Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (8 page)

THE DAY BEFORE
Baghdad’s 2005 interim presidential elections, Iraqi security forces are on heightened alert. Getting anywhere in the city is difficult because of all the roadblocks, and I spend a lot of time working out of the cluster of small houses that CNN rents in a heavily guarded neighborhood.

Sometimes the city doesn’t feel that dangerous, but just when you think this, a bomb goes off or someone gets kidnapped. Sitting in the office you see the numbers come across your computer screen, an endless string of press releases that never make it on air: Three policemen kidnapped. One Iraqi soldier killed. A grenade tossed into a store. A surgeon shot to death outside his home. No names, just bodies. So many small acts of terror that, after awhile, you lose track of them all.

Most reporters stay at one of several large hotels. When I first came to Iraq, in June 2004, CNN stayed at the Palestine, but the security situation there kept getting worse, so we relocated. On the roof of the Palestine is a labyrinth of makeshift shacks, rented out by news agencies. Each allows reporters standing in them to have a backdrop of Firdos Square, where the Saddam statue was torn down. At night on the roof, with the bright camera lights in your face, you make a tempting target, and sometimes a security guard has to stand in the shadows, just off to the side, watching the street for signs of snipers.

There’s a dingy gift shop in the lobby of the hotel, with tacky trinkets, dust-covered knives, and cheap tins. I once bought a few boxes with Saddam’s picture on them, but most of the Saddam items were snatched up long ago.

The Palestine’s elevators are snail slow, and while waiting for them, people exchange death tolls like pleasantries. The first time I rode in the elevator, a South Korean woman with Birkenstocks and a DV camera whispered to a tanned American with a silver pompadour, “Did you hear? Three Iraqis were killed. IED.”

“Yeah, two policemen got killed in Mosul,” he responded.

When I stayed in the Palestine in 2004, our security guards warned us one morning of a potential attack. “We have a report some people might come door to door, killing non-Muslims,” one of the guards told me. It had happened in Saudi Arabia several weeks before, so the threat didn’t sound too far-fetched.

“We have a plan,” he told me confidently, and handed me two large pieces of wood. “Use these to barricade your door at night.”

“Two-by-fours?” I asked. “Wooden two-by-fours? Don’t you have something a little bit more hi-tech?”

He just shrugged and looked at me as if he thought me a wimp. Which of course, I was.

The attack never came, though the morning I left, insurgents fired on the hotel with rockets. They parked a bus loaded with mortars a few hundred yards from the Palestine. One hit the Sheraton, next door. Another, the nearby Baghdad Hotel. The weight of the rockets tipped the bus over, however, and most of the arsenal exploded. Two Iraqi guards were injured.

I’d worried about getting my morning wake-up call, and though a rocket slamming into the building next to me wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, it definitely got me out of bed in a hurry.

A few hours later, while I was on the tarmac boarding the plane, a mortar landed several hundred meters away. The impact was loud, the plume of smoke clearly visible.

“It’s all right…it’s all right,” a teenage baggage handler said, laughing. I’m still waiting to see if he was right.

ON ELECTION DAY
in January 2005, Baghdad is all but shut down. No cars, no traffic, roadblocks everywhere. In a small polling station, a local school, a line of men wait patiently to vote. American troops are on the roof of a nearby building; no sign of them though on the streets. The block is cordoned off. Iraqi National Guard soldiers man one checkpoint, Iraqi police another.

As I pass the barbed-wire barricade, a member of the Iraqi National Guard asks me to take his picture, proudly holding his American-made rifle. He is young, cocky, clearly proud of his service, the kind of soldier armies are made of.

“This weapon,” he says to me, slapping his rifle, “has made men, who think they are big men with RPGs, run like women on Haifa street. I swear by God, I shall fight forever.”

I smile and move on. A half-dozen cell phones sit on a cement block, confiscated from people going to vote. Cell phones are used by insurgents to detonate bombs, and therefore aren’t allowed near voting booths.

It’s quiet in the line of Iraqis waiting to vote. At the entrance to the school, a poster on the wall reads
DO NOT LIVE IN FEAR. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT TERRORISTS, YOU MIGHT BE QUALIFIED TO GET A REWARD
.

