Reporting Under Fire (26 page)

Martha's interest in military issues expanded over those years. She left Boston to report from the Pentagon for NPR in 1993 and was drawn to the war in Bosnia during a horrendous time, when another woman correspondent, Christiane Amanpour of CNN, provided inspiration. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that woman was so brave,'” she recalled. Martha went to Bosnia five times. Reporting on the US Department of Defense and the US military intrigued her. The Pentagon beat, a “microcosm of society,” fascinated her. Martha understood that reporting from the Pentagon encompassed more than the nuts and bolts and bullets of making war. “It involved death,” she explained. “It involved society's issues.” The human dimension—stories of real men and women—compelled her to become an expert on the American military. This has taken more than 20 years. Like Georgie Anne Geyer, Martha has worked at building her “institutional memory” for decades. Like Geyer, she simply “knows what to do.”

She moved to ABC in 1999, returning to work in front of the camera as a State Department correspondent. On June 22, 2001, she contributed to an ABC News report:

US Navy warships have pulled out of Persian Gulf ports and a Marine Corps exercise in Jordan was halted following the detection of an “imminent” and specific terrorist threat against Americans, ABC News has learned….

And less than a month ago, four followers of Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi exile suspected of sponsoring terrorism, were convicted of involvement in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

Shortly after that verdict, on May 29, the US government issued a worldwide caution for Americans, warning intelligence had been received in early May that American citizens abroad might be the target of a terrorist threat from extremists linked to bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.

US authorities also suspect bin Laden associates were involved in the attack on the
Cole.
[A suicide terrorist attack on the USS
Cole
when it was docked in Yemen killed 17 US sailors in October 2000.]

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Martha was at home in Arlington, Virginia, when the first airplane hit the World Trade Center in New York City. Tom Gjelten, reporting for NPR at the Department of Defense, rushed to the Pentagon. Martha hurried to her office in Washington, checking in with Greta at Amherst College and with Jake's school as well before she got to the State Department:

The State Department was being refurbished so the press was in a downstairs temporary facility with one large TV. My young producer, Phuong Nguyen, was already glued to the images. Before we knew any details about where the planes came from, I remember thinking that no US pilot would ever fly into those buildings, even if there was a gun to his or her head, so I assumed that the planes must somehow [have] been stolen. Officials I was calling assumed the same.

Nothing made sense that day. And then less than 20 minutes after arriving at the State Department, there was a report of an explosion at the Pentagon. Just before we evacuated the State Department, it was confirmed that a
plane had hit the Pentagon, although it was unclear on which side it had hit.

It was chaos outside. As soon as we were outside we heard reports there was a car bomb that had gone off at the State Department. I knew that was not true and reported that to ABC. Then Phuong and I walked to the Memorial Bridge, the one behind the Lincoln Memorial, and I looked across the river toward Virginia. A huge pillar of black smoke was coming from the Pentagon.

Martha wondered if Tom was all right, and then decided to be optimistic and assume, because news reports were coming from another part of the Pentagon, that he was OK.

I spent the day on that historic bridge watching the Pentagon burn, smelling it, and seeing fighter jets streaking down the Potomac. I knew I would not be back home for a very long time and that when I finally did [return], all of our lives would be changed.

The September 11 attacks on American soil also changed the direction of Martha's reporting. She got a transfer to the Pentagon in the spring of 2003, just as the United States went to war in Iraq, and embarked on a long series of visits there, sometimes to follow the defense secretary or generals as they inspected operations, and sometimes embedded with American soldiers as they carried out day-to-day operations in Mosul or Fallujah or to the desert in Al Anbar. “Embedded” was a new term in those days— a term coined to describe journalists who lived and worked alongside troops in a war zone, sharing meals and living spaces.

Martha Raddatz and two US Marines in Ramallah, Iraq, in 2007.
Courtesy of Martha Raddatz

By the summer of 2004, matters had turned deadly for the Americans in Iraq as insurgents rose up against the military with accusations that the United States had “occupied” Iraq. Martha, about to leave for home after a trip to Iraq, was having dinner with a group of generals when General Jack Keane shared details on a briefing he'd heard concerning a battle back on April 4. Eight soldiers had died that day after an attack in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City. A platoon from the First Cavalry Division, thinking they were on a peacekeeping mission, were caught in a “platoon pindown.”

Martha expressed interest in doing a story for ABC's
Night-line
on the attack, but she was about to go back to Washington. The general offered his help, and two days later the army flew her to Sadr City, where a group of survivors awaited her. She later recalled this story for a reporter on C-SPAN.

I knew 8 soldiers had died, 60 were wounded. I sat down with these soldiers and it was one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard.

And it was a time I thought, OK, this is not policy. This is not the administration. This is these human beings who have been in this horrendous battle. And there was one in particular. There was this staff sergeant named Robert Miltenberger, who was sitting over in the side and kind of grumpy. And I thought, “This is the last thing this guy wants to do is talk to me.” And they brought over Sergeant Miltenberger and he sat down. And I asked him one question about this, and he burst into tears and talked about how he'd had one hand on a sucking chest wound in one soldier. They were in back of the open truck, that he had the knee on the leg of another one. One of the soldiers was paralyzed, and he kept telling him he was OK.

