Buying the Night Flight (47 page)

Yet I was never without hope. The world had come to a point where I could, after all my searchings, see clearly two major developments: (1) Marxism, which I had studied and suffered over firsthand, had worked nowhere, and (2) democracy was the only workable system, and never had it been more attractive to the peoples of the world. And this despite our often woeful policies!

Moreover, Marxism, it was now utterly clear to me, was simply another way of oppressing man: but totally, in the soul as well as over the body. Its mind-controlling elements, which had fascinated and confused and frightened me in the beginning, I could now see as part of a history that stemmed from ancient Persia to the trances of Khomeini's Iran today ... and continued later in the hysteria of an Argentina over the Falkland Islands. On the other hand, I had come to see that the democracy and democratic ideals I had always loved were more than just a system, more than just a balance of passions and forces; they were in themselves an ideology, for the basic compromise inherent in democracy was at heart an abiding respect for the uniqueness and for the individuality of our fellow man.

People were always asking me why, after having seen so many horrible things, most of us foreign correspondents did not become hardened, or deeply depressed, or even suicidal, and I think there are psychological explanations for that too. Like fear, depression usually comes out of alienation, out of a feeling of being out of control of things. The correspondent, even while often seeing horrendous things, is seeing them for what they are; they are not abstract, and thus not so frightening (something that argues for as direct an experience as possible, on every level of life). Moreover, we also saw such wonderful things ....

***

Out of my "little countries" had arisen tragedy but also true saintliness, things that stay forever locked in my soul. Probably the single man I most admired -- and was privileged to know, if briefly -- was the great Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. Here was this simple man of Indian descent plunged into the archbishopric. Non-confrontational before, once in power he spoke with simple magnificence of the sufferings and needs of his people.

When I interviewed him that same Sandinista summer of 1979, I felt for the only time that I was truly in the presence of a great human being. He was a beautiful man. His skin, which came from his Indian ancestors, was a rich cocoa brown and, in his white priest's robes, he was a figure of eloquent colors. A radiance seemed to flow from him as though he were infected with so much good that his body could not hold it all.

At the end of the interview, which came just six months before he was assassinated -- as he said mass in his chapel -- by rightist gunmen of the same sort that had tried to kill me in Guatemala, I asked him, "Your Eminence, wouldn't it have been easier to have taken another road?"

He smiled that radiant smile, pausing and speaking slowly. "Perhaps it would have been easier not to have mixed myself in politics," he answered. "I could have just stayed quietly in the archbishop's palace." Then he smiled that radiant smile again. "But that would not have been very easy either, would it? I did what my conscience asked." He paused. "I feel a great freedom," he said finally.

What was so special about Archbishop Romero -- truly one of the three or four most impressive men I have ever met -- was that his anger sprung from no ideology. He was a simple priest. He just couldn't bear killings and injustice. It wasn't a self-conscious or even conscious thing; it was a response as normal and uncomplicated in some people as hunger or thirst -- or the need for God. That was why "it would not have been very easy" for him to take any other road.

That's a funny thing -- it never is.

Buying the Night Flight

"There is no buying the night flight, with its hundred thousand stars, its serenity and its moment of sovereignty."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It was late November of 1980, a gloomily dark Friday afternoon, and I was standing in a melancholy mood looking out at the sparkling lights of downtown Chicago. John Fischetti, the magnificent political cartoonist, the big, glowing man with the big, booming voice, was gone. John had been a power in all of our lives with his wanton generosity and boundless spirits; he was one of those rare human beings on whom all the others lean for protection and for renewal. Another of the great "band of brothers" of the
Chicago Daily News
was gone. Life was passing, too rapidly.

One of the speakers at John's simple but impressive service at the Fourth Presbyterian Church praised John's "childlike" nature, how he was able to see things anew every day and, despite everything, never lose his great sustaining human power. It was so true. Like all the really great journalists, he was not childish but he was childlike, which only meant that he kept the ability always to see things new, and to respond with genuineness and spontaneity.

Watching the glimmering, blinking lights of my city that afternoon--lights that go on again and again, regardless of which one of us passes into human darkness -- I felt wave after wave of intense emotion. Then I began to think, as John would have wanted me to, of what I was just about to do. There swept over me the strangest mixture of feelings of inner excitement, and fear, and satisfaction too, for the next day I was going to Iraq -- I was going to Baghdad to try to get the first firsthand story of why they had started the war with the Ayatollah Khomeini's diabolical Iran. And the stakes were higher than any I have previously rolled for.

There had been enough madness the last year for any civilization to absorb -- American hostages held by chanting, maddened mobs in Teheran; the Arab world in ferment with desert-haunted tribesmen under a "messiah" holding the great mosque at Mecca; threat after threat of the oil flow stopping underneath our eyes -- and now there was more: Khomeini was sending Shi'ite agents across the Arab borders from Persia, just as the early Moslems had sent their legions across North Africa, into Spain, and to their final, fateful battle at Tours. Borders would fall (that was his mad and destructive dream) and regimes would perish under the religious dream of spiritual and political conquest driven by a half-sane old man sitting cross-legged and scowling in Qum. And the West was faced with dual fears of ancient holy wars destroying the already fragile borders and of the oil supplies already burning from Abadan to Kirkuk.

Under the harsh Arab Ba'athist government of President Saddam Hussein, Iraq had then attacked, not in religious hordes but in harsh military formation, across the Iraqi-Iranian borders. I was going into the heart of modern political darkness.