When people have finished voting, they dip their index finger in a jar of ink, a sign that they have done their duty. As they emerge from the school, many hold up their fingers, smiling at my camera.

“It’s worth all the bloodshed,” a man says looking at his finger. “This is going to determine the future of a nation and the people. Voting is a very good feeling.”

A woman dressed in black, her legs swollen with disease, is pushed in a wheelchair by her son. Her name is Badria Flayih and she is ninety years old. As I approach, she holds up her ink-stained finger.

“I wasn’t scared at all,” she announces, practically shouting. “I couldn’t sleep last night, I was so excited to come here and vote. May God save all Iraqis: Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds. We are all Iraqis—one nation.”

The line of men behind her breaks into applause.

REWIND. SOWETO.
May 1994. A crowd of women broke into applause when the polling station opened its doors. The line of voters wound through the sprawling South African slum, and from above I imagined a thick black snake, coiled amid the shanties and mud alleys. Elsewhere in Soweto I’d seen young boys and girls chanting slogans, dancing in small groups, but on the line there was patience. The women and men, the old and young, had waited so long already; a few hours more didn’t seem to matter very much.

There were so many theories back then, about what would happen when black South Africans finally took power—rumors of a guerrilla war fought by white Afrikaners, fears of what black rule would really mean.

Several weeks earlier I’d seen a young man shot to death. I was at a demonstration by the Inkatha Freedom Party against the African National Congress. It was in downtown Johannesburg, before downtown had completely fallen apart. Snipers in nearby buildings let off a couple of shots into the crowd. No one knew where the shots came from or which way to run.

“You can just as easily run into a bullet as run away from one,” a cameraman once told me. I didn’t run at all.

There was pandemonium, chaos, but standing watching it all unfold around me, I could break it down into hundreds of separate actions and reactions, a thousand different moments. An enraged old woman used a stick to hit a fallen Mandela campaign poster promising
A BETTER LIFE FOR ALL
. A half-dozen South African police tried to batter down the door of a building, while a female cop gripped the trigger of her shotgun, scanning the windows looking for shooters. Down the street, Asian hookers who worked out of a storefront whorehouse stood on a balcony in low-cut tops, their breasts squeezed between their elbows as they leaned straight-armed over the ledge trying to see what was happening.

The boy was perhaps fifteen. Shot once in the chest, he lay motionless on the ground. One of his red sneakers was by his side—it must have fallen off when he was shot—the other sneaker was still on his left foot. It had no laces. Four black policemen in riot gear dragged the boy’s body behind a concrete wall. His feet scraped the ground, and the remaining sneaker came off. The bullet hole in his chest was small, surrounded by just a thin trickle of blood.

After the shooting stopped, the police began covering the bodies with blankets or campaign posters—whatever they could find. I walked several blocks to a nearby store and bought bottles of soda and water. I sat on the curb and downed them one after the other. During the chaos, I’d forgotten that I was in the middle of a city. I’d forgotten everything about myself. All I felt was the rush, the adrenaline. Sitting on the street, I could still feel it. It took hours for it to fade.

I’d been on this corner before. Two years earlier I’d gotten out of a cab across the street. The white Afrikaner driver had been lecturing me about how blacks would never rule here.

“AIDS and public transportation will be the savior of Africa,” he told me.

He had picked me up outside a butcher’s shop on Rocky Street, where a sign read
MEAT MARKET
and the wall behind the counter was plastered with nude centerfolds.

“See, the black male has sex four to five times a week,” the driver had said matter-of-factly, “whereas the white person gets by with one to two times a week. So with AIDS, it’s going to solve the problem. Ninety-four to ninety-seven is the big die-off period. I figure if eighty percent of the blacks, and only twenty percent of the whites are infected, and most of them are drug addicts, homosexuals, and liberals, that’d rule out a future black government here.”

I didn’t argue with him. Everyone carried a gun in those days, and there wasn’t any point. On Election Day in Soweto, I thought about that cabdriver, and I thought about the young man I’d seen shot to death. We like to think we can predict the future. We like to think we understand the present. I’m not sure we ever do.

