Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (11 page)

Every story has a smell. I don’t always notice it at first. Sometimes it takes days before it weaves itself into the fabric of my clothing, and sinks into some dark corner of my cortex, becoming memory. I come home, I can’t smell a thing.

That night, lying on the well-worn mattress in my dingy room, listening to the tap drip and the mechanical laughter of the
matatu
minibuses on the street outside, I cried. It was the first time in years.

SOMALIA GOT ME
a full-time job as a correspondent with
Channel One.
That’s what I’d wanted. That’s what I’d been hoping for. When I actually got it, however, it didn’t feel so good.

The pictures of the man and woman washing the body of their dead child caused a stir among many schools that aired
Channel One
in their classrooms. Some schools held raffles and bake sales to raise money for Somalia relief.

“I’m building a career on the misery of others,” I said to a friend.

“You’re not doing that,” she told me. “You’re informing others about the plight of people who are suffering.” Perhaps—but the irony was, the more sadness I saw, the more success I had. After I got back from Somalia,
Channel One
gave me a two-year contract.

In Somalia, the relief flights continued for several months, but it became clear that much of the food wasn’t getting to the starving. Once it left the planes, it was ripped off by the warlords who ruled the streets. The U.S. military announced plans for a humanitarian mission, to secure the distribution of aid—Operation Restore Hope they called it. In December 1992, some three months after I’d first gone to Somalia,
Channel One
asked me to go back, so I could be there when U.S. troops landed.

I flew to Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, a crumbling city of shell-pocked villas, streets strewn with torn-up pavement, and lights that hadn’t worked in years. The main hotel in Mogadishu was fully booked for the invasion, taken over by dozens of international journalists. Satellite dishes covered the roof, a few scattered mattresses lay in halls for those like me, unable to find rooms.

It was the first time I saw the U.S. military and the U.S. media in action up close. American troops came ashore under the glare of camera lights, broadcast live around the world. Soon after, the military sent in its public affairs officers, PR troops waving lists of free rides on choppers and tours of ships, for journalists desperate to file a story. It seemed that everybody was spinning in those days, crafting the message for mass consumption. Photo ops, exclusive sit-downs, walkabouts. Uncle Sam gave you access if you made a deal.

It was a game you could get trapped in. You needed them because they controlled the scene; they needed you because they wanted their message out. They fed you, you ate it up, and tried not to soil yourself along the way.

Several days after the invasion, I rode on a chopper out to the USS
Tripoli
—just me and a newspaper reporter and photographer.

“What do you think about this?” the navy press officer yelled to the print reporter, above the din of the helicopter. “The entire crew of the
Tripoli
on deck spelling out ‘Thank you, America’?”

“Sounds like a front-page photo to me,” she said grinning.

SOMALIA HAD ITS
own rules, its own codes, very different from our own. All I saw the first time was the starvation, the gunmen, but the picture was far more complex. There was an order to it; I just didn’t realize it at first. It was like walking into a darkened theater; it took time for your eyes to adjust.

In the beginning, Somalis seemed thankful that the U.S. military had arrived, but the longer we stayed the less welcome we all became.

One day, a French military jeep stopped in front of the hotel; the squeaking of brakes got my attention. A Somali woman wrapped in bright fabric got out of the passenger seat. Out of the swirl of the street a hand grabbed her. Someone called her a whore. The crowd seemed to gel. Fists and feet thrust at her; she twisted about. She may have cried or tried to explain, but I couldn’t hear her above the yells of the mob. The men in back pushed for a better view, jostled for their chance to strike.

The woman spinned, grabbed a knife from one of the watermelon sellers outside the hotel entrance. I climbed onto the wall of the courtyard and turned on my camera. With one eye I peered through the viewfinder at the woman in grainy black and white striking out at the crowd with the knife. With the other eye, I watched, in color, the men laughing as she tried to fend them off. She was close, just below me. Between us there was only a parked car. I could have jumped down, tried to lift her to safety. I thought about it, but did nothing. I worried that the mob would grab me as well, or that I might make things worse for her by intervening. Maybe I was just scared.

