It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

by Addario, Lynsey

  I knew that the armored personnel carrier, a common military vehicle used to transport troops, was full of men, and I wondered how long I would have to endure this torment before someone came to my rescue. I heard one of my colleagues groan in pain—I thought it was Anthony but later learned it was Steve getting a bayonet shoved in between his butt cheeks, not quite ripping through his pants—and I knew we were all being abused simultaneously.

  “Please. You are Muslim,” I said. “I have a husband. Please.” He ignored my words and kept his hands on my breasts for the thirty minutes or so we drove, until miraculously another soldier pulled me into the protection of his embrace. He was trying to shield me from the groping. The salty-fingered guy pulled me back against him. The savior pulled me back. Someone had a conscience.

  The vehicle finally slowed and pulled over to the side of the road. The door opened, and I was roughly pushed out. With our arms tied and eyes blindfolded, they shifted us to the back of a cramped Land Cruiser. Inside, Anthony was moaning loudly.

  “My shoulders,” he said aloud, his voice drenched in pain. “My arms are bound so tightly, it’s killing my shoulders.”

  My shoulder with the titanium plate that reset my collarbone after my car accident also ached. Anthony and Steve began to speak a smattering of Arabic to a soldier, pleading with him to retie our arms in front, rather than behind our backs. One by one the soldier untied our arms, and the relief was immediate. I was eerily calm in the back of the truck: My hands now tied in front, the close proximity to my colleagues, and the hope that we would all remain together were enough to get me through the night.

  I kept my eyes closed under the blindfold and tried to slow my breath, to distract myself from my fear, my thirst, my need to pee. That’s when I felt another hand on my face, caressing my cheek like a lover. Slowly he ran his fingers over my cheeks, my chin, my eyebrows. I lowered my face into my lap. He raised it, tenderly, and continued with his caresses. He ran his hands over my hair and spoke to me in a low, steady voice, repeating the same phrase over and over. I kept my face down, ignoring his touch, his words. I didn’t understand what he was saying.

  “What is he saying, Anthony?”

  Anthony took his time answering. “He’s telling you that you will die tonight.”

  I was numb. Since the moment we’d been taken that morning, I’d resigned myself to the likelihood that I was going to die, and every minute since then had felt like a gift. I focused on the moment, on staying alive, on not getting overwhelmed by emotion.

  Tyler suddenly said, “I need some fresh air. Anthony, could you please ask them if I can step outside for some fresh air?”

  Tyler’s request was strange to me; he had endured the previous hours without so much as a whimper, and now he was asking for fresh air. I would later learn that Saleh, the soldier who kept telling me I would die as he caressed my cheeks, had told Tyler repeatedly that he was going to “cut his pretty head off,” and Tyler had been nauseated.

  • • •

  SOMEHOW WE ALL FELL asleep sitting up in the back of the Land Cruiser. It was light out when we awoke, stiff and sore, to the sound of soldiers banging on the door. We were thrown into the back of a pickup truck. Bound, blindfolded, and lying on the bed of the hard metal pickup, we drove west for two hundred fifty miles along the Mediterranean coast under an unforgiving sun. I imagined what we looked like, being paraded through the streets like medieval trophies of war from one hostile checkpoint to another. I was so tired of being scared, of wondering what was next. The unknown was more terrifying than anything. Tyler was our eyes: He was able to see out from beneath his blindfold and narrated the scene to us in a hushed voice as we drove along the endless road. Anthony was our ears: He translated the slurs and shouts, like “Dirty dogs!” (a grave insult in Islam). For most of the time I crouched in a fetal position to shield myself from the street and rested my head against the metal arch of the wheel, my bound hands covering my face. My collarbone and shoulder ached with every bounce of the truck, but I thought if I could dig myself deep into the flatbed, no one would notice I was there.