Niger

NIGHT SWEATS

I
CLOSE MY EYES
, pretend to sleep. Maybe I am sleeping. In Africa it’s hard to tell. Coiled in a dirty sheet, sweat-soaked, my hair matted with the day’s dust and grains of sand in my mouth, I dream about work, storylines, plots; I edit pictures in my head. I wake gasping for breath, unsure where I am. Niger. Rwanda. Somalia.

In Africa there are too many pictures, too many contrasts. You can’t catch them all. It’s like sticking your head out of a fast-moving car—you suffocate; it’s too much to take in. Amputations. Executions. Empty beds. Shuttered stores. Crippled kids. Wild-eyed gunmen. Stripped-down corpses. Crashed cars. Mass graves. Handmade tombstones. Scattered ammo. Half-starved dogs. Sniper warnings posted like billboards. Buses and boxcars stacked at intersections. Old men in boxy suits walking to jobs that don’t exist in offices that aren’t there. It all blurs together. Desert. Mountain. Rice paddy. Field. Farmers bent over. Heads rise as you pass. Eyes follow eyes. Little kids run to the road, stand frozen, not sure if they should be happy or scared. They keep their weight on their heels so they can run back at the lurch of the car, the crack of a shot. Houses, whole towns, nothing but rubble—roofs blown off, walls burnt out, crumbled. Desiccated, eviscerated, gutted, and flayed.

At some point though, the disorientation fades. You put it behind you; go on. There is an adventure waiting. Life happening. It’s not your life, but it’s as close as you’ll get. You want to see it all.

One minute you’re there—in it, stuck, stewing in the sadness, the loss, your shirt plastered to your back, your neck burned from the sun—then you’re gone, seatbelt buckled, cool air cascading down, ice in the glass. You are gliding above the earth, laughing.

I’M IN MARADI,
Niger. It’s late July 2005. A few days ago, I was in Rwanda with friends on vacation. I’d gone to see the mountain gorillas and to tour the new genocide museum. Not everyone’s idea of fun, perhaps, but I’ve never been very good at taking time off. I burn on beaches, and get bored really quickly. I had a couple of days left in Rwanda, and was watching TV in my hotel room, when a short report came on about starvation in Niger.

“According to a report by the United Nations, 3.5 million Nigeriens are at risk of starvation, many of them children,” the news anchor said, then moved on to something else.

I called CNN to see if I could go. My travel companions were pissed off, but not all that surprised. They were used to my bailing out on them at the last minute.

“Why would you want to go to Niger?” one of them asked when I told him of the change of plans.

“Why wouldn’t you want to go?” I responded.

“Um, because I’m normal,” he said, laughing.

I wished I knew how to explain it to them. It’s as if a window opens, and you realize the world has been re-formed. I wanted to see the starvation. I needed to remind myself of its reality. I worry that if I get too comfortable, too complacent, I’ll lose all feeling, all sensation.

The next day, I was on a plane, on my way. I’d been relieved of the burden of vacation. I was in motion once again, hurtling through space. Nothing was certain, but everything was clear.

BY ALL ESTIMATES,
Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. Ninety percent of it is desert, and even in good years, most people here barely get by. The average Nigerien woman gives birth eight times in her life, and one out of every four children dies before he reaches the age of five. One in four. It’s a staggering statistic, but not hard to imagine when you see how poor Nigeriens’ diet is, and what little access they have to medical care.

Even for adults, the summer months between the planting of crops and harvest is a difficult time. Nigeriens call it the hungry season, when they rely on grain stored up from the previous year to get by. In 2004 there was a drought, followed by an invasion of locusts. Crops were decimated, devoured, so now it’s 2005, and there’s no grain stored up. People are foraging for food, eating leaves off trees.

When you land in Niger, by the time you reach the end of the runway, Niamey International Airport is nowhere to be seen. On either side of the tarmac, sand and scrub brush stretch to the horizon.

The gin-swilling British businessman sitting next to me on the plane stares out the window and bursts into tears. “They have nothing,” he mumbles to no one. “The children are dying.”

“What’s your problem?” the Air France flight attendant asks as he saunters by.

“People are dying,” the businessman repeats.

