Finding the News

by Peter Copeland

  The vendor added something in Arabic.

  “What’s he saying now?” John asked, for some reason accepting the idea that I actually understood. My Arabic was limited to a handful of expressions, but living in Mexico had taught me how to shop in a market in any language.

  “Now he says that it cost him thirty-five, and he would take a loss to sell it to you for twenty. Stand firm. He’s weakening.”

  But John, the wimp, pulled out his wallet, making the international gesture of submission. He might as well have bared his neck to a wolf. Forty riyals.

  Emboldened by his success, John decided to try his negotiating skills with a Bedouin lady dressed in black and veiled to the eyes. She sat on the ground amid bundles of rugs and bags outside the market, which meant she was too poor to afford a stall. Looked like easy pickings.

  John, the son of a Lutheran minister from North Dakota, was the most decent and polite of people. “Hello,” he said kindly to the Bedouin lady, looking into her dark eyes, the only part of her showing under yards of black fabric. “What have you got in there?” He leaned forward to peer into a wrinkled plastic shopping bag.

  She reached into the bag and pulled out a dozen engraved silver bracelets, worn smooth around the edges. “Forty,” she said to John, holding up a small bracelet and a larger one. Forty was either the price of the day or the only number the vendors knew in English. “For baby,” she said, holding the smaller one. Offering the larger bracelet, she said, “For madame.”

  We hadn’t seen any Westerners in the market, and we clearly were an oddity. Several armed policemen asked what we were up to. They were most concerned with John’s tape recorder and microphone. They wanted to know if we had cameras, which we did not. We had been warned that taking certain photographs was strictly forbidden for religious (and political) reasons, and we had been told to be extra careful not to photograph women.

  I was buying a little spice bag of cardamom when I realized John was still talking at the Bedouin lady, who had begun to answer back rather loudly. She folded a stiff paper fan and began to whap John on the leg. She yelled at him in Arabic, pointing at the tape recorder. This could get ugly. I decided to leave the translating to our guide, who was getting flustered and warned us, “She insists that is a camera, and she wants John to stop taking her picture.”

  “Thank you very much,” I told the lady. I pulled John by the arm and hissed at him: “We’re outta here.” The guide trotted along behind us, moving quickly through the crowded aisles.

  I thought we were safe, but suddenly, out of nowhere, the Bedouin lady was on top of John, beating him on the head and shoulders with her fan and shouting at the top of her voice. Ever the rational gentleman, John tried to explain that his tape recorder was not a camera, taking out the cassette to show the lady. This only infuriated her, and now our guide started to panic, pulling John and me by the arms to the safety of our air-conditioned vehicle. He locked the doors and took a deep breath.

  “What about the camels?” I reminded him.

  “Too late for camels,” he said.

  “No, no,” I protested. “Can’t we just try?”

  “Why do you want to see camels?” he asked, for the tenth time.

  I sighed and tilted my head at him to say, you know why. He relented and directed the driver to the nearby camel market, which we could smell from inside the car.

  “Now that we are here, you’ll have to ride one,” the guide told me, savoring the thought.

  “Oh yeah, I’ll ride one,” I said. “But before that, what I really want to do is talk with some Saudis who work here. Just typical camel herders or Bedouin.”

  He feared this was some kind of trick. “What do you want to talk to them about?”

  “About life,” I said, “about what they think about things, about the US troops, the Gulf crisis.”

  “They aren’t very talkative,” the guide said, trying to decide what to do. He really didn’t want to stop again, but I was a guest. Arab hospitality was a real thing, and he was a good host. He nodded his head and pointed the driver toward a barefoot shepherd standing alongside a dozen long-haired sheep. We pulled up next to the shepherd, and the guide rolled down the window halfway. The guide turned to me and said, “What do you want to ask him?”

  It dawned on me that the guide was afraid of the shepherd, embarrassed, or at least extremely uncomfortable asking him questions. I remembered the dates on the local newspaper—one was in 1990, and the other was in the Islamic year 1411. Our guide lived in 1990, but the shepherd was in 1411, and I was not going to bridge the gap between them.

