Finding the News

by Peter Copeland

  “Uh, Iraq and Kuwait?”

  The editor did not think that was funny. “Why didn’t you file?”

  I held the phone to my ear, sick to my stomach. Only a couple of my stories had gotten through, the editor said, and they were days late, too stale to use. There was no record of what I had seen, no story, and therefore I had failed as a reporter in the most fundamental way.

  I didn’t say anything. I was disappointed but not crushed. I had experienced a war and had seen men at their best and at their worst. I was more mad than anything, mad at the military for not delivering my stories as they had promised and mad at myself for believing they would. I just wanted a hot meal, a shower, and a bed with sheets. I kept quiet, hoping the editor would forgive my failure. I asked him, “What should I do?”

  “If you want to salvage anything,” he said, “you better sit down and write the best story of your life.”

  After their calls home, the guys wanted to continue to the base camp, so we said good-bye. I got a room, ordered a pot of coffee, and started to write. I had a lot of material, too much for one newspaper story, so I told my own story of watching the artillery help win the war in one hundred hours. I worked fast because Friday night was not a good time to send out a long story; Saturday papers were thin. The sooner I got it in, the more likely it would be used. I wrote fast and easily—the experience was still fresh. I was happy writing, energized again.

  The story recounted my time with the artillery brigade, the people I had met, how it felt sitting inside the howitzer during a raid, driving into the minefield, and watching the Iraqi convoy be destroyed. I described the fear and bravery of the soldiers, their quiet competence, and their nagging concern that the war had ended without getting Saddam.

  I read the story one last time, hooked up the computer to the telephone in my room, and dialed. Nothing. I dialed again. Nothing. The connection wasn’t working. I had to get through to Washington. Every minute of delay meant another paper that would not get my story in time to publish. I could picture the time zones across the continental United States as newspaper deadlines hit from east to west. I had to move fast because I would not get a second chance to make this right.

  I took the computer down to the front desk and tried to explain the problem to the clerk. He just shrugged his shoulders to say how sorry he was.

  “The room phone is not working,” I said, my voice rising. “I need to use the switchboard.”

  “No, that is not possible,” he said. “The room phones are for guests.”

  “But it’s not working!”

  “I am very sorry, sir.”

  I mumbled some kind of apology, put my head down and pushed my way behind the front desk near the switchboard. I dropped to my knees, pulled a screwdriver out of my bag, and removed the wall plate where the main phone lines were hidden.

  “Sir! What are you doing? You cannot do that!”

  “Sorry, I’m really sorry,” I said, blocking the computer with my body. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Inside the wall, I found the connections and attached two alligator clips. I hit the code to dial Washington and heard the happy buzz and click when the two computers connected like old friends. I called to confirm that the story had arrived and answered questions from the desk. Then I treated myself to that hot meal, long shower, and a bed with sheets.

  12

  A BABY, A BALLET, AND A BOOK

  ——— ON HAPPINESS ———

  A week later I was on a flight home. Dale told me the only reaction to my final story was about the Iraqi dog tag I had been given as a souvenir. The way I had worded the story, some readers got the erroneous impression I had desecrated the body of an Iraqi soldier. The complaints came from US veterans who understood better than I did that a dog tag represented a real person and the link to his family.

  Since my first day on the job, Dale had warned me that most errors started with a seemingly minor detail, because we carefully checked the big, controversial things. It was the little things that could trip you up, he always said. In this case, I should have been more precise in describing how I got the dog tag, or just left it out of the story. Dale apologized for not catching it, either.

  The dog tag, with the tiny Arabic writing, made me uncomfortable anyway; at some unconscious level I felt its power. I mailed it to the International Committee of the Red Cross with a letter about how I had obtained it, and my sincere apologies. I asked them to please try to return it to the soldier’s family.