Someone took the knife away from her; her top got ripped, exposing one of her breasts—a shocking sight in this covered-up culture. A convoy of U.S. marines drove by; they slowed to honk at the crowd. A few marines craned their necks to see what the commotion was about, but the crowd let them pass. The convoy sped on.

A pipe whizzed past my head, landing in the courtyard behind me. Some Somalis began yelling at me and at a couple of other reporters who were watching. They didn’t want us taping them.

I suppose I should have stopped then, climbed down from the wall. I knew the video probably wouldn’t make air—the attack was of no real consequence—but that didn’t matter to me at the time. I thought that by taping this attack, I was somehow taking a stand, showing these men that they were being watched, that people saw and cared what they were doing. It sounds so foolish now.

I closed my outer eye and watched through the viewfinder, detached in black and white as the men faced me, shouting, waving their hands, shaking their fists. It was silent, as I remember it; my only thought: Whom should I focus on? I once heard about a police officer who’d responded to a domestic dispute in a housing project. When he walked into the apartment there was a man pointing a gun at him. The cop knew that if he moved, the man would shoot, so he released all the tension from his body and projected nothing. No fear, no hostility, no threat. He thought of himself as invisible, and the gunman left. Standing on the wall, looking through my camera’s viewfinder, I felt as if I weren’t even there.

Finally, someone grabbed my legs from behind, tugging at my jeans. It was another reporter inside the courtyard.

“Get down,” he yelled, and I started to lower myself from the wall. Before I dropped, I looked for the woman. I caught just a glimpse of her. She was being led away by several men in the crowd. I never found out what happened to her. I never saw her again.

FOR THE NEXT
two years, I traveled continually for
Channel One.
Bosnia came next, then Croatia, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Israel, Cambodia, Haiti, Indonesia, South Africa. Wherever there was conflict, I wanted to go.

In May 1994, I headed to Rwanda. The genocide was well under way. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus had already been killed. Many more would die before it was over. The mostly Tutsi army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front was advancing on the capital, Kigali. They were on the verge of victory and had vowed to stop the killings. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus were streaming for the borders. With blood on their hands, they slinked into Tanzania and Zaire, hoping to lose their sin in the crush of the crowd. Their piles of weapons were the first thing you noticed when you crossed into Rwanda. The weapons and the bodies.

Most were naked, swollen grotesquely by gases and water. There were at least a dozen of them, bobbing up and down, at the base of a small waterfall underneath the bridge you had to cross to get into Rwanda from Tanzania. It was hard to count how many; they twisted and turned in the tide, their arms flailed about in the churning water. I noticed the body of a child stuck between two rocks. His arms shook as waves of water washed over him. I watched him for several minutes. I couldn’t look away. I kept wondering if his body would somehow become dislodged, break free. It never did. Not while I was there, at least. Breathing on the bridge was difficult. When I opened my mouth, the spray from the falls filled it with the taste of rotted flesh.

The bodies floated downstream, about one a minute. I actually stood there and timed them. I heard that thousands of bodies floated all the way to Lake Victoria in Uganda, where the UN paid locals a dollar a corpse to fish them out.

The border was controlled by the Rwandan Patriotic Front. When I first approached them, I tried to be diplomatic.

“I’d like to see some of the local areas,” I explained to a soldier in army green fatigues and red Converse hightops.

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Don’t you want to see the massacres?” he asked. The rebels knew all about the value of good public relations. “We will help design a program that meets all your needs,” he promised.

His name was Lieutenant Tony. He took us into Rwanda the next day.

I’d rented a car in Tanzania, but I didn’t tell the driver where we were headed because I was afraid he wouldn’t go. I said we were just driving to the border. The joke was on me, though. Since he didn’t think we were going far, he didn’t fill the tank with gas. We had only a few gallons. So every time we passed a rebel vehicle, we had to stop and beg them for a few liters of fuel.