  I opened my door and jumped down onto the hard sand. Reluctantly, the guide followed me out of the car. I smiled at the shepherd, who gently shook my hand with his rough hand, which was brown and weathered as a strip of rawhide. In his other hand he carried an orange plastic tube he used for a staff. I made small talk and complimented his sheep. The guide translated my words. Then I asked what the shepherd thought about the American troops in his country. “I think that is a political question,” the guide protested, declining to translate.

  “Life is political,” I snapped. “Just ask.”

  The guide asked my question in Arabic. The shepherd answered at length, gesturing at the horizon, at his sheep, at me. He waved the yellow plastic staff to make a point. I looked at the translator, thinking I was getting good stuff. I had my notebook and pen ready. The guide told me, “He says it’s a good thing.”

  Wait a second! That’s it? What about all that gesturing? Simmering, but accepting my defeat, I started to get back into the car.

  “There are your camels,” the guide said, pushing John and me back into the sun. “Go over there and see them. But be careful.”

  The camels were tanking up at a concrete trough, maybe thirty or forty of them. One was sitting in the sand, rubbing himself in the dirt and kicking up clouds of dust. Clumps of long dark hair were bunched on his sides like seaweed. They all needed a bath and a trim. Camels in the cartoons were not nearly so unkempt or stinky. I pushed John forward to tape their bellowing, but when a big toothy mouth tried to eat his microphone he fell over me, running back to the car. The guide was laughing so hard he forgot I was supposed to ride one.

  I was happy now: I had met a shepherd from the fifteenth century, and seen a camel from plenty close. The guide, relieved our adventure had concluded, ordered the driver to return to the hotel. We drove back onto the paved road, kicking up a cloud of sand that covered the camels, the sheep, and the shepherd, who was waving good-bye.

  When the best story I offered was about camels, the desk decided maybe I should come back to Washington. We never talked about the cost of my stay, but money was a factor. In addition to my meals and hotel for more than a month, the company was paying for a special life insurance policy to cover me in a war zone. The regular insurance would not have paid out if I were killed in combat.

  I was ready to go home anyway. The buildup would last a few more months before anything happened. The US military would not attack until all the troops and equipment were in place. My best guess was that there would be no need to attack because Saddam would do the smart thing and start to pull back from Kuwait.

  Back to my old routine in Washington, I went to the office, the Pentagon, or Capitol Hill to cover the political debate about the war. I was relieved to be home and to have weekends off, but the story was sterile and remote compared with running around the desert.

  Maru was happy to see me, but she also had grown accustomed to being on her own. She was working, taking classes for her high school equivalency, and studying English. While I was away in the desert, she made new friends, was talking about getting back into Mexican dance, and kept busy without me. Maru had been supporting herself since she was a teenager, so she didn’t really need me, but she did miss me.

  I didn’t want to admit it, and I did miss her when I was gone, but I loved covering stories overseas. I liked having one thing to focus on and an oppor
tunity to do something well. I didn’t have to worry about anything except the story. I could manage my own time, and the closest editor was 7,000 miles away.

  After Christmas with Maru and my family in Chicago, I packed to return to Saudi Arabia in early 1991. I still didn’t think there would be a war. How could Saddam be so stupid that he would not declare victory and leave Kuwait? Instead he seemed to be digging in deeper, both in rhetoric and in the desert. Maybe it was all just words, and he was planning to withdraw at the last minute for maximum drama and attention.

  I called my mom before I left Washington for Saudi Arabia and told her not to worry. I said I was going back to the frontlines where I wanted to be, but just to cover the peace talks. I kissed Maru good-bye and assured her there would be no war. I’d be home in a few weeks.

  10

  OPERATION DESERT SWARM

  ——— ON SOURCES ———

  When I arrived in Saudi Arabia the second time, the mood had changed. US forces were leaning far forward and ready to attack. War suddenly felt imminent.