  Scripps Howard treated me like a returning hero and sent me to speak about my experiences in cities where we had newspapers, including Cincinnati, which also was the corporate headquarters. The host for my talk at the Queen City Club was Charles Scripps, a grandson of the company founder, and a kind and soft-spoken man. We talked about beer, astronomy, and just about everything except for the newspaper business. He thanked me for all I had done for the company, which seemed weird because I was the one grateful to the Scripps and Howard families for letting me run around the world for the previous decade.

  The next day Bill Burleigh, the corporate boss who seven years before had approved my assignment to Mexico City, gave me a ride to the airport. That was the kind of gesture that stayed with me. He was many levels above me, but all he wanted to talk about was my future. I told him I loved being a reporter, and that I hoped to write books someday. Burleigh was full of encouragement and assured me I had more good things ahead.

  Back at my cubicle in the Washington bureau, piled with yellowed, unread newspapers, reports from think tanks, news releases, receipts that I needed to submit for reimbursement, and boxes of old notebooks, I fell into a funk. My life felt like the pile on my desk: clogged with things that didn’t matter. The whole Washington scene was depressing. I was drowning in the vacuous talk, rote political arguments, and petty disputes and intrigue that were the focus of capital life. When you met someone, they wanted to know your title to determine your worth. Even parties felt like work with drinks.

  I had just witnessed more than one million people locked in the death grip of combat. The stakes were control of Middle East oil, which meant the entire world depended on the outcome. There was clarity and purpose covering the war. I didn’t wish for another war, but I missed the stripped-down focus on something important and the feeling of being at the center of things. The camaraderie of reporters in the field had vanished, too, now that we were back in our offices. Soldiers often said they preferred to be deployed, and some struggled at home. Once you experienced life in the field—the danger but also the closeness with your comrades and the sense of mission—you wanted to go again. I needed something bigger.

  “I might have a book idea for you.” The caller was Bill Burleigh from corporate. I thought we had been making small talk about my future on the ride to the airport, but shortly after my visit he met a Gulf War vet with a story to tell. The soldier was an army doctor who had been shot down, badly wounded, and captured by the Iraqis.

  When her helicopter crashed into pieces behind enemy lines, Maj. Rhonda Cornum was presumed killed in action. By the time the Red Cross found her alive with other POWs in Baghdad, the war was over and nobody paid much attention. CBS reporter Bob Simon and three members of his crew also had been captured by the Iraqis, and their release after the war was covered heavily in the media. But few people knew about this army doctor who also had been held prisoner.

  I was in good with the women in Army Public Affairs, who appreciated my stories about women in combat in Panama and the Gulf War, so they vouched for me. Major Cornum and I spent a day together, but it took all my skills to get even the barest story out of her.

  “It was not that big a deal,” she said.

  She had gone in to rescue a downed F-16 pilot, only to be shot down herself. Five soldiers on her rescue helicopter were killed in the crash, and Cornum—with both arms broken and a bullet in her back—was captured with two other soldiers and held prisoner. Sounded like a pretty good story
to me.

  “If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen,” I told her. When she reluctantly agreed to do a book, I interviewed Cornum, her family, and army colleagues, and I turned the whole thing into a story in her words, sort of like being a rewrite at City News. I worked on the manuscript every day from 5 a.m. until 9 a.m., when I went to my day job at the Washington bureau.

  Cornum insisted my name be on the cover with hers. “If people don’t like it,” she joked, “I’m going to blame you.”

  When the first box of books arrived from the publisher, Maru hovered over me while I gingerly picked out the first copy. I gently opened the pages, starting from the covers and working toward the center, the way I had been taught in school to open a new book without breaking the spine.

  “You did it, Pito!” Maru said, hugging me while I held the book, proud and relieved it was finished.

  I was afraid to read the book in print, fearing it was not as good as it could be, but Cornum was happy, and the reviews were enthusiastic. The New York Times named She Went to War a “Notable Book of the Year,” and just as importantly to me, it was assigned reading at some of the military training schools.

