Hi Mom, yeah it’s late here. I’m waiting up for a TV interview. It was weird, two soldiers in the unit I was with were killed, but I don’t say it was a matter of hours and a different patrol. I don’t say it because I’ve learned it’s better to keep scary things like that hidden sometimes because, after all, I’m the one who chose to be here.
Why hasn’t Fox News called? They’re supposed to call my T-Mobile or sat phone. That’s why I am still awake at 5A.M. and I’m standing outside my trailer in the dark to get clear reception for the TV spot and the power generators that keep Camp Victory going are humming loudly and I have to catch a helicopter in two hours because my embed is over and I don’t really want to stay for the ceremony of the two dead soldiers and that’s really unprofessional of Fox not to call and cancel the interview.
You look into the abyss, see your reflection. Lean closer.
But Fox doesn’t call and I stay awake anyway and there is a pile of cigarette butts by my trailer now as the sun rises and it does not inspire me and it’s a cool dawn and I have a slight chill and I watch soldiers in flip-flops and shorts and gray army T-shirts with towels slung over their shoulders stumble to the latrines to shower and shave and shit and so I go to the latrines, too, long white trailers provided by KBR and they smell like strong disinfectant and feces and mouthwash and aftershave, but it is warmer inside because the heating units are on full blast and I throw water on my face and wipe it off with paper towels but some drops remain in my thin beard. Then I go find the public affairs officer who takes me to a helicopter pad at Camp Liberty and my stomach hurts because I’ve smoked too much and my embed is over, and reports like those that Captain Greg Stone, twenty-eight, from Potsdam, New York, compiled from the field and I, Michael Hastings, twenty-six, from Malone, New York, witnessed him compile, reports with digital pictures of mosques from different angles, are sent up the chain of command to give the U.S. military command the confidence to say, as Major General Rick Lynch does during a press conference in the days following the bombing and repeats after I’ve left Camp Liberty and after the two soldiers have been shipped home and their parents notified along with the fifty-three other soldiers killed that month: “We’re not seeing civil war.”
And the closer you look it’s you and it’s not you and you think everything becomes clearer but a force beyond human control like gravity but much more personal pulls you deeper and deeper and you no longer know what it is you’re looking at.
We don’t see the abyss. We’re Americans.
There is a state of emergency in Iraq. Beginning February 22 permanent curfews are enforced. The death toll climbs, Shiite militias attack Sunni mosques, Sunni insurgents attack more Shiite mosques. There are open gun battles in the streets. The media reports on the spiraling situation (though still with a question mark—are we in a civil war?). The abyss spreads and horrifies and excites everyone it touches.
My two months are up. It is the first week of March. I want only to get on my flight to Amman then get on my flight to Vienna and then to meet Andi. I have to get to Andi. I have promised her, and that’s all that matters. I am supposed to leave on Wednesday, March 1, but there’s a curfew. I am supposed to leave on Thursday, March 2, but there’s a curfew. I am supposed to leave on Friday, but the curfew holds. I try to sound cool about it when I talk to her. A fluid situation, baby. Just get on the plane. I’ll be there.
The curfew lifts on Saturday. I go to the airport.
Andi catches her plane from New York, and is picked up at the airport with a sign that saysMRS ANDREA HASTINGS, she tells me, and I think that’s funny. The car takes her to the Hotel Imperial, a five-star European hotel, where they knew I was going to run late because I sent an email to the front desk saying: “Dear Sir, due to the fluid nature of the situation in Baghdad, the civil war and such, my fiancée Andrea will be checking in first under the room reserved in my name…Please let me know if this will be an issue. Sincerely…”
I arrive in Vienna on Sunday morning, March 5. Andi greets me at the door wearing a white top from Banana Republic and she just glows goodness and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
We order room service. We sit on the bed. We stare at each other. We order more desserts, including an elaborate cheese plate.