And Sergeant—you could just see the pain in this man's face like I've never seen before. He was awarded a Silver Star for his heroics, all the time he's continuing to shoot.

There were others, Martha knew, the families at home at Fort Hood, Texas, who had gotten early word on the battle from CNN. Some would get the dreaded knock on the door from an Army chaplain and a fellow officer to provide official notification that their soldier had died. She knew there were family preparedness groups, networks of army wives on call to bring food and offer a shoulder to cry on to grieving wives and children.

Two months later, Martha was back in Iraq, again in Sadr City to do follow-up interviews with men from the First Cavalry. A second general, Peter Chiarelli, encouraged her to go to Texas to speak with families at home—a different story she could talk about on
Nightline.
Martha flew to Fort Hood.

Out of Martha's long talks with soldiers in Iraq, the wounded in hospitals, wives and parents at home, and army officials, came her book
The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family,
published early in 2007. She didn't ask ABC for time off to write it, preferring to stay on the job and work into the wee hours to finish the manuscript.

Her book offers countless tiny details about the people whom Martha interviewed about the horrific attack, details that grieving people were willing to share. She took time to get to know them, to ask questions and to listen carefully. “No one asks them,” she explained. “We say, ‘What was it like? Did someone get killed?' And [we] don't really say, ‘And then what happened? How did you find the courage? And how did you keep going on?'”

Her book garnered good reviews and a thumbs-up from a
New York Times
reviewer, whose skepticism about the freshness of the book—Martha's story had already played all over television—declared that
The Long Road Home
offered “searingly vivid evidence of the toll our soldiers pay.” Others, including an antiwar columnist writing in the
Columbia Journalism Review,
questioned how she can maintain an objective view of the US military when she spends so much of her time living and working among its men and women.

Martha Raddatz states categorically that she can keep her reporter's objectivity even as she's embedded with US forces in spots like Iraq and Afghanistan. “I say things they don't want to hear,” she once told an audience, “but I can never be objective about sacrifices and service. I have lost friends. I have had friends wounded.”

Issues of personal safety are always in war reporters' minds, but it was rare for one to be attacked or killed in action until the past few decades, when journalists, producers, and photographers
became fair game for enemy combatants. The Iraq War came home to ABC News in January 2006 when two of Martha's colleagues, coanchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, were gravely injured when a roadside bomb struck their military vehicle. And in February 2012, American journalist Marie Colvin, a veteran writer for the
Times
of London, was killed in Homs, Syria, reporting on the suffering of 28,000 civilians caught in Syria's civil war. One year earlier, CBS News reporter Lara Logan and her crew, including her producer, cameraman, and translator, were attacked in Cairo's Tahrir Square. The moment their camera battery lost its charge, a mob of men attacked. Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted, and nearly died.

“I think you take what safety precautions you can,” Martha emphasized. “Bad things are going to happen. With Marie Colvin I don't think death had anything to do with her being a woman. She was the bravest journalist around, period. Lara's attack was horrendous, and I know she took precautions and had security men … you have to do what you can to mitigate that threat.”

Lara Logan was criticized for leaving her two young children to report from a war zone. Martha Raddatz's kids are grown, but she has thought deeply about the issue. She is not sure she would have left them when they were little, and as teens, Martha said, they were more into their own problems than worried about hers. A smile stirred in her voice when she looked back on a trip to Bosnia when her daughter, Greta, was a young teen. Martha hadn't been in touch for two days. She set up a satellite phone to make a quick call home, and Greta answered. “Mom, thank God you called,” she said. “I'm thinking of dropping Latin.”

Martha Raddatz (right) pictured with her ABC News producer, Ely Brown, in eastern Afghanistan.
Courtesy of Martha Raddatz

Of course, when children become young adults, their worries change. Years later, when Greta, by now working at the University of California, Berkeley, got a call from Martha with the news of the explosion that injured Woodruff and Vogt. “My mom began to cry, and her tears fueled my own,” Greta wrote. “I cried so hard I was gasping for air. I'd obviously heard the horror stories about journalists being wounded, kidnapped, and even murdered in Iraq. But this was different—it could easily have been her.”

My mother's own experiences in Iraq have certainly made this war more meaningful for me. On Easter Sunday last year, my mom attended a sunrise church service at Camp Victory, the main military base in Baghdad. After the service, she flew out of Baghdad on a military cargo plane.
The following is an excerpt of an e-mail she sent that day:

“When we walked onto the plane, we saw in the middle four flag-draped coffins, stacked side by side. On the way home on Easter Sunday. The passengers were seated on the sides of them. Our luggage was next to the coffins. The retired general I was with walked back and touched the flags. I cannot describe how emotional it was to see those coffins so close to you, not knowing who they were but knowing how they probably died.”