  With so many reporters swarming the country, the Pentagon had established an elaborate press pool operation to control access to the troops. Adopting White House rules, the military allowed the media to organize themselves to fill the pool slots, but there were not nearly enough slots for the number of reporters who wanted to go. And as at the White House, the large news organizations thought they were in charge. There were only eighteen slots for media to cover the entire US Army operation. There was no way eighteen people could cover hundreds of thousands of soldiers in combat.

  The really bad news was that there was no slot for me.

  Frustrated by the lack of access to the troops, I drove to the coastal city of Jubail with Hearst’s Stewart Powell, my friend from Panama, to see what we could learn. We ran into soldiers from Great Britain, who were fun and loud and looking for a pub on the road to Kuwait. Their arms were tattooed with snakes and daggers and the words “Death Before Dishonor.” What paper are you from, they asked us, the Baghdad Daily News? We laughed at the joke, but then they told us their wartime mission.

  Media handlers prevented US soldiers from revealing their missions to reporters, but the Brits confidently said they were preparing for two weeks of an air campaign to weaken Saddam’s defenses. Then there would be an easy breach of the Iraqi lines and on to Kuwait.

  We tried the same trick at a nearby US base—just act like we belonged there—but we were chased away by the military police. We were forced to sneak around because we weren’t in a pool and therefore didn’t have access to sources among the troops. Stewart and I kept pushing to get on a pool, but we did not have any leverage.

  When we heard about a meeting of the reporters running the pools, we decided to just show up. They gathered in an open area of the hotel near the press operations of the US military and the Saudi government. The meeting was for pool members only, and since Stewart and I had arrived in Saudi Arabia “late,” we were allowed to observe but not speak.

  We were informed we could not possibly be considered for pool membership for weeks, which might be after the fighting had started. There were motions and seconds and votes, but the reporters reminded me of kids playing parliament. If government officials had tried to hold a meeting like this, we would have ridiculed them without pity.

  Stewart couldn’t control himself, spoke twice out of turn, and was censured. He looked over at me and mouthed, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  Realizing no one was going to call on me, I just started in: “I was here in August before any of you, but the way the system is now, I can’t cover the war. I didn’t come all this way to read pool reports and cover this through your eyes, as good as they might be. I can’t believe I’m pleading with my colleagues to let me cover something. This is a huge pie. There is plenty for everybody.” With a dramatic gesture toward the Pentagon’s Joint Information Bureau, or JIB, I said, “This is worse than the people over there.”

  There were murmurs and the shaking of heads, but no one responded. If the war started tonight, I was going to miss it.

  Our original Pentagon pool handler, the Iceman, was observing the meeting, too. He leaned over and whispered to me: “Whoa, these guys are cutthroat. I wouldn’t want to be in a trench with any of them.”

  I told him I was embarrassed about how the reporters were behaving. The lack of opportunities to get out with the troops forced us to fight among ourselves. Instead of worrying about stories, we worried about blocking our colleagues from the action. The military could not have planned it any better. “This is right out of Sun Tsu and The Art of War,” I whispered to the Iceman.

  He laughed and said, “We study that shit. It works.”

  The mood of the reporters at the hotel during January of 1991 was nervous boredom. The deadline set by the United Nations for Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait was approaching, but the only news was the sound of the clock ticking. We were relatively safe in the hotel, although we knew Saddam could reach us with Scud ballistic missiles, tactical weapons developed by the Soviet Union. The Scuds were not accurate or especially lethal, unless Saddam armed them with chemical warheads.

  My biggest worry was how to cover the war. If I stayed in the hotel, I would have access to the briefings and pool reports, plus the computers and phones to file stories. Not to mention a roof over my head, a bed, and hot food. On the other hand, I felt a particular burden to be in the field with the troops.

  Fifty years before me, Scripps Howard had a reporter in the Washington bureau named Ernie Pyle, a modest, nice guy from Dana, Indiana. After walking by Pyle’s portrait every day at the Pentagon, I wanted to learn more about him. Dan, my bureau chief and a Hoosier like Pyle, told me that Pyle was the bureau’s “aviation writer,” which was the hot technology beat at the time, and he also did some travel writing. At the start of World War II, the desk sent him to cover the action in North Africa and then to Europe.