CHAPTER12
March–July 2006
VIENNA, PRAGUE, NEW YORK
Two days in Vienna then we catch a train to Prague. (Budapest or Prague—Andi wants Prague. She makes the right choice.) We check in at the hotel near the river. The room is large; Andi puts on the slippers and the oversized white bathrobe. We take a walking tour of the city. Kafka and Kundera, the Brothers Grimm. Castles and Gothic structures, small, dark mysterious streets. We have a picture taken of us on top of a famous clock house; a picture near the castle overlooking the city; a picture on the Charles Bridge. Dana, a sweet woman who once gave Jackie O. a tour, shows us around. “You look like a Czech model,” she tells Andi. “Except for the sneakers.” Andi likes this and she likes the Czechs—a people who elected a poet for president, who’ve managed to overcome their troubled past and are now safe and happy and fond of freedom. We eat dinner at Allegro, overlooking the river and the Charles Bridge. We walk across it before midnight, holding hands.
There are issues, there always are—those things that for the last two months have gone unsaid, all the fears, paranoias, small aggravations that you can’t really get at over the phone. On the train to Prague, we discuss them at length, sitting in a passenger compartment we have to ourselves. Andi takes out a pen and piece of white paper. She wants to write them down; she wants a document listing our anxieties and demands and grievances. She starts to write, dating the top of the page “The March 6 Agreement.”
1) MH will not “seek attention” from other females…
2) MH will not flirt…
3) MH will not “emotionally cheat”…
4) MH will not “be nasty” and “attack” ASP if in bad mood…
I object to the conditions as stated and I tell Andi to add an amendment clarifying that “MH is denying that he has engaged” in the activities stipulated by ASP, and I add my own clauses to the agreement.
5) ASP will not break up with MH every time she is upset with MH…
6) ASP will not “threaten our love” by telling MH to “let ASP go”…
7) ASP will not break up with MH over the phone while he is in Baghdad…
8) ASP will not threaten to leave MH for remainder of vacation (as ASP did on second night in Vienna, when, after a fight, she said she was “going to the airport now”)…
The list fills up both sides of the page—she furiously scribbles, each new clause bringing a smile to her face. “It’s our Treaty of Versailles,” she says. We both are required to sign on the bottom of the page. “We hereby agree to love each other…”
Andi senses, too, that I’m still tweaked from Iraq. On the days when we travel, I wake up early in the hotel and pack my bags and place them near the door. She wakes up and looks at them: “Is the convoy coming yet?” I am wound up, jumpy. As we are crossing a trolley track in Vienna on a cold sunlit morning a teenager screams—I jerk back. Nothing, just the teenager yelling to a friend, but I’m startled. My temper is short. At the reception desk to the hotel, I ask the man to break a fifty-euro bill and he looks at me like I’ve requested him to scrape shit off my shoe. “Are you kidding me,” I snap, “I’m paying fucking seven hundred dollars a night and you’re giving me a hard time about making change?” Andi walks up behind me, pulls me away from the desk, slightly embarrassed by my outburst. She wants me to shave my beard: “You’re not in Baghdad anymore,” she says, “and it hurts my face.”
After a week together, though, the tension starts to disappear. And Prague is a city where we can repeatedly say what we’ve been longing to say to each other, face-to-face. “Why do you love me?” she asks one morning, waiting for room service to deliver breakfast.
I list all the reasons. Be
cause you are pure of heart, because you are beautiful, because you are honest, because you believe in things and I don’t know if I do, because you don’t compromise your principles and sometimes I think I am always compromising my own, because you are brilliant, because you are mine, because you love me and you are willing to put up with my bullshit; because we fit.
“We are stuck together,” she says, “no matter how difficult you can be.”
“Me difficult?”
“You are difficult, Newsie.”
“So are you!”
A pause, a squeeze of her hand—two squeezes back means she loves me.
She draws her knees up to her chest, the bed’s comforter wrapped around her. There is a look of concern on her face. I know the look well by now. I can already imagine what’s coming next—I know that even though the tension over our relationship can fade, it’s always close to the surface. We are always a moment away from what she says next. “Is love enough, though?”