“I know,” the attendant says. “People are dying every day, all over the world.” He was tired of dealing with drunks.

It is hard to see the hunger at first. In Niamey, chauffeur-driven Mercedes glide down potholed streets. Businessmen and bureaucrats shuttle about, car windows firmly shut. A layer of dust seems to coat everything.

“This isn’t a famine, it’s a sham-ine,” I hear one European reporter mutter in the hotel, concerned that the images he’s gathered aren’t going to be what his bosses back in the newsroom are expecting. That’s how TV works: You know the pictures you want, the pictures you’re expected to find. Your bosses will be disappointed if you don’t get them, so you scan the hospital beds, looking for the worst, unable to settle for anything less. Merely hungry isn’t good enough. Merely sick won’t warrant more than a cutaway shot.

The hunger is there, of course—you just have to look close. On the drive from Niamey to Maradi are fields of corn, sorghum, and millet. Crops are planted, but harvest is a long way off, and there’s little food to get families through until then. Adults can live off leaves and grass; kids need nutrients, and there are none to be had.

“It’s not so bad,” I say to Charlie Moore, my producer, and as soon as the words come out of my mouth, I wish I could take them back.

“It’s bad enough,” he responds, and of course he’s right.

It’s bad enough.

“IT’S PRETTY BAD
out there,” the air force officer said as I was gathering my things. “Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know!” I shouted, and it came out sounding scared.

“What do you mean you don’t know? You can’t just go to Somalia. Who do you work for?” I was worried he’d take my phony press pass, so I told him I was staying with an aid agency; I just wasn’t sure of their exact location. The truth was, I didn’t have anyplace to stay, and I didn’t really work for anyone.

It was early September 1992, and I’d just landed in Baidoa, Somalia. I hadn’t been to Sarajevo yet. Burma was the only fighting I’d ever seen. After
Channel One
bought my Burma footage, I lived in Vietnam for six months, taking language classes in Hanoi and trying to shoot more stories. When my visa expired,
Channel One
still hadn’t offered me a full-time job, so I had to come up with another plan.

I was twenty-five, two years older than my brother would ever be. A day might go by when I didn’t think about his suicide, but then I’d be walking on the street, and a stain on the concrete would remind me of blood, and I’d run into a nearby restaurant and throw up in the bathroom.

I used to see my brother in Vietnam. Someone would round a corner or catch my attention in a crowd, and for a few seconds I would think it was Carter.

One evening in Hanoi, a crippled beggar stopped in front of me while I was in a café. He stretched out a twisted limb, asking for money. I glanced up and saw Carter’s face. Something about the gentle look in his eyes, the cut of his hair, the looseness with which it fell from the side of his head. The thought stunned me.

The beggar left, and I wanted to run after him, talk with him in case it
was
Carter trying to reach out to me. I didn’t move from my seat, however. It was a crazy thought, and I never told anyone about it. I was embarrassed, worried that even thinking it was a sign of delusion.

It wasn’t just people who reminded me of Carter. Once, I was eating at a food stall near my apartment in Hanoi and I noticed that the ceiling was made of pressed leaves. It looked just like a box covered with tobacco leaves that Carter once gave me for Christmas. The texture and color were the same. For a moment, I remembered him so clearly: the shape of his body, the color of his hair, the delicate thinness of his fingers. It had been four years since his death, and still nothing about it made any sense. Vietnam hadn’t filled in the shadows I saw when I looked in the mirror, or eased the sadness that seemed to flow through my veins. I was hurting, and needed to be around others who were hurting as well. I wanted to dangle over the edge and remember what it was like to feel. I also needed a job. Somalia had seemed like a logical choice.

Famine was sweeping the Horn of Africa. Tens of thousands of people had already died of starvation, and millions more were threatened. Somalia had no central government to deal with the drought, just competing warlords with private armies and countless guns.

The famine hadn’t yet become a major story. In some three months, the U.S. military would send troops, the American public millions of dollars in aid, and the broadcast networks their anchors. Hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved, but after that, things would get out of control. They often do. It started off being one thing, and ended up as something else. Peacekeepers became peacemakers. A humanitarian mission became a hunt for a Somali warlord. A Black Hawk went down. U.S. troops got killed. The whole thing turned to shit.

