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Words & Reflectionsreporters and continued to monitorwar coverage. We feared that once thewar ended in Iraq, worn-out journalistswould immediately head home, sowe needed to land interviews as soonas possible. We had no guarantee thatthese journalists would even talk withus. Nor could we assume that the personalaccounts they might share withus would be engaging or compelling;we suspected that many of them wouldsave their “best stuff” for their memoirs.Tim’s first day in Doha, Qatar—April19th, 10 days after Saddam’s statue fellin Baghdad—proved uneventful. Bythen, the media headquarters was thinlypopulated by low-level stringers fromthe major news bureaus. When wespoke, he sounded demoralized, butan interview the next day with an AlJazeera reporter who had recently decidedto no longer remain embeddedgave him hope. One of the more riskyof the Pentagon’s embedding decisionswas to embed this Al Jazeera correspondent.The message behind doingso was obvious: to demonstrate thatthe U.S. military represented a democratic,open society with nothing tohide.What happened, however, was thatthis Al Jazeera reporter, BBC-trainedAmr El-Kahky, claimed he had beengiven back-of-the-bus treatment andsuffered blatant discrimination fromAmerican officers in the field worriedabout security and believing that anyonefrom Al Jazeera represented theenemy. In time, El-Kahky left his embeddedposition in frustration and wascastigated by Arab media colleaguesand even threatened with death by aFree Iraqi Forces militiaman in the field.Despite this revealing interview, Timlet me know in our dollar-a-minute cellphone call that: “No one is here. I musttravel to Kuwait.” I wired him moremoney. After jumping through severalvisa hoops, Tim flew to Kuwait City.During the next week, he camped outin the air-conditioned lobby of KuwaitCity’s Sheraton, from where he approachedbattlefield reporters on theway home or seeking a welcome respite.Many reporters he managed tospeak with were unilaterals who hadcovered the war from rented SUV’s,encountering fedayeen and armed militiaambushes and stonewalling U.S.and British forces trying to keep nonembedsout of harm’s way.In all, Tim interviewed about a dozenwar correspondents and photographers,including several military publicaffairs officers in Kuwait. Interviewsaveraged about an hour. Many wereeager to discuss their experiences andoften remarked that they were still in atransitional period of decompression,of trying to make sense out of whatthey had been reporting. Their recollectionsand reflections were fresh, visceraland dramatic. The longer theyspoke with Tim, the more their waryjournalistic guard lowered. They discussedpersonal feelings about confrontingfear or facing death, watchingenemy troops dying in a fiery attack,and crossing a wavering line of objectivityin the desert sand.If the book’s goal was to excavatethe emotional cost borne by these witnessesto war, these interviews werehitting pay dirt. Some were haunted bywhat they saw. Robert Galbraith, afreelance photographer from Montreal,Canada, revealed: “Lately, I’ve hadnightmares. Not the usual ones. Worse,far worse. I dreamed that bombs androckets were blasting into my home inMontreal. I heard my children screaming.They were being shot at, and Icouldn’t move. Then I knew it was timeto leave Baghdad.” Others compartmentalizedtheir feelings. Voice ofAmerica’s East Africa bureau chief,Alisha Ryu, said: “What makes it fascinatingfor me is why people behave theway they do. In Africa, I have watchedhands being chopped off. I’ve watcheda man being roasted alive and his hearteaten. There is so much brutality I sawthat after a while I became numb to it.It is terrible to say, but it’s true. Now Ihave almost no reaction when I seedead bodies.”Many reporters, in particular thosefrom U.S. publications, try to maintainobjectivity and impartiality in the waysthey cover events. But in these interviews,war correspondents spokefrankly—and subjectively—about theirexperiences. Stored-up feelings werepried open. Seldom do journalists’personal observations surface for publicconsumption. Peter Baker, TheWashington Post’s Moscow co-bureauchief, said that after watching a live U.S.missile take out an Iraqi personneltruck on plasma TV screens in commandheadquarters, he felt that “it wasan odd disconnect. It’s hard to sit thereand watch a video like that and reallyprocess what it meant. It’s easy to bedetached about it as they were and hadto be. It’s their job. But there is also ahumanity in that situation. Men aredying at that moment, and you arewatching it happen live in front of you.That’s the problem with a high-techwar. In some ways it may appear morebloodless than it really is.” Still, Bakersounded surprisingly calm when recountingan incident when his wife,fellow Washington Post correspondentand Moscow co-bureau chief SusanGlasser, was under fire at a Basra hospital.Baker did ask command headquartersto see what they could do tohelp.Embedded reporter Steve Komarowof USA Today echoed this sense ofestrangement from the human side ofwar: “We’d be watching live video feedsat field command headquarters fromhunter aircraft of night air strikes onIraqi convoys. We’d hear them callingin the fires to take them out. Then thescreen would go black and white witha flash. We’d just see the smoke. It waslike a Tom Clancy movie. It soundshorrible, but we didn’t see the peoplewho were killed. It was more strikingwhen we came to a spot and there werejust bodies rotting in the sun. Thesmell of human bodies rotting is anawful thing. It just hits you. I soonstopped looking.”Moving on to BaghdadAfter spending a week in Kuwait City,Tim insisted on pushing closer to mediaground zero: Baghdad’s PalestineHotel, home to news organizations suchas CNN and The New York Times. Withhis only daughter heading off to col-78 Nieman Reports / Winter 2003