coverage in Iraq and elsewhere. What aren’t you getting? What are you getting too much of? I welcome your well-conceived story ideas, relevant information and observations or valuable sources that may contribute to better journalism and a more informed public.

BTW in the spirit of full disclosure, aside from a few video skills—I’m a techno-neophyte, not some kind of blogging pioneer. I like to write and shoot, but I did not and would not know how to lay the code that made this thing. Cyber genius Xeni Jardin, a cross between Annie Lennox and Albert Einstein is this site’s creator and producer.

Thereby for the grace of Xeni, go we.

Let’s get started.

Discuss

Kevin 12:27 PM