Tell Them I Didn't Cry A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival in Iraq

A Note from the Author This book is a personal account of the more than nine months I spent in Iraq as a reporter forThe Washington Post.After a brief visit to Iraq in January 2004, while embedded with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, I returned in May -- arriving eight days after U.S. soldiers on a routine patrol found the decapitated body of American businessman Nick Berg on a highway overpass west of the Iraqi capital. His gruesome videotaped execution at the hands of insurgents -- coupled with the deaths of four U.S. contractors whose mutilated bodies were strung from a bridge in the city of Fallujah the month before -- marked what we only now realize was a free fall into a dark cavern of blood and violence. It will be a difficult climb out. During the time I was in Iraq, the deteriorating security situation changed the way we covered the news, challenging every convention for how to report on and in a conflict in which we, the press, had no immunity, no white flag to save us from the car bombs, the mortars, the gunfire, and the kidnappers. The bad guys were aiming for us, too. By the fall of 2004, stuck in our fortified bunkers in Baghdad, we were largely cut off from the rest of the country, unable to travel to many parts of Iraq without the U.S. military because of the threat of attacks on foreign reporters. And yet our mandate never changed: Iraq was a story that had to be told. I reported on car bombs and power plant reconstruction, wrote stories about soldiers in battle, soldiers waiting for battle, soldiers dying in battle. I interviewed hundreds of Iraqis, sometimes without ever leaving my hotel. I met them instead through the scribbled notes of our Iraqi translators. When they came back from an assignment too dangerous for me as a Westerner to cover, we sat together in front of my computer while I grilled them about what they saw.What color were his eyes? Did he really say that? How did he say that? What do you mean he looked anxious? Tell me how he looked. Was he sweating? What were his hands doing while he talked? I asked each member of our Iraqi staff individually how they wanted to be identified in this book because they remain at risk as long as they work for an American company. Although the full names of our translators are published in The Washington Post in story credits and bylines, connecting their names to additional information about their families might put them at greater risk. For the book, most asked to be referred to by their first names only or by a common Arabic title for mothers and fathers: if a son is Ali, his father is Abu Ali, his mother Um Ali. Our conversations, as detailed in the book, are precisely as I remember them. All of the people are real, not characters. They exist in flesh and blood and blood and flesh, the living story of Iraq. To them, I owe everything. I never really swam in Baghdad, although the pool at the Ishtar Sheraton Hotel taunted me on impossibly hot days when it seemed Mother Nature had turned a hundred hair dryers on an already brittle split-end. I went to the Sheraton pool once, long after dark. My Post colleague, Robin Shulman, and I had just sat down at the edge of the pool when six or seven members of the hotel staff, wearing sweat-stained white shirts and dark trousers, came out to watch us from the shadows of the pool deck. They dragged on cigarettes, the fiery glow lighting up the night like fireflies suspended in flight. Robin and I tried to ignore them, but eventually, we got up and left, unwilling to give them the satisfaction of a cheap peep show of our bony knees and bare shoulders. We walked by their disappointed faces and disappeared back into the grungy hotel, back into our uniform of long sleeves and long skirts. From then on, the only swimming I ever did was in my imaginary pool. I called up the image to keep from under the pressure and fright of being in a warSpinner, Jackie is the author of 'Tell Them I Didn't Cry A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival in Iraq', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743288552 and ISBN 0743288556.