The questions to which I wanted answers were as clear as their answers were then obscure: Why had the Iraqis started the war? What did they hope to gain? Would they take the Iranian oil fields? Did they want to destroy Khomeini? The western industrialized world? What, now, did this leftist government, until now virtually allied with the Soviet Union, want from the United States? Was there any change in its always bitterly hard-line position on the Arab-Israeli conflict?

The answers to these questions were critical to the United States -- and yet, having no direct diplomatic representation in Baghdad, we had no answers. Once again we journalists -- now also become the new "diplomats" -- were the ones who stepped in.

***

This time, however, I was not going blind or on chance, the way I used to go, hoping for luck or fortune or rain. Now I had prepared the situation as carefully as a Chinese cook prepares the Szechuan duck, or a Russian cook the fine pelmeny. I had woven a fine web, using and calling upon every contact and pressure that I could bring to bear to influence the Iraqi leadership to talk to me. (Men in the field, incidentally, use the word
grid
where I used
web
, an interesting male-female distinction.)

Looking out over the city that evening, I felt an odd sense of destiny. How many years ago had I been only, as Mike Royko and the people I knew put it, just a "goofy kid" dreaming improbable dreams? Yet now everything I had ever dreamed of had been more than fulfilled. And in a very real sense everything I had ever done seemed to lead directly to this assignment.

First, once I got the idea, I had contacted an American of Lebanese birth who knew the Iraqis well. He contacted them, explaining my plan. The fact that I had been the first Westerner to interview the Iraqi strongman, Saddam Hussein, in 1973 was an extremely helpful card. Next I called the Jordanians. Since they were strongly backing the Iraqis in the war, I asked if they could put in good words for me with the Iraqis; they would. Last I contacted a prominent Palestinian of Christian birth and asked him to intercede with his good friend, Tareq Aziz, the Christian thinker who was the spokesman for the regime and close to Saddam.

All the years of experience, all the lines I had thrown out over the years, the nights I had pored over history books, the friends I had made -- suddenly all of it was pulling together. Abadan was then blazing, sending the industrialized world into spasms. Much of the future, East and West, could rightly be said to depend upon the outcome of this war.

Had the romantic "little girl" from the South Side of Chicago finally grown up? Well, let's not carry things too far.

***

The plane landing in Jordan carried me again to a friendly world I knew well. But now it was only a dropping-off spot. I was moving on as quickly as possible to the hostile world of Baghdad.

But the first night in the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman, where I had stayed so many times, I immediately ran into my "pals" in the hotel and we began to indulge in our usual crazy exchange of ideas.

Could we really be considered "serious" people? One advanced very soberly the knowledge that you could always get a seat alone, with space to stretch out and sleep, on Air India in the following hallowed manner: You choose the smoking area, naturally, to avoid the families with children. Then you ask for the second seat in one of the four-seat rows in the center. This means that very probably no one else will come and it's all yours, particularly on weekdays. Good sound advice for people for whom a great deal of one's time is involved in getting around the world with as little hassle as possible.

That night, for some reason, I also realized in what a very special way this life freed me. Even at forty-five, when one should have long ago exorcised one's demons, the restraints for me fell away when I got overseas. It wasn't that I acted differently; it was that I felt differently about my actions.

Hesitations, shyness, guilt -- all fell away like a snake's skin in molting season. Suddenly I had been doing this so long and so conceitedly that I had come to the precious point where I simply knew things. And yet the work was only the more exciting for being effortless. No longer did I consciously have to think about every single element of every single case. Now certain things were simply given; they fell into place naturally. There was no shortcut about it because it was only the years of experience that made it happen.

That night we stood around the bar, and Youssef Ibrahim of
The New York Times
and Bill Claiborne of
The Washington Post
and I pondered aloud our odd profession. "What could be better,"
Youssef asked, "than to work all day in some fascinating country at some world event nobody else sees to have access to everyone and then, in the evening, to sit around with your friends and be further amused."

We left for Baghdad by old and dirty taxi one day later, traveling down from the hills around Amman to the long, 750-mile gray, rocky "desert" -- a very poor man's desert when one compares it to the glorious reds and purples of Jordan's Wadi Rum or Egypt's delicate sands by the Nile -- and the trip was long and always the same.

While traveling with Bill and Youssef, two remarkably fine companions; I noticed some of the subtle changes in the correspondent nowadays. First of all, Bill soon brought out his "ears," the two electronic earphones that allowed him to listen, privately, to rock and roll all the way to Baghdad. Youssef kept the "ears" on while punching the telex. It was a way of shutting out the unpleasant parts and living your own life, even in the midst of all of this.

Such great early explorers and writers as the wonderful Englishwoman, Freya Stark, had taken this road. In 1937 she opened her book
Baghdad Sketches
with the line: "In a very short time a railway will link Baghdad with Europe." So much for predictions.

When we finally hit the Jordanian-Iraqi border, it was dark and cold. Winds howled now across the great plain here that separated antiquity's old land of Mesopotamia, to which we were going, from King Hussein's modem, rational kingdom. Egyptian-born Youssef strolled out of the immigration shacks shaking his head. "They want to keep our typewriters," he said. Then, dryly, "I told them we were journalists, and they said they had never seen journalists with typewriters before."

He got us through, forbidden typewriters and all, but it was another reminder to me of the closed and suspicious part of this world. In Iraq, as in many other countries, typewriters must be licensed and registered; they are looked upon as propaganda devices and are thus dangerous. Later, when I told a Jordanian minister, with some irony, about our scene at the border, he narrowed his eyes and said with sad mischief, "The Iraqi was probably telling the truth. In their country they probably never had seen a journalist with a typewriter before."

***