“Please, we have a war to run, you know,” Lieutenant Tony complained whenever we stopped for gas. “We don’t have much petrol left ourselves. We can’t give it away.”

“We’d be happy to buy some,” I said.

“Please, let’s continue,” he responded.

That’s how our conversation went for several hours.

YOU SMELLED THE
bodies before you saw them, but the truth is, after a while, you stopped seeing them altogether. Even monstrosities can become mundane if you stand too close.

On the side of a road we came upon five bodies. They were lying in a row, partially hidden in a field of grass. For a moment, I thought maybe they were only resting, a family that had stopped to nap on their way to market. They were dead, of course. Exposed to the elements, they seemed to have shrunk, their skin stretched over their bones like leather. There was a little girl. I could just make out tufts of hair on her withered scalp. Next to her was a woman in a dirty white blouse. Her hand rested on the man she lay next to. At first I thought she was wearing a glove. It seemed partially removed. Then I realized that it was her skin. Hardened by the sun, it had peeled off. So had the soles of her feet. I’d never seen anything like it. Her face had decomposed as well. Her teeth were visible still attached to her jaw. She appeared to be smiling.

No one said anything. We stood listening to the buzzing of flies and the cries of a vulture circling overhead, waiting for us to leave.

“Bastards,” my producer muttered, as he looked over the scene.

I remember thinking how strange it was that he said that. He was cursing the people who had done this, I knew that, but I thought it odd that he was taking it so personally. I didn’t realize that I was the odd one for not doing so.

I stepped over the bodies, bent down, took out my cheap instamatic camera, and took close-up pictures of the woman’s hand. Click. Click. Weeks later, when I got the photos developed, the clerk in the drugstore looked at me, disgusted. When I saw the photos, I understood why. I’d crossed some marker, stepped over a line. The corpses were mixed in with pictures of smiling soldiers and of my camera crew, souvenir snapshots I’d taken for my scrapbook. At the time I’d seen nothing inappropriate about this. But later I realized that it was time to stop, time to seek out other kinds of assignments.

In Somalia, when I’d started my career two years before, each body came as a shock. I used to imagine the lives they’d led. The father coming home from work, perhaps a teacher. The mother raising the children. I pictured them alive, around a table, talking about their day. That, for me, was always the saddest part. The fact that no one would remember their passing. Their history, their squabbles, the joys they’d experienced—all of it just dissolved with their bodies on the side of a road. They’d simply disappeared.

In Rwanda, however, I no longer thought about who these people were. I was transfixed by the details of their death. Fascinated with the stages of decay, the surprise of rigor mortis, I’d forgotten what I was really looking at.

The more you’ve seen, the more it takes to make you see. The more it takes to affect you. That is why you’re there, after all—to be affected. To be changed. In Somalia, I’d started off searching for feeling. In Rwanda, I ended up losing it again.

“My heart is too full,” I told my boss soon after I got back. I didn’t want to see any more death. I think he thought I wanted more money, but the truth was, I’d simply had enough. Months later my contract with
Channel One
expired, and I decided to leave. I got an offer from
ABC News.
I was incredibly flattered, but I also thought it was funny. I hadn’t been able to get an entry-level job at ABC in 1992. Just three years later, they were asking me to become a correspondent. They told me I’d be working mainly in the United States, which was fine by me. I needed to stop searching the world for feeling. I needed to find it closer to home.

Katrina

FACING THE STORM

I
T BEGINS AS
a breeze, barely noticed, brushing the land where man was born. A bush pilot flying out of Kisangani might have found himself buffeted by a surprisingly strong current of air, or a farmer on a rocky Rwandan slope stretching his back as he stood could have felt the cool wind on his face. But it’s not until the third week of August 2005 that meteorologists take note of a powerful tropical wave of wind and water moving slowly off the coast of West Africa. It crosses the Atlantic and feeds off the warm waters of the Bahamas, growing in size and strength. On August 24 it becomes a tropical storm, and automatically is assigned the next name on a list created by the National Hurricane Center: Katrina.

