I had learned a valuable lesson earlier at an anti-Noriega demonstration: don’t get caught between the police and the protest. I was on a narrow street interviewing people who had gathered with banners and signs calling for Noriega to step down and be jailed. They were chanting slogans and shaking fists, but there was no rioting or looting or even pushing or shoving. The atmosphere was almost festive. Until the pro-Noriega forces arrived.
Police and soldiers jumped down from buses and trucks and formed into rows. Armored cars rumbled on the corners. Groups of beefy men in civilian clothes—the same type of guys who had attacked the hotel—milled around the police. Noriega called the men dressed as civilians “Dignity Battalions,” but there was nothing dignified about how they behaved. The two sides stared at each other. The standoff ended when someone, somewhere, ordered the police to charge.
The crowd surged back away from the attacking police, and I was caught in the riptide. There was no way to move forward or to the side; I had to run with the crowd and away from the police or be trampled. There were women and children, old people. Some of them were just watching the demonstration, not really taking part. Now we all were part of it, running for our lives as the police and club-wielding thugs bore down on us.
The first hint of tear gas tingled through the air. When the cloud hit my face, it didn’t feel like a gas: it felt like battery acid or broken glass. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t see because mucus was pouring from my eyes and nose. Terrified of falling, I grabbed blindly at whoever was near me, hanging onto a shirt or a belt, and kept running like bees were chasing me.
A military truck caught up to us and sprayed water at the crowd. I wasn’t too concerned about the water until my skin started to itch and then burn. The water was laced with pepper spray or some irritant that stung like barbed wire.
At last I reached a place where the narrow street widened into a plaza. I slowed to a walk, wiped my watery eyes, and tugged at my wet shirt because it felt like it was on fire. There was screaming in the street behind me, and the roar of police and military vehicles. Ahead of me, it was just an ordinary afternoon. People were shopping, going home from work. Vendors sold ice cream from little carts. I walked until I found a taxi to take me to the hotel.
Even with all the violence, I was surprised President George H. W. Bush had invaded to oust Noriega. It seemed like going after a housefly with a wrecking ball, but I did not share my opinion with anyone at the time. It wasn’t my job to write about whether the United States should have invaded. We had other writers and columnists who did that. I never read the editorial opinions written by people back in the office and didn’t care about their views. More to the point, I didn’t want their views to color my coverage. I read every news story on every topic I could find, but I almost never read opinion pieces in any paper. I felt the same way about advertisements in the newspaper: I knew the ads were necessary, but I skimmed right over without reading them. My job was to show what was happening on the ground, not share what I thought about it.
When the desk sent me to cover the invasion, I knew Noriega wouldn’t be much of a military opponent. So if I wanted to cover the fighting, I would have to hurry before it ended. The good news (for me) was that the pool of reporters assigned to cover the invasion had been locked up on a US military base “for their own safety.” This rightly infuriated the reporters, and it limited news coverage of the invasion from the ground.
Maru stayed in Chicago to celebrate Christmas with my family and then planned to return to Washington on her own. I expressed the proper amount of remorse to my mom for missing the holiday, but I wanted to go to Panama. I loved being a Washington correspondent, but at thirty-two years old, I was excited to jump on a plane to anywhere, especially into the middle of a big, breaking story.
An older editor once told me that he, too, used to love parachuting into big stories, but “then your legs go.” I nodded like I knew what he was talking about, but after being a reporter for ten years, I didn’t understand the phrase, and I certainly didn’t share the sentiment. When Dale called about Panama, the light turned green, and I raced out the door.
I did worry about leaving Maru alone. At twenty-seven, she was teaching Spanish and working as a waitress in Washington, both new jobs for her after a career dancing. She still did not feel entirely comfortable in the United States, and she missed her home, her friends and family, and Mexican folk dance. Some nights I woke to find her at the dining room table, sad and nostalgic at 2 a.m., with a bottle of tequila and Mexican music playing softly. I begged her to come back to bed, fearful that she was so homesick she would return to Mexico without me. She had moved to Washington for me, but I often left her alone while I chased stories around the world. She was very supportive of me, however, and respected that my work required travel.
“You want to go, Pito,” she said. “Go.”
I flew to Costa Rica where the Pan-American Highway crossed into Panama. There I found frustrated reporters who were unable to get into the country to cover the fighting. They were standing around a big, busy parking lot debating what to do. Cars, trucks, and buses were backed up, and no one was sure what they might find across the border. The initial invasion had been short and sharp, but were there pockets of resistance? Had the Dignity Battalions gone into the mountains to wage a guerrilla war, as they had threatened? Would they try to stop reporters? What if there was fighting along the road?
A dozen reporters from the United States, Europe, and Latin America found a driver willing to “charter” his bus if we paid cash, a lot of cash, in advance. I didn’t want to be on those roads at night, so our goal was to get to Panama City before dark. We loaded up and headed for the capital.