“Yes, yes of course it is,” I assure her. “We’ve made the decision to be together. That’s that. Now it will just take time.”
But I know my response doesn’t put her at ease. I’m still going to go back to Iraq, and no matter how many times I explain that I’m laying the groundwork for my career, that I’m trying to establish myself, that when I go I’m not leaving her, she still thinks that my commitment to work trumps my commitment to her. I try to say that I understand that she worries about me, that it’s harder on her, that it’s not fair, and that I know I am asking her to make the sacrifice, while I do what I want.
“I’m not your priority. Work is. The magazine is. I’m like number five on your list.”
“There is no ranking! You are equal. I have to work all the time. It’s what I love to do. But I am not doing it just for myself, I’m doing it for our future.”
“Oh, lies. Spin. Spinner.”
“I’m not lying. I just don’t see it as ranking, you are not in a category, you are in your own separate place.”
“But if something happened to me, you’d file first!”
“Oh, stop. Who says things like that!”
We dance in the room, music from iTunes on the laptop, a dance party, we call it—Frank Sinatra, the Beach Boys (“God Only Knows”), Johnny Cash.
As we dance, I tell her: “Look, baby, it’s a trade-off. Look where we are. We are in Prague. With my job we’ll be able to travel around the world when we want to; yes, it’s a steep trade-off, but being the significant other of a foreign correspondent does have its perks.”
“Why don’t you get the Paris bureau job?” she jokes.
Back to Vienna to catch the plane to New York. Hot chocolate and coffee and Easter eggs at Demels; more cheese; a visit to Freud’s house; a stop by Franz Josef and Empress Sisi’s palace, where Andi buysThe Empress, about the life of Empress Sisi.
She gets a migraine on the way to the airport. As we pass customs, she says, I’m going to get sick, I don’t feel well. I had already anticipated this, already scoped the airport terminal for receptacles and bathrooms in case of an emergency, and I grab her head and guide her toward the wastebasket as the vomit comes up. I go to the gift shop to buy napkins and the only ones I can find have black roses on them, which I hand to her to wipe her mouth off.
I have a business–first class ticket courtesy of the magazine (overseas flights of eight hours or more are automatically business class) and she has coach. I ask about getting her ticket upgraded and they keep saying, At the gate, you can upgrade at the gate, but when we finally get to the gate, we have to part—her back to economy and me to first class. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll get you up here or you can take my seat.” There is one seat available, the flight attendant tells me as the plane starts taxiing out. I walk back, the seat belt sign solid red, and there she is, sleeping, and I wake her up and grab her bag from the overhead compartment. It feels as if everyone in the plane is going to start clapping as she follows me up the aisle to join me in first class. We watchThe Constant Gardener on the flight.
Back to New York, back to the office, back to reality—or something.
Andi has been working on a big event; the Bring Them Home concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom on 34th Street. She’s arranged for Air America to be one of the primary sponsors. The guests for the March 22 concert included Susan Sarandon, Cindy Sheehan, Rufus Wainwright, Moby, Michael Stipe, Bright Eyes, and a veteran to speak to the crowd about his experiences in Iraq. I am there in the role of significant other, in the VIP lounge, and am so proud of her. She looks so capable and so stunning and the event raises Air America’s profile and gets new subscribers to their Internet service and at the end of the night everyone is pleased.
I am getting back into the pace of office life. It chafes. It seems pointless and dull and I don’t feel like I’m going forward. I’m doing the same things I’d done for the previous three years. It’s hard to take the daily workplace drama seriously. There are times when I want to yell—in the office, at dinner parties, in conversation—“I just got back from fucking Baghdad, motherfucker! What you are saying means nothing!” It is an irrational urge, unfair, self-important—because I can answer the scream myself: “So? Who gives a shit? Good for you, asshole. Pass the salad.” But I can’t really connect to what I’m doing and I don’t know when I’m going back to Iraq again; I could be stuck in New York for four months or more. The magazine wants me here, where I can report and help with editing from a cubicle on West 57th Street. I get to work on Iraq stories, but I’m also writing extensively about luxury goods for a section of the international edition called “The Good Life.”