  At each checkpoint one of us was beaten. I heard the thump of what I imagined was an AK-47 or a fist to the back of my colleagues’ heads, and a whimper of contained agony. At one checkpoint I felt a soldier sidle up next to me alongside the truck, and immediately afterward he poured the weight of his body onto my cheek with his fist. Tyler, in a gesture that would get me through the next few days, managed to move his bound hands over to me and hold mine while I wept in misery.

  “You are OK,” he said. “I am with you. You are going to be OK. You are going to be OK.”

  “I just want to go home,” I said aloud as hot tears dampened my blindfold. I found reassurance only in the fact that we were all still together.

  It was afternoon when we arrived in Sirte, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, which lies halfway between Benghazi and Tripoli. We were still blindfolded when they led us downstairs into an area that felt, smelled, and sounded like a prison. The man leading me put me up against a wall and told me to place my hands above my head and spread my legs. I imitated the position I had seen so many times on police TV shows. We were being searched again. Like all the other Libyan men before him, he rested his hands on my breasts for a bit too long while he checked my pockets. I had a small container of saline for my contact lenses that I was able to convince the previous soldiers to let me keep for medical reasons, but this soldier confiscated it immediately. He took the plastic watch off my wrist. The man felt me up one last time and walked me into a cell.

  “Is everybody here?” Steve asked.

  “Yes,” we all replied.

  Eventually they untied our hands and undid our blindfolds and brought us a dinner of orange rice and plain white bread rolls. Our cell was about twelve feet by ten. There was a small sliding window in the upper left corner, four filthy foam mattresses on the floor, a box of dates, a giant bottle of drinking water with some plastic cups, and a bottle for urine in the corner by the door. I was too distressed to eat and, despite my thirst, too terrified of needing to use the restroom to drink. I had a splitting headache from caffeine withdrawal, and my contact lenses were dry and irritated. My eyesight was -5.5; I was nearsighted and almost blind without them. My glasses had been stolen with our gear. If I cried a few times a day, I thought, I could keep my contacts moist.

  The men took turns urinating into the bottle in the corner, and I longed for a funnel, or a penis. There was nothing to do but sleep, talk, and wait. They came to take Anthony away for questioning a few times, and we couldn’t decide whether the men in the prison in Sirte had gotten word of who we were from Tripoli or whether they still had no idea we were New York Times journalists.

  “Do you think anyone realizes we’re missing?” I asked.

  Anthony, Steve, and Tyler were sure. “The New York Times is a machine,” Steve said. “They will be doing everything they can to find us.”

  “Really?” I asked skeptically. I couldn’t imagine that anyone even realized we were missing in the chaos of the front line. I had been so immersed in my own head, in staying alive, that I hadn’t once thought about the mechanisms in place for trying to rescue us.

  “Four missing New York Times journalists is a big deal,” Tyler stepped in.

  “This is it for me,” Steve said, unwavering. “No more war. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this to Reem [his wife]. This is the second time in two years.”

  “Yeah …” Anthony trailed off, eyes lowered onto the prison cell floor. “Poor Nada. I feel horrible for putting her through this.”

  Would we even have a chance to tell our significant others how much we loved them? Covering war was inflicting immeasurable pain on our loved ones, and we knew it. This was the second time I was putting Paul through this pain. Anthony and Steve both had infants at home, too. And yet as guilty as we felt at that moment, and as terrified as we were, only Steve sounded convinced by his own declaration that he wou
ldn’t cover war anymore.

  “If they bring us to Tripoli, we will probably end up in the hands of the Interior Ministry,” Anthony said, referring to a ministry infamous for torture. “And probably in one of their solitary-confinement cells, or where Ghaith is.” We had heard that Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi journalist and photographer for the Guardian, was being held by Qaddafi’s men. He had been missing for days, and we assumed the worst.

  “But we need to get to Tripoli,” Anthony said, “because we will never get released if we don’t get to Tripoli. We will probably survive—it will be difficult, but we might live if we get there.”

  “If we do, I am going to be so fat in nine months!” I exclaimed suddenly. I knew that if we made it out of Libya alive, I would finally give Paul what he’d been asking me for since we’d married: a baby. After all those years of feeling conflicted about having a child, I found myself praying for the chance to start a family with Paul. I felt confident that I could endure anything—that I would be able to survive psychological and physical torture—if it meant we would eventually be released.