A few miles after the bus crossed the border, we ran into the first checkpoint. We could see military vehicles and US soldiers blocking a high place in the road ahead, their weapons pointed at us. The bus driver stopped and refused to continue. The reporters and photographers argued over what to do. We had come this far; nobody wanted to go back to Costa Rica, and daylight was running short.
Since I was bilingual, speaking both Spanish and US Army lingo, I was elected to negotiate. I told the driver not to move, and I stepped down from the bus onto the road. I hoped the driver wouldn’t panic and do something stupid. The US soldiers blocking the road had no idea who we were, or if the bus was a threat. I put my arms out wide and yelled up the hill, “I’m coming up! I’m American! Mom, dad, apple pie.”
The soldiers did not laugh or even smile. They were young, even younger than I was, and it probably was their first time in combat. I didn’t think they would shoot me on purpose, but a misunderstanding or an accidental discharge could be fatal. The turret gunner in one of the vehicles pointed the weapon at me and cocked it, making an unmistakable metallic sound. With one arm still away from my body to show I was unarmed, I used my other hand to show my Pentagon pass, a pink plastic card with my name and photo. It was not a press credential, but a building pass used by everybody, military and civilian, cleared for regular access to the Pentagon. It read, “Property of the Department of Defense,” and looked very official.
One of the soldiers appeared to be in charge. “Where’s your lieutenant?” I asked him.
He looked at me, deciding what to do, and said, “Wait one.” He jogged behind the vehicles and returned with a young officer.
I showed the lieutenant my Pentagon pass and said we needed to get to Panama City before dark.
“Sir,” he said, “will you be escorting these journalists?”
My mouth moved but I did not speak. I stopped and debated with myself for a quick second. I didn’t know who he thought I was, but I did not clarify that I was just a reporter. I had been raised not to lie, and lying by omission was still lying. I also had promised myself, after the baby-selling investigation in El Paso, not to misrepresent myself to get a story, but this seemed like such a harmless exception to my own rule. And I was, technically, going to escort these journ
alists.
“Yes, lieutenant,” I said, “I’ll be with them the whole way.”
He ordered his men to move their vehicles off the road. “Let the bus through,” he said, waving his arm at the driver. I walked down the hill toward the other reporters, trying not to grin too widely.
It was getting dark when we arrived in the capital. I found a hotel, dropped my gear and hired a taxi driver willing to show me around. Most of the city looked fine, untouched. The streets were quiet, and I didn’t see any damage, except in the old downtown where a fire had burned the densely populated buildings. Many people had died, the driver said. We drove close to the fire so I could see. I talked to a few people about what they had witnessed and what they thought about the invasion. I got their names, occupations, and ages for my story, and told the driver to hurry back to the hotel.
No matter how good the story in my notebook, it was worthless if I couldn’t file. I wasn’t sure about the phones and didn’t want to take any chances, so I decided to cut short the reporting to get something on the wire. The desk expected me to be in Panama and to file. They didn’t worry about how it all came together, just the story. I was surprised when I got through easily to Washington and promised to file shortly. I read through the story on my laptop one more time, making little improvements. On every editing pass, the writing got better, but at some point I had to let it go.
I moved aside the table between the beds, unscrewed the plastic cover from the phone jack, and connected two alligator clips to contacts inside the wall. I plugged the other end of the wire into my computer, clicked on the modem and hit “send.” I heard the happy sound of buzzing and whining, always a relief, as the story moved across the phone cables, through the hotel’s switchboard and on to Washington. A few minutes later I called to confirm. The desk didn’t have any questions, and I promised to file again the next day.
I went down to the pool for a beer. The night was warm and pleasant. A few reporters were sitting around tables under big umbrellas, drinking and smoking. There were no other guests for Christmas in Panama. I ordered a beer, and we compared notes. Everyone had filed already, so we didn’t mind sharing.
From what we all had heard, Noriega was on the run. Bizarre stories soon circulated—probably planted by the US government—that he was wearing his special red underwear for luck. Soldiers searched his house and found bags of white powder in a freezer, supposedly proof that he was involved in drug trafficking. Further testing would reveal the powder to be flour, but the demonization of Noriega was unstoppable.
In the daylight, I talked my way into Noriega’s abandoned office, which had been torn up in the fighting. He had display cases filled with tiny frogs made from glass, ceramic, and wood. They were cute, even beautiful. Maybe Noriega thought he was a prince who looked like a frog. Or maybe he collected the figurines because the word for toad in Spanish was the same as for snitch, and informers were valuable to Noriega. He used to taunt people by saying, “I’ve got a file on you.”
I stepped over broken furniture and books spilled on the floor. I opened the top drawer of his desk and found small black-and-white photos of young men lying on clinical tables, naked from the waist up, and dead. I drew back from the photos, fearing I had crossed a line and should not touch them. I felt ashamed and uncomfortable seeing them, like violating a taboo. I had no idea who the men were or why the photos were in Noriega’s desk, but it seemed like an archive of some kind, an archive of murder. Maybe I should have told someone about the postmortem photos, but I was too inexperienced to know what to do. I closed the drawer and left the photos in the desk.