  The book left less time for Maru, but she had started dancing again with Mexican friends. They practiced after work in church basements and sewed costumes by hand. She formed her own group, the Maru Montero Dance Company, and began to get bookings around Washington. Maru did everything all the way, and then pushed it harder. Soon she was performing at the Kennedy Center and the White House and getting rave reviews in the Washington Post, which called her new company “magic.”

  A dance company for her and a book for me felt like enough to keep us busy, until Maru declared that we had to move to a house: “I’m not having a baby in an apartment.” I don’t remember discussing a baby, or that we needed a house to have one, but thankfully I just went along. I did insist that if we were going to upgrade from our little condo to a real house, it would have to be in the outer suburbs and priced below my absolute limit, because we still couldn’t afford the city. The house Maru picked was, of course, way over my absolute limit and still urban enough to “walk to sushi.”

  I was quietly anxious about having a baby because of what I had experienced in Kuwait and Iraq. After the war I did a lot of reporting about a mysterious illness called Gulf War Syndrome, which had sickened thousands of vets. Soldiers I had been with complained of strange rashes, fatigue, and muscle aches. I felt fine, so far. I just hoped I hadn’t damaged myself in some unseen way that would be passed on to our unborn child, among the generation called “Desert Stork” babies. Maru knew what she wanted and got pregnant as soon as we moved into our new house. The next summer we had a perfect, beautiful, and healthy baby we named Isabella.

  I had read about tears of joy, but it always sounded like an oxymoron, or something that happened to other people. Tears meant fear or sorrow, not happiness. Maru was in the hospital bed resting from the birth. On her chest was the baby, swaddled in a blanket and wearing a little cap over her black hair. Maru handed Isabella up to me for the first time, and I felt I was taking a very large, warm burrito into my arms. I wasn’t sure how to hold her, but once I got her cradled into my arms she looked up into my face. Her eyes were dark like her mother’s, and I was overcome with emotion, with happiness and completeness, like something missing had been found. I sobbed tears of joy.

  From that moment, the three of us were inseparable. I couldn’t wait to get home after work to see Isabella. I got up early with her, so Maru could sleep before I went to the office. Some mornings I pretended I was covering a story on Capitol Hill, just to steal an extra hour with the baby. The three of us went to art exhibits, movies, and neighborhood parks. We took long walks every day through the summer and fall and into winter. At our favorite sushi restaurant, we put Isabella on a blanket under the table, where she slept happily through dinner.

  No one had told me a child would change my life, not that I would have listened or understood. Nor did I realize how happy and fulfilled I could feel married to the right woman. Some of the meaning and purpose I had sought covering stories was being siphoned off to my new family, and I liked it. At the same time, I felt a sense of accomplishment publishing my first book, and it led to more writing offers. I also was proud of all Maru had accomplished with her dance company. Our lives had taken another interesting turn, once again with little forethought from me, and I felt my heart expand with love and possibility.

  13

  RESCUE IN SOMALIA

  ——— ON ATTITUDE ———

  Maru, our 4-month-old baby, and I were at my parents’ house in Chicago for Isabella’s baptism and first Christmas, when the call came from the desk. By now, my mom dreaded those calls, because it meant I was going some place dangerous. This time Dale had a destination that could not have been more frightening: Somalia.

  By late 1992, the African country had broken down and people were starving. When the government collapsed, warring clans prevented food from getting to those who needed it. The images on television were horrific, and American politicians asked, why do we have this big military if we don’t use it to help? President George H. W. Bush ordered US troops to beat back the warlords and deliver food to the hungry. Dale wanted me to be there to cover it.

  Once again, I kissed Maru before leaving for the airport. But for the first time before going to war, I also kissed our child good-bye. So many times previously I had been able to switch off my gentler emotions to chase a story. This time my feelings and responsibility as a husband and father overwhelmed my professionalism as a reporter. I felt fear and dread, plus pain and guilt for leaving them. The story was the biggest in the world, but surely other reporters could cover it. I never had declined an assignment, however, and I wasn’t going to now.