  Sometime in the night the clanking of our prison door woke me; I feigned sleep. A young man opened the cell door, looked at the four of us asleep, and grabbed my ankle. He started dragging me toward the door.

  “No!” I screamed, frantically twisting my way back toward Anthony, who was asleep near me. The young man pulled my leg again toward the door. I squirmed back, pressing myself against Anthony, in search of protection. The man gave up and left.

  Eventually I closed my eyes. I breathed slowly and took in the silence of our cell. Steve, Tyler, and Anthony were all asleep. Images of others who had spent time in prison echoed through my head: my Iraqi interpreter Sarah, who was jailed by the U.S. military in 2008 after she spent two years risking her life and interpreting for them; Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek colleague who was put in solitary confinement in Iran and hummed Leonard Cohen songs to stay sane. I sang “Daydreamer” by Adele over and over in my head, because I had been listening to the song as I painted my toenails the morning we were captured. I knew so many people had endured worse—captivity, torture—and their resilience helped me face my fear of what would come next, the physical pain of being bound and punched. My thoughts reverted back to Paul and my family, who had no idea where I was.

  Throughout the night we listened to a man screaming in a cell nearby.

  The familiar clanking sound of our prison door woke us in the morning. We heard them say Tripoli, and we knew that was our fate.

  Soldiers led us outside of the prison once again blindfolded and bound, but this time with plastic zip ties that cut deep into our wrists. I asked them to loosen them. They tightened them even more, these plastic ties I had seen used by the U.S. military on so many Iraqis and Afghans. I felt my hands start to lose circulation, and when I let out a whimper, the soldier pulled the plastic cuffs even tighter, slicing them into my wrists and punishing me for my weakness. We were driven to the airport and loaded onto a military aircraft, which I recognized by the ramp, the hum of the engine, and the seats lining the walls.

  “Is everybody here?” Steve’s question was first answered with a gun butt in the face.

  “Yes.”

  They sat us at least a few feet apart from one another, and with ropes and strips of cloth, tied our hands and ankles to the webbing covering the walls of the plane, like cattle. I heard one of my colleagues get smacked again, and then the whimper. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by desperation and helplessness. Tyler, Anthony, and Steve kept getting beaten with fists and rifles. Getting felt up and fingered through my jeans didn’t seem nearly as bad as that physical abuse. My hands and feet tied to the webbing along the inner fuselage of the plane, my eyes blindfolded, and the mystery of what would happen next was just too much to bear. I started crying uncontrollably. I was ashamed and lowered my head so whoever else was on the plane wouldn’t see me and wouldn’t hit me or tie me tighter for being weak and making noise.

  I cried and cried until a man came up beside me and said, “I am sorry. I am sorry.” And he untied my blindfold, undid my zip ties, and released my legs and arms from the walls of the plane. I was too scared to look around. I kept my eyes down and continued crying. They were evil. These men were the epitome of evil. They understood psychological torture and deployed it.

  When I finally looked up, two middle-aged men dressed in military uniforms were sitting across from me. They looked at me sympathetically. They had kindness in their eyes. Anthony, Steve, and Tyler remained tied to the walls and blindfolded, their heads slouched over toward their knees. Were they sleeping? I again felt guilty for getting easier treatment because I was a woman. When we began our descent, one man refastened my blindfold.

  We landed in a frenzy. We were off-loaded from the plane, and Steve and I were put into a police wagon. Men with automatic weapons stood over us. I could see the tips of their guns through the bottom of my blindfold. They were thugs. Qaddafi’s famous “Zenga Zenga” speech played on someone’s mobile phone. (In the midst of the uprising Qaddafi gave a speech vowing to hunt down protesters “inch by inch, house by house, room by room, alleyway by alleyway [zenga zenga].”) Hearing his speech again motivated them to beat us down. A few different men put their hands between my legs, over my jeans, and rubbed my genitals with their fingers. They were more aggressive than all the others before them, laughing when I pleaded with them to stop. I prayed they didn’t find my second passport tucked into a money belt nestled in my underwear. It was all I had left of my identity at that point.