It started, though, with the starving. Thousands dying every day: mostly kids and old people, the ones without weapons or money, or families to fall back on. Roving bands of teens armed with guns and grenade launchers rode around in tricked-out “technicals,” pickups with machine guns mounted on the back.

I hitched a ride on a relief flight that the U.S. military had just begun operating out of Mombasa, Kenya. In Baidoa as many as a hundred people were dying a day. The United States was shipping in sacks of sorghum on lumbering C-130 Hercules transport planes. The bags of grain were stacked on wooden pallets, kept in place by mesh netting attached to the plane’s floor by cables. On my flight, a half-dozen young men with high-and-tight crew cuts lay sleeping on top of the sacks of grain.

“Who are those guys?” I asked the air force officer on board the flight.

“We call those guys the snake eaters,” he said, whispering as though he were divulging classified information. “They set up on the ground and monitor the security of the runway.”

A month earlier, stuck in Nairobi, waiting for my visa to clear, I’d gone to see a low-budget action movie,
Snake Eater II
, with Lorenzo Lamas. These guys looked far more businesslike than the muscle-bound star in that film. When we landed, the snake eaters were the first ones out the cargo door. They ran to the side of the airstrip and disappeared into the bushes.

The C-130 wasn’t on the ground more than twenty minutes when it shut its cargo door and took off, leaving behind a few sacks of sorghum, the icy smell of airplane fuel, and me.

On the other end of the runway, a handful of aid agencies had parked their pickup trucks. On top of one of the trucks, a young Somali sat straddling a heavy machine gun. In the back, gnarled men in soiled T-shirts stood around grinning, gnawing on small green twigs that I’d soon learn was khat, the favorite pastime of Somali men—besides arguing and shooting one another. Khat is like an amphetamine. Chew it all day, as many do in Somalia, and you’ll end up edgy, strung out—just the kind of qualities you want in a Somali gunman. Only a few flights of relief food were getting into the country, but dozens of planes packed with the bitter stimulant were able to land at airstrips every day throughout the starving nation.

That day I arrived a couple of Western aid workers waited for the food sacks to be loaded up. They all ignored me, and I was too shy to approach them. Journalists, I’d later learn, were considered a pain in the ass. They arrived at a story demanding transportation and food, not to mention information. Relief workers put up with them if they were from a major network, and had big audiences who’d make donations, but if you were just some kid with a home video camera, then nobody really wanted to make the effort.

When the bags of sorghum were loaded onto the trucks, everyone took off, leaving me standing on the side of the runway alone. There are times when the reality of what you’ve gotten yourself into hits you like a brick dropped from a tall building. Standing by the airstrip in Baidoa was one of those times. I was in way over my head, and had just realized it.

I had a couple of thousand dollars in cash, a camera, some blank videocassettes, and a backpack filled with cashews, the only food I’d had time to buy before boarding the flight. I had no idea what I was doing or what I should do next.

IT’S LATE JULY 2005.
In a makeshift hospital in Maradi, Niger, dozens of mothers sit with their children, waiting to see if they are malnourished enough to be saved. The hospital is run by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), a French relief group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. They are one of my favorite relief organizations because they fearlessly go to the worst places, and they seem far more efficient than the lumbering UN.

The hospital is a few blocks off Maradi’s main drag. This is the third largest city in Niger, but that’s not saying much. Even the capital, Niamey, is a backwater, and it’s a ten-hour drive away.

To get into the hospital the mothers pass through a small metal gate guarded by two unarmed men. By dawn there’s already a long line to enter. The women are wrapped in impossibly bright fabrics, a collage of color shocking against their desert black skin.

Weeks later, when I return to New York, an elegant lady stops me on the street and puts her hand on my arm. “Oh, Anderson, those women in Niger.” She sighs, pausing to gather her emotions. “I mean, the fabrics. Where do they find them? Those colors. They must put so much thought into it.”

The morning I arrive at the hospital, there are about a dozen mothers waiting with their kids outside the gate. A naked little boy with skin like an elephant’s squats in front of his mother and shits. She wipes his wrinkled butt with a piece of cardboard from a box of medicine.