I’m on a boat with friends off the coast of Croatia, sailing in the crisp blue waters of the Adriatic. This is my second attempt this year to have a vacation, after cutting short my trip to Rwanda in July to go to Niger. I’ve resisted checking my e-mails for several days, but my BlackBerry is on and when it begins to ring, I know it’s not good.

“Sorry, buddy, but you need to come back,” David Doss, my executive producer, tells me.

Katrina becomes a hurricane on Thursday, August 25, and that evening it hits southern Florida. Twelve people die. Over land, the storm weakens, but once it returns over water, this time the Gulf of Mexico, it begins to re-form.

Saturday morning, I fly out of Dubrovnik, bound for Houston. In Louisiana, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco hold a press conference, asking city residents to leave. Nagin and Blanco don’t, however, make the evacuation mandatory. That evening, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center calls the mayor to warn him personally of the seriousness of the storm. It’s only the second time he’s called a politician to do that.

New Orleans’ emergency plan requires authorities to provide buses to evacuate the one hundred thousand residents without access to transportation. No buses, though, are organized to get people out of the city. On Sunday, over the central Gulf of Mexico, Katrina turns northwest as expected, becoming a monstrous category 5 hurricane. Sustained winds 175 miles per hour. The mayor and governor finally declare a mandatory evacuation.

I arrive in Houston late Sunday and drive to Baton Rouge. I get there around 1:00
A.M.
on Monday, just as the outer bands of rain are beginning to hit. It’s another hour-and-a-half drive to New Orleans, but when I call into my office, they tell me that the roads are closed. I am furious with myself for getting there late, but it turns out that CNN has pulled its satellite trucks from New Orleans because they anticipate flooding. Even if I were able to get there, I couldn’t broadcast during the storm, so I decide to ride it out in Baton Rouge, then head to New Orleans as soon as it’s over.

Katrina is the sixth major hurricane I’ve covered in the last fifteen months, the second one this year. I never used to understand people’s fascination with the weather. One of the great joys of living in New York is that I’m able to ignore what little bit of sky I ever see. Since covering Hurricane Charley in 2004, however, I’ve continually volunteered to report on hurricanes. It’s not just the storm itself that I find compelling, but also the hours before and after. There is a stillness, quietness. Stores are shut, homes boarded up. In many ways it feels like a war zone.

A few hours before Hurricane Charley made landfall, I checked into a waterfront hotel in Tampa, Florida. The manager, a large woman with a small parrot perched on her head, agreed to let me stay if I signed a waiver absolving the hotel of any responsibility for my safety. As I signed the paper, the parrot defecated on the woman’s shoulder.

“She’s just a little nervous about the s-t-o-r-m,” the woman said, spelling the word out, worried the parrot would hear.

Reporting on a hurricane, you depend on your skills for survival; it’s all in your hands. You rent an SUV, load it up with water, food, whatever supplies you can buy; gas cans, coolers, and ice are always the hardest to find. In a war, you head to the front; in a hurricane you head to water. You pick your location as if you’re planning an ambush. You want a spot near the water, so you can see the storm surge, but you need to be on high ground so you don’t get flooded when the water rises. You don’t want too many trees or signposts near you, because they can become airborne and turn into flying missiles in high winds. You also need several fallback positions so that as the storm intensifies, you can retreat to ever more secure locations.

In Baton Rouge, a team of CNN engineers has already found a riverfront location on a pier. There’s a big building several hundred yards away that can protect the satellite truck. As long as the satellite dish works, you can broadcast, so keeping it safe is essential. The problem is, the dish acts as a sail. It can get picked up by a strong wind, causing the truck it’s attached to to flip over. You have to find a spot where the satellite truck is protected by a building on at least two sides. That way even when the hurricane winds shift, the dish will not be directly hit.