I took a taxi up to Quarry Heights, the US military headquarters in Panama. At the gate, I was stopped by a tall military police officer who leaned in to ask my business.
I told her I was a reporter and showed my identification. Before she waved me through, I said, “Excuse me, soldier. Did you see any action?” I was just being nice. This was the headquarters, with clipped lawns and long lunches, and I suspected she and her fellow soldiers had spent the invasion standing around waiting for something to happen. Anyway, US law banned women from combat.
She looked down at me in the car, deciding what to reveal, before saying, “a little bit.”
“Really?”
I told the driver, “Hold on a second.”
I asked the soldier, “What do you mean, ‘a little bit’?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
Now I really was interested. “I’d like to hear about it.”
“You’d have to get permission from my commanding officer,” the soldier said, pointing to an area above the headquarters. “She’s right up the hill.”
“Your commanding officer is a woman?” I asked, now bursting to talk to her and her commander.
“Yes, sir. Captain Linda Bray.”
“I’ll be right back,” I told her.
I suspected Captain Bray would require the okay from the army press office before speaking to me, so I found a public affairs officer, introduced myself, and made a little small talk. The army was like a global, small town; we knew people in common and traded gossip.
“So,” I ventured, careful not to reveal any details. “There’s an MP company commander I want to interview. What do I need to do?”
No problem, the press officer said, and gave me permission for an interview.
I didn’t tell any other reporters. I was sure I had a good story, and I wanted it for myself. Women had been integrated slowly into noncombat units, including the military police, but the urban battlefield didn’t really have a “front” and a “rear” the way people imagined. Women were legally banned from combat roles, however, and the expectation was that they were safe from danger. If I could find women who had fought during the invasion, it would be a big story.
The military police commander, Capt. Linda Bray, weighed maybe 100 pounds and was tightly controlled in demeanor. She was matter-of-fact in her description of what had happened during the invasion. I tried to get her to relax and be more expansive, but she would not budge. Every strap, every buckle, was in place, and she was not going to loosen them for some reporter, or “media puke,” as we sometimes were called.
Talking to her and others in the unit, I slowly got the big picture. On the night of the invasion, Captain Bray’s 988th MP Company saw action at three locations, including a Panamanian military barracks with a kennel for police dogs. Bray arrived at the kennel after the shooting started, used her vehicle to break through the gate, and fired her weapon at the Panamanians shooting from the barracks. Some time before dawn, the Panamanian forces slipped out and escaped. Bray and her troops moved in to secure the building, where they found forty abandoned bunks and a large cache of weapons.
“Did any other women see action?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
I asked for the names, and she gave me a list of twelve female soldiers. I mentioned the soldier I had met at the gate, to include her on the interview list. I didn’t want to get her in trouble, but I did want to give her credit for fighting well and honorably.
I spent the rest of the day driving around the city looking for more female combatants. I guessed that Bray and her soldiers were not the only women who had seen action, and I thought it was better to have more examples. Once I knew what to ask, I had no trouble finding female soldiers who had been under fire and shot back. I also learned that another reporter, a freelancer named Wilson Ring, had interviewed Bray, so I had to finish reporting quickly to be first with the story.
When I filed the story on women in combat, the editor on duty in Washington was Bob Jones. Bob always had questions for me, and we worked through the holes in the story. I had answers to his questions; I just hadn’t included all the details. Usually, I had too much information for a single newspaper story, and the hard part was deciding what to leave out. Bob was such a diligent editor that he never left his desk when he was alone in the office. He worried that if he went to the bathroom,
he might miss a call, so he held it until the end of his shift. Bob was thorough, and while his attention to detail was annoying at times, he never let me make a stupid mistake.
My story about women in combat ran January 2, 1990, across the top of the front page of the Washington Times, a smaller but influential paper. In the story, I tried to describe what the soldiers, men and women, told me had happened on the ground during the battle. I had talked to more than two dozen participants, enough to paint a good picture of what the female soldiers had experienced. I didn’t get into the Washington policy issues about women being banned from combat and just reported what I was told by people who had fought in Panama.
When I called the Pentagon press office the next day, the army major who picked up the call, a regular source and a friend, said, “You really kicked up a hornet’s nest around here.” I was surprised, but not unpleased. She was delighted. “Everybody is running around trying to figure out what to say,” she told me.
I was feeling good about my story, which now was all over television and the newspapers, and other reporters slapped me on the shoulder and offered congratulations. The account of Capt. Linda Bray attacking the kennel was even mentioned during the White House briefing.
Just then, when I least expected it, I was hit by a burst of friendly fire.
The dilemma for army leaders was that they were proud of the soldiers who fought in Panama, male and female. They did not like to single out individuals for special attention, however. Nor did they want the issue of women in combat to take away from their military victory. In planning the invasion of Panama, the brass did not set out to break any rules by putting women into combat. It just happened. Now Capt. Linda Bray, twenty-nine, was being called the first woman to lead US troops in combat, although I never referred to her that way in my story.
Finding the News Page 16