  Outside I heard them beating my colleagues with their guns—that awful thumping sound. Someone let out a muffled squeal and a moan, and I strained to decipher—by the sound of the moan—which one of my friends was being brutalized. It wasn’t Steve, because he was in the paddy wagon with me, being forced to yell “Down, down Ireland” by someone who had no idea that Ireland wasn’t part of any foreign coalition against him. With the next round of thumps I recognized Tyler’s voice. He had been silent throughout his other beatings, and I knew this was a terrible sign. He was getting beaten on the tarmac. I couldn’t hear Anthony.

  When their parade was over, we were transferred to a Land Cruiser again.

  “Is everybody here?”

  “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.”

  Tyler’s voice was empty.

  We rode for about twenty minutes in the Land Cruiser as a man who spoke very clear English explained that we would not be beaten anymore and that we were now in the hands of the Libyan government. Anthony later told us that before this announcement there had been a fight (in Arabic) over who would “get” us on the tarmac: the Interior Ministry or the Foreign Ministry. When we were put into the police wagon, we were initially to be released to the Interior Ministry. But somehow the Foreign Ministry won. I didn’t care anymore where they were taking us. I was so resigned to whatever fate lie ahead, too beaten down to feel fear. I rode along in a stupor.

  When the car stopped, the man who spoke English helped me out of the car—I was still blindfolded—and as he placed his hand on my shoulder and offered to lead me up to a building, I flinched.

  “Please just stop touching me! Please don’t touch me anymore!”

  “Listen to me,” the man with perfect English said. “You are now with the government of Libya. You will not be beaten anymore. You will not be mistreated. You will not be touched.”

  I didn’t say a word. I felt the tears welling up again in my eyes.

  • • •

  WE WERE LED into a room with a clean, soft, off-white carpet. We had all endured misery on the trip from Sirte to Tripoli, but when our blindfolds were removed, it was as if we had to confront one another’s pain. I looked first at Tyler, my stoic friend whom I admired so much. He was hunched over, crying. Perhaps they were tears of relief that we had survived so much brutality and finally were given a reprieve by a man who spoke English, offered us juice boxes, and promised not to beat us anymore. Or per
haps Tyler was just broken. Seeing him, usually so strong and poised in the face of anything, tore me apart, and I cried, too. I looked over at Anthony; his eyes were glassy. Steve was stone.

  A nameless Libyan man who claimed to be with the Foreign Ministry reiterated that we would no longer be beaten or bound. We would, though, be blindfolded when interrogated, and they were going to hold us in a nearby guesthouse while they questioned us. The interpreter, who had a permanent, gentle smile from the moment we were able to see his face, leaned in close to me and in a hushed voice asked, “Are you OK? Did they touch you?”

  I was surprised by his candor. “Yes, they touched me. Every soldier in Libya touched me.”

  “But were you raped?” he persisted.

  “No. I was not raped. I was touched, punched, pushed around, but no one took my clothes off.”

  “Oh, good.” His body language immediately relaxed. I was shocked at how relieved he was; it was so jarring to come out of this world of abuse and fear and meet someone who cared for my well-being. Perhaps he was worldlier, or perhaps he was just worried about a potential public-relations nightmare. But it was as if rape was his own red line—the beatings, gropings, psychological torture, and threats didn’t matter, but rape did.

  The man in charge asked us whether we had any passports or possessions, and at this point I surrendered my passport and was reassured it would be returned before we were released. They transported us to our temporary accommodations, and they told us that if we attempted to open a door or a window, we would be shot.

  The apartment had two bedrooms: one with three beds for the men and one with two beds for me. We shared one large, dormitory-style bathroom with several stalls and a shower. We had a kitchen with a table just large enough for the four of us and a youngish, handsome cook, who was always pleasant.