After covering several hurricanes, you start to know what to expect. At first the winds just pick up gently. Then it starts to rain. Your fancy Gore-Tex clothing keeps you dry for about thirty minutes; then the water starts to seep in. Within an hour you’re completely wet. Your feet slosh around in your boots, and your hands are wrinkled and white. If you’ve ever wondered what your skin will look like when you’re eighty-five, try standing in a hurricane for a few hours.

Katrina comes ashore at 6:10
A.M.
, on Monday near Buras, Louisiana. The sustained winds are estimated to be 125 miles per hour, a category 3 hurricane. In Baton Rouge, conditions deteriorate rapidly. What seemed like high winds just a few hours ago now seem calm by comparison. The electricity goes out, transformers explode, lighting up the darkened sky with greenish blue flares. I can’t see any debris flying through the air; I can only hear it: the snap of tree branches, the twisting of signs, aluminum roofs ripping loose. You can’t tell where the noise is coming from or where the debris is headed.

Between live shots I sit inside my SUV, dripping in steamy darkness. As the storm intensifies, other reporters’ transmissions get knocked off the air, so the network starts coming back to me more and more—live shot after live shot. Chris Davis, my cameraman, can barely see through his viewfinder, but he keeps working, steadying himself against the railing of the pier. After a while I’m just repeating myself: “It’s really blowing now…and the rain, it’s torrential.” There’s really not much else to say. It’s water and it’s wind. How many ways are there to describe them?

You see weird stuff in a storm: floating Coke machines, boats washed up on roads. During Hurricane Frances, two guys in a brand-new Humvee with
HURRICANE RESEARCH TEAM
printed on the side pulled into the marina where we were working. From their matching yellow raincoats, I assumed they were scientists, but it turned out they were just two guys with a storm fetish. I last saw them around 1:00
A.M.
They were hooting and hollering and videotaping each other getting tossed around by 110-mile-per-hour gusts of wind.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the excitement, easy to forget that while you are talking on TV, someone is cowering in a closet with their kids, or drowning in their own living room.

After Hurricane Charley, I drove around Punta Gorda, Florida, surveying the damage. There was aluminum siding wrapped around trees, shockingly silver in the morning sun; a family’s photo album lay in the street; a sofa sat on top of a car. A relief official mistakenly said that there were a dozen or more bodies at one trailer park, and all the morning-show reporters in mobile news vans crisscrossed the small town searching for the dead. They’d slow down and ask local residents if they knew of a nearby trailer park where “something” had happened. (No one wanted to come right out and ask, “Seen any dead people around here?”)

In the end, the real power of a hurricane isn’t found in its wind speed. It’s in what it leaves behind—the lives lost, the lives changed, the memories obliterated in a gust of wind. Anyone who does hurricane reporting for any length of time knows all too well that standing in the aftermath of a storm is much more difficult than standing in the storm itself, no matter how hard the winds blow.

At the height of Katrina, I’m holding on to the railing of a pier, surrounded by a whirling wall of white. Between live shots, my arms stretch out, my eyes close, I don’t care if anyone sees. The storm is a phantom, rearing, retreating, charging. It spins and slaps, pirouettes and punishes. I’m submerged in water, corseted by the air. I lean my shoulders into the wind, spread my legs so I don’t fall when the gust weakens. If I shift the wrong way, it will take me. I could just let it. I’ve felt the tug. A few more steps and I’d be gone. Crushed by the wall of water and wind. It’s that close. I can feel it.

It sounds a little crazy, perhaps, but you do get caught up in the challenge, trying to stay on air, trying to get as close as you can. During Hurricane Ivan, in 2004, I kept insisting on staying out longer and longer. We were on a balcony in Mobile, Alabama, a perfect spot to witness the storm. At one point, my producers tied a rope around my leg so they could pull me back if I got knocked down. Finally, they insisted we move inside. I reluctantly agreed.

