Into harm’s way
THE desert in Kuwait seemed such a wasteland. Goose farms near the Iraqi border yielded huge quantities of shit, which gathered along the sides of the roads and in the yard of the house where we were squatting.
When the sandstorms blew, so did the shit, smearing the world with its stench. That patch of desert already felt abandoned to the war. There was no question that it would slide in of its own weight; it was just a question of when. The border — the constant pounding of tanks, the hovering helicopters, and the military police patrolling — was a trembling faultline.
As we travelled, larger groups of American soldiers appeared out of nowhere. When they were close, you could hear their rumbling and see the life inside of them, like some uncoupled train from a lost world, carrying its survivors into the future.
The sandy fields were filled with American tanks, and their turrets beaded on us as we passed, swivelling in unison and following us until we were out of sight again. We slept in our cars, in the lees of dunes, or on the open ground.
At night, the far horizons glowed with bombing, and it became impossible to distinguish what manner of destruction was hurtling earthward human-made or otherwise. Soon it just seemed to merge.
The fighter planes flew over it all, racing in and out on bombing runs. Some nights I wanted to leave — just turn around and go home.
One night I called a colleague and told him so. “Come on back,” he told me. But I couldn’t, really; I didn’t trust my own navigation skills. So I kept going toward Baghdad.
Long hours passed when all I followed was the dust trail left for me as a track by photographer Luc Delahaye’s truck. Helicopters sometimes thundered by above us, the bodies inside impassive. I had no idea where I was. But the small lines of the GPS led us north. It was a vast landscape we were in, and we were the only things that seemed to be moving.
Suddenly, I saw a man standing by the side of the road. He was wearing green fatigues. He was tall, bearded, and wore a green hat with a bill, Nicaraguan-style.
He had a very big gun, and was holding it at waist level. As soon as Luc’s car reached him, the man began to fire. By the time I came within his range, it was too late to turn around.
I realised they were shooting at me too. I sped up. It had rained earlier, so the ground was wet and dark, including parts of the road, and alongside the road were ditches of mud streaked with shallow and putrid pools of waste. I heard the rounds as they hit my truck. They punctured the metal, penetrating the car and exiting on the other side. There was more than one man firing now.
I ducked this way and that. I sped up; I slowed down. I heard glass shatter. Suddenly, the back of my vehicle caught fire — I could smell it burning. They must have hit the fuel tank.
Luc was long gone. There was nothing ahead of me except a long line of gray asphalt that led into a foreboding distance. Behind me were the attackers. Farther behind them still was the American army, slouching along, perhaps not moving at all. That stretch of road became my own purgatory. The possibility of death became real.
The next thing I knew, I lost control of my car. I tried to regain control of the wheel, but it was too late.
When I came to, I was sitting upright. But the rest of the world was wrong. My feet were on a window, and the window was on the ground. In front of me was the windshield, now lengthwise. The smell of petrol permeated the compartment. The car was on its side.
The attackers were still shooting. The bottom of the car, the hard metal section, was facing them, and whatever was hitting the vehicle was ricocheting off — pinging around me, but not penetrating into the cab. My feet lifted off the floor and began to kick at the window. The window didn’t budge. I kept kicking. I kicked until I saw a crack, then another. A web began to form.
I kicked as hard as I could; I kicked the shit out of that window. A small hole began to form, and I kicked it until it became about as big as my head. I could hear the attackers shouting nearby. The firing continued. I heard feet. I heard the click of chambers, the dumping of bags, running, panting, breathing.
Finally I managed to create a hole in the window large enough to escape through. First my head, then my shoulders — I pushed my way out of the cab and fell onto the ground.
For a moment I lay there, unsure of what to do. I considered popping my head up above the hood, waving a white shirt, and surrendering to the men who must still be nearby, but they would likely shoot me. Then I heard them shouting gleefully, probably thinking I lay dead inside the car.
So I began to crawl away, along the median. I lay on my belly and made myself as flat as possible. I smeared my face as far down into the dirt as I could, filling my mouth with it. I closed my eyes, ostrich-like, and tried to keep my movements as infinitesimal as possible as I crawled forward.
A few more shots rang outrandomly. I lay still for a moment, wondering if they had seen me, trying not to breathe too much.
A dung beetle appeared next to my face, moving doggedly. I had never seen a more endearing creature, with its perfectly rounded shell; its crooked, spiny legs; and its measured gait.
It was going in the same direction. I began to crawl again, too. I must have crawled on my belly for at least another hundred yards, like a lizard, pushing my legs up to my hips and back down, swivelling my torso as I did. Please, I kept muttering to myself, please, please, please. And fuck: Fuck, fuck, fuck.
And then I heard a low rumble in the distance. It was faint at first, and then it grew louder, and unmistakably stronger. It was the US army coming my way. The first vehicles that arrived were tanks.
The only people visible in them were a couple of small, goggle-wearing heads, like warts on a turtle. They rolled on by. I began to wave. As more tanks passed, trucks began to appear, then some Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but those too passed. I got up some courage and stood up. I began to wave more vigorously, and started to run alongside the convoy as it passed. Pretty soon I was running as fast as I could, shouting at the top of my lungs.
Eventually a few soldiers began waving back at me, like beauty queens on a float. “Stop,” I kept yelling, “I’m an American.”
A Humvee pulled out of the line and rolled off to the side of the road. The man in the passenger seat beckoned me over through the window. I approached with my hands up in the air.
“I’m an American,” I said. “I got attacked. Please help me.”
The soldier had his hand on his pistol. “What are you doing out here?” he asked.
“I’m a reporter,” I said. “Reporter. I’m American.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Newsweek. Newsweek magazine.”
His face broke into a broad smile. “Really? Cool. Get in.”
*Scott C Johnson was a Newsweek foreign correspondent and bureau chief for 12 years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and elsewhere. Excerpt from The Wolf and the Watchman by Scott C Johnson.
The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded the deaths of at least 150 journalists and 54 media support workers in Iraq between the invasion in Mar 2003 and Dec 2011, when the war was declared over. The number offatalities was higher than any other wartime death toll for the press on record.
CPJ noted another substantial difference between media casualties in Iraq and other conflicts: The majority of journalists killed in Iraq were victims of targeted killings.
“In Syria, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, combat-related crossfire has accounted for a large proportion of deaths,” said CPJ. “But in Iraq, at least 92 journalists, or nearly two out of every three killed, did not die in air strikes, checkpoint shootings, suicide bombings, sniper fire, or the detonation of improvised explosive devices.
“They were instead murdered in targeted assassinations in direct reprisal for their reporting. Many were targeted because of their affiliations with US or Western news organisations, or their connections to news outlets seen as having sectarian connections.”
The vast majority of journalists and media workers killed were also Iraqi, CPJ reported.
Reporters Without Borders highlighted the heavy death toll in Iraq in 2010. At the time, the organisation reported that the Iraq War had claimed the lives of more journalists than any conflict since the Second World War.
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