  Pyle loved covering the grunts, the toughest guys in the toughest conditions, and lived in the field for weeks at a time. He didn’t write about the briefings given by the generals, but described how the infantry slept in the mud and how bodies piled up around them like firewood. He was one of the most popular writers in the country, won a Pulitzer Prize, and was known proudly as “the GI’s friend.”

  In our bureau, Dan had decorated the walls with photos of Pyle, a Peanuts cartoon remembering him, plus the original of one of his more famous columns, about soldiers recovering the body of their fallen captain. The display I liked was the framed collection of Pyle’s expense reports, written on little pieces of notebook paper, requesting reimbursement for “whiskey for courage” and “lipsticks for England.” That was a glimpse into a reporter’s life that I appreciated. Those little bits of paper represented the hardship he had seen, plus his sense of humor and the warm relationship with his editors back home.

  When the Allied victory in Europe was near, the desk sent Pyle to Asia to cover the war with the Japanese. On the little island of Ie Shima, just months before Japan surrendered and the war would end, Pyle was hit by gunfire and killed. He was forty-four. Ernie Pyle did not cover war from a hotel, and neither could I.

  The final day of the UN deadline for Saddam to leave Kuwait, I had breakfast with Stewart. He looked different, and it was jarring. Then I realized why: he had shaved his beard to get a better seal for his gas mask. I gave him grief about his new look, and he laughed. We didn’t really talk about the deadline passing because it wouldn’t be a story until one of the two opponents—Saddam or Bush—made a move. We did feel more urgency to get on a pool.

  I jerked awake at 4:30 a.m. on January 17, 1991, and wondered why I couldn’t sleep. I was staying in a luxury, high-rise hotel a few blocks from the fully booked hotel where the media operations were located. I turned on the radio and learned the war had begun. Operation Desert Shield, the protection of Saudi Arabia, had become Operation Desert Storm, an attack to drive Saddam out of K
uwait.

  I threw on my clothes and went down to the lobby. People were awake, which was unusual at that hour, but otherwise everything seemed normal. Waiters in the restaurant carried gas masks and flashlights in case the power was knocked out, but they were calmly serving early breakfast. I looked around for someone to interview about the start of the war, already roughing out the story in my head. One Saudi man was wearing fully loaded bandoliers crossed like sashes on his robed chest, so of course I had to talk with him. I even found a stray prince staying at the hotel. I ran back to my room and was banging out a quick story when Stewart called from the media hotel with news: we both had landed pool slots. Get over here fast, he said. We’re going to war.

  I filed what I had, packed a bag, and headed back down to the lobby. My hands were shaking. When I walked past the front desk, the clerk said there was a call for me. I wasn’t expecting a call, but I took the phone and said hello. The caller was from a radio station in New Zealand—“We’re on the air!”—looking for someone who spoke English. I gave them my most dramatic account of the war so far, based entirely on CNN and the one heavily armed Saudi I had interviewed, and said I had to go.

  An American woman grabbed me near the door and asked for a ride. She wanted to interview me, too. My mouth was dry as paste, but I told her what I knew. She said she worked for Mirabella, a fashion magazine. I had heard about her. Had she really interviewed female soldiers about masturbating in the field? “It’s relevant,” she said.

  While waiting for news about my pool, I was interviewed by a C-SPAN producer from a live show in Washington. I now had given interviews on three continents and written one story, without hearing a shot fired.

  Stewart got a pool slot, and then, finally, someone called my name. A new pool, Number 10, had been formed, and I was on it, along with Tim Collie from the Tampa Tribune, Ed Offley of Hearst Newspapers, and a TV crew. We were provided (on loan) flak jackets, helmets, and gas masks, and were driven to the airfield, where we climbed onto a C-130 bound for the Saudi air base in Taif.