  We stood together one final time at the door, the three of us. I had my arm around Maru, who was holding the baby. I tried to make Isabella smile up at me, even though my tears were falling on her blanket.

  A few days later, I joined 169 Marines and their families in a parking lot at Camp Pendleton, California. Their commander, Lt. Col. Pete James, forty-two, called everyone in close one last time. “To the families, you have my pledge I’ll do everything I can to bring every Marine home. Because they are dear to me. They are dear to me.” There were hugs and tears and nervous laughter.

  A little girl in pink barrettes, who was going to spend Christmas without her father, shouted over and over: “I don’t like good-byes! I don’t like good-byes!”

  We made refueling stops in New York, Rome, and Cairo before landing in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. By the time we arrived, the chartered jet was littered with discarded newspapers and magazines and messy food trays, but the civilian flight attendants were pleased to be doing their part to help people in need. One of them told the Marines she was proud of them, and that “the Big Guy doesn’t forget.”

  Jet-lagged and apprehensive about what was ahead, we shuffled down the steps off the plane and into Africa. A cool breeze blew in from the choppy waters of the Indian Ocean. The air was humid, and the terrain around the airport was covered with thick green vegetation. The natural surroundings were verdant and pristine, but everything made by humans was broken, toppled, or smashed. Rubbish sat in smoldering piles amid abandoned cars and aircraft engines, stripped of parts and wires. Hundreds of people watched us from just off the tarmac, more curious than threatening.

  The only civilian among the Marines, I climbed up into the open rear of a five-ton truck. We sat on benches facing each other, our backs exposed to the street. The Marines carried their weapons, stocks down and barrels up, between their legs. They lugged seabags filled with clothes and supplies, including cases of industrial-strength bug spray labeled “Permethrin Arthropod Repellent.” I had a knapsack for my computer and notebooks, plus an old parachute bag for clothes, snack food, a roll of toilet paper, a pack of baby wipes, and ski goggles for blowing sand.

  The Ma
rines were taking malaria pills and had received as many as ten injections to protect them from typhoid, cholera, plague, and hepatitis—not just the “A” variety, but also B, C, D, and E. They were warned about exotic health risks such as schistosomiasis, which was caused by a parasite that burrowed into human skin, and told not to eat or drink anything unless it was prepared by the US government. I had gone to an international travel center for my own shots, but my biggest worry during any rough travel was a common but debilitating stomach bug.

  The health and environmental risks were bad enough, but then we rolled out of the airport into a lawless city. I had been to some tough places before, but none like Somalia. Dented cars swerved through pitted streets crowded with people. Horns honked and trucks rumbled past vendors selling trinkets and clothes. Stripped-down jeeps were mounted with heavy weapons, and even boys carried automatic rifles. Young men, lean and hungry and hiding their weapons just out of sight, stared at us from open doorways. Women in colorful wrap-around skirts stared, too. Small children laughed and shouted, “Americanos!”

  Our truck stopped and started through the cratered streets. The buildings were crumbled, and not one window frame had glass. There was no paint that wasn’t faded, and bullet holes pocked the walls. The entire city appeared to have been ground down, or blasted with gravel from a hose. Some of the younger Marines with me on the truck had never deployed before and had never been outside the United States; they just stared, mouths shut.

  Then Somalis charged the truck. One of the younger Marines shouted: “Get back! Get back!” He pointed his weapon at them and they stopped.

  I was less afraid of the crowd—they seemed excited to see us—than I was of the Marine shooting someone by mistake. If he did shoot, we would be swarmed. Most of the Marines appeared more overwhelmed than afraid. Back home we had seen starving children on television, so it was a relief to see people who looked relatively healthy. Still, the destruction was complete, and the need too great for anyone to fix quickly, even the United States Marine Corps. Tensely scanning the jostling crowd for threats, one of the Marines quietly spoke my own thoughts: “What the fuck are we doing here?”