In Baton Rouge, for a while I can’t see the camera lens because of the rain. It doesn’t really matter, though; I know what I’m supposed to say: “I am powerless in the face of the storm.” That’s what reporters always say. “The storm’s a reminder of how weak we humans really are.” Right now, however, at this moment, I don’t feel any of that. I feel invincible. The storm whips around me, flows through me. I am able to work, to stand, even when it’s at its worst. The satellite dish is up, we are on the air, we’re just about the only ones left. We have beaten the elements. We have won.

BY NOON THE
worst of it is over. Katrina is moving on, heading toward Mississippi. I want nothing more to do with it. That’s the way it always is. The wind weakens, the adrenaline wanes, and my body shuts down. Face scrubbed raw, whipped for hours by the elements, eyes itching, I long for sleep, but have to stay up, look for survivors, locate the dead. We do a quick reconnaissance around Baton Rouge and see that the damage is limited. There’s no word on when the road into New Orleans will reopen, and I have to be on the air again in seven hours, so my producer, John Murgatroyd, and I decide to follow the storm as it heads east. We want to catch the tail end of it.

We leave the satellite truck, and head to Meridian, Mississippi, where we think the storm is going. We’re told that another satellite truck will meet us there. Wet, tired, we pile into the SUV, drive east, then north, constantly buffeted by dangerously high winds. The speedometer says we’re going a hundred miles per hour. I try not to check it all that much; we have to beat the storm.

Near Jackson, trees are down, roads are flooded. It’s raining so hard we can barely see where we are. We finally find the satellite truck, by a boarded-up gas station on the outskirts of Meridian. It’s not an ideal spot from which to broadcast, but we have no choice. We’re expected to go live in half an hour. It takes about twenty minutes for the engineer to set up, and when we finally connect to New York on the satellite, I can hear people in the control room nervously yelling, checking our audio levels, trying to fix some problems with the picture we are sending them. The minutes tick by. With thirty seconds to go, we’re still trying to make sure our transmission is working. Ten seconds before airtime I’m told we’re good to go.

We stay on the air for several hours, during which Katrina is downgraded to a tropical storm. By 10:00
P.M
. we’re done. We’re almost out of fuel, but luckily CNN has gotten us reservations in nearby Philadelphia, Mississippi. Amazingly, a casino run by Choctaw Indians is still open for business.

During big storms most hotels shut their doors. Casinos, however, always try to stay open. They’ll do whatever it takes to keep the slots running and the cash coming in. When we arrive, a few elderly ladies, blue tint–washed hair, sit at the slots, pulling the levers, their eyes fixed on the flashing lights. When I get into my room, the smell of mildew is overwhelming. The window is broken; it must have happened during the storm. Water is running down the wall, spreading onto the carpet like a bloodstain. My eyes ache, my feet throb. Sleep is close; it’s just on the other side of my eyelids. All I have to do is lie down. Breathe. Close my eyes.

MY FATHER DIDN’T
like gambling, at least as a teenager. I know this because when he was sixteen he wrote a letter to the
Meridian Star
about gambling’s negative effects. I found a copy of the newspaper recently, in a scrapbook he kept as a kid. It was sitting in storage, in a box of his papers I’d never gone through.

“Many a person who has strayed from the straight and narrow way began his erring at some slot machine dive,” he wrote. I laughed when I read the letter. It sounded so priggish, his teenage voice so unlike the open-minded man I remember.

Quitman, Mississippi, where he was born, is just a few miles south of Meridian. During World War II his family moved to New Orleans, but they didn’t stay there for long. When they came back to Mississippi, they settled in Meridian. My grandmother opened a general store, and my father worked as an announcer at the local radio station while taking classes at the junior college.

I was eight when my father took my brother and me to Mississippi to see where he was born. We drove out to Quitman, to where their house had been, but found no sign of it, just some faded bricks where the chimney once stood. He’d grown up in a small wooden house on some 250 acres of farm and pasture land. The barns were gone as well, the wood long since rotted. The pasture, the peach orchard, the cotton fields had been reclaimed by trees and underbrush, buried under canyons of kudzu.

We’d walked around Quitman, stopping in at stores, running into old friends my father had gone to school with.