In May, two military investigations confirmTime’ s story on the Haditha massacre. A platoon of marines are accused of executing twenty-four Iraqi civilians after a marine lance corporal named Miguel Terrazas was killed in an IED attack. The incident occurred in November 2005, and the marines tried to cover it up. I call marines who were in Haditha that day to get their opinion. The consensus: If you weren’t there, you can’t judge. Soon after that, I write a story about a designer shoe company in SoHo, whose shoes, some of which are made from alligator skin, go for up to $3,200 a pair.
In June, another war crime is reported in the Iraqi town of Yusafiya. An American soldier named Steven Green is accused of raping a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl then killing her family. The rest of his squad allegedly watched it happen; before the attack, the soldiers had a barbecue and drank beer. I drive to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to interview the mother of one of the accused soldiers. I wear a jacket and tie. I talk to her for two hours at her kitchen table. She is still in shock. She doesn’t believe her son could have been involved in something so horrible. She has pictures of him around her house, dressed in his army best. He looks like a hero; in her eyes, he still is.
I write a story about expensive flat-screen televisions that work outdoors. I profile a New Yorker who makes custom suits. He made the suit Michael Douglas wore in the movieWall Street .
I want to get back to Iraq as soon as I can. I feel like I’m missing out on the story. I used to enjoy writing about anything—shoes, suits, yachts, whatever—but all I want to do now is cover what’s happening in Baghdad.
Andi senses this. She interprets it as me not wanting to be with her. I try, again, to dissuade her of this notion, but it is this feeling that causes our one serious rough patch, the only time we actually break up, which lasts for a period of about twelve hours.
It’s a Sunday. I don’t even remember what we are fighting about. She threatens to leave my apartment. She is crying. I am very upset. “I’m leaving,” she says.
“Then leave—I’m not coming after you this time!”
“No one will ever love you like I do,” she says.
I remember this. I thought it might be true though it sounded like a threat.
She leaves and I don’t go after her. I sit on the futon and flip to a NASCAR race. I lock the door. She is not coming bac
k, I realize. I turn on HBO. It’sBig Love, and the song on the soundtrack is our song—Sunday nights are our nights, the nights we watched our shows together, and it’s the Beach Boys that get me—
God only knows what I’d be without you.
I pick up the phone and make call after call and finally get an answer very late at night. I shouldn’t have let you leave, I tell her. She agrees.
Two weeks later,Newsweek ’s publicity department asks me to go on a Fox News show to talk about a story I had worked on about IEDs. Radio and television interviews were a regular weekly duty for the magazine’s Iraq reporters. Shows in the U.S. were always looking to get the on-the-ground perspective from Baghdad, to talk about the news of the day, and stories we had written; it was also a good way to promote theNewsweek brand.
Andi decides to come with me to the Fox studio on 50th Street and Sixth Avenue—the heart of the enemy, she says, the belly of the beast. Before the show, a producer does a preinterview with me. The producer asks what I will say. I tell her that IEDs are the number one killer of American troops in Iraq, responsible for two thirds of the casualties, and that the bombs are very easy to make and hard to detect. Apparently this isn’t good enough news for Fox. “Is there anything positive you can say?” the producer asks. “Uh, sure, I guess it’s good that the DoD is putting like two billion dollars into something called the Joint IED Defeat Task Force (JIEDD, better than Joint Defeat IED, which would be J-DIED, hah). So that’s progress, right?”
The TV spot goes smoothly. I sit in a room staring at a camera, answering questions from the anchorman who is on the floor above. As I talk, the show runs b-roll of American Humvees getting blown up.
I Lost My Love in Baghdad Page 13