Evil Reporter Chick

Random thoughts in war and peace

Archive for the category “War”

19 Jun 2013

Silenced too soon

Michael and me at Camp Striker near the Baghdad airport in September 2005.

Michael and me at Camp Striker near the Baghdad airport in September 2005.

Michael Hastings died Tuesday in a car crash in Los Angeles.

The news hit me hard. He was 33. He was a great journalist. He was a friend.

Most people know his name for the Rolling Stone story “Runaway General,” the profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal that exposed him as a loose cannon, chiding his civilian commanders in the Obama administration.

“Great reporters exude a certain kind of electricity,” said Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana, “the sense that there are stories burning inside them, and that there’s no higher calling or greater way to live life than to be always relentlessly trying to find and tell those stories. I’m sad that I’ll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write, and sad that he won’t be stopping by my office for any more short visits which would stretch for two or three completely engrossing hours. He will be missed.”

Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed praised Michael’s incredible instinct for a story. He also said this:

“Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague, a joy to work with and a lover of corgis — especially his Bobby Sneakers.”

Michael was known for his aggressive reporting. He believed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were misguided and didn’t for a second let any U.S. official — whether it was McChrystal or Hillary Clinton — get away with an easy answer.

His fiancee, an aide worker, was killed in Iraq when Michael was a Newsweek correspondent. He wrote about that relationship in his first book, “I Lost My Love n Baghdad: A Modern War Story.”

I never met his wife,  Elise Jordan. I cannot imagine her grief today.

As much as I respect his journalistic prowess — I leave it up to every media outlet to give him the proper reporter’s eulogy — the Michael I will cherish the most is the one I met in May 2005 at a hostile environment training put on by AKE in Virginia. I was there with AJC colleagues. He was there, I guess, on his own, determined to make a career for himself by going to the wars America was fighting.

He entertained us with his NYC white-boy rap — he was really good — and acerbic wit. Not bad, I thought, for a 28-year-old kid.

Three months later, Michael messaged me. “I am in Baghdad,” he said. “Going to Camp Striker tomorrow. I hear you are there. Lunch?”

So we ate standard military fare at the chow hall and shared stories about being embedded with the U.S. Army. He made me laugh when I hadn’t laughed in weeks. For that I will always be grateful.

An incredible young man robbed of life. An amazing journalist who will never again be able to write all the words that were within. Or expose the world for its sins.

Goodbye, Michael. May you rest in peace.

Read Michael’s advice for young journalists.

Posted by monibasu in U.S. Army, violence, War and tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment
24 May 2013
1 Comment

On this day, remember

The last day of a 12-month deployment in Iraq for the 1st Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment of the Georgia Army National Guard's 48th Infantry Brigade. The long journey home started with an incredible thunderstorm over Baghdad.

The last day of a 12-month deployment in Iraq for the 1st Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Infantry Brigade. The long journey home started with an incredible thunderstorm over Baghdad.

Even at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan, the wars were but a rude blip in the minds of a majority of Americans. Our military is made up of those who volunteer their services. Most Americans are disconnected from the men and women who serve in uniform.

A smaller share of Americans serve in the Armed Forces now than at any other time in our history except for the period between the two world wars. Unless you have a loved one of friend in the military, unless you live by a military base, you probably don’t think much about the sacrifices of service members. Aside from the magnetic yellow ribbons that adorn cars, there’s not even many visible reminders that America has been at war for a dozen long years.

How many families are separated? How many children are growing up without daddies and mommies? How many lives are broken by wounds that cannot heal? How many lives, lost?

In 2010, on the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan war, I traveled to Watertown, New York, to write a CNN story about a place I knew was constantly reminded. Fort Drum, home of the 10th Mountain Division, sits on the edge of Watertown. The division’s soldiers led the charge into Afghanistan and its many brigades and battalions have done multiple tours of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Watertown is also my husband’s hometown of sorts. He was born in nearby Carthage but as a boy, he lived in Watertown for nine years. I had been visiting the area for a number of years and knew very well that war’s toll was greater here than where I live in Atlanta.

Up there, in the North Country as the locals call it, war makes unwanted, life-arresting visits; crashes into homes and entire neighborhoods just as assuredly as a January blizzard. If you like, you can read my CNN story.

In Watertown and in military homes across America, war is a constant. Let us make it a constant in our homes  just for one day.

On Memorial Day.

Posted by Moni Basu in U.S. Army, War
19 Mar 2013
2 Comments

Catching up with Baby Noor

noorschool

I went to school with Noor (right) during my visit to Baghdad and had this photo taken with her and Hajar, her best friend, who lost the use of her legs in a mortar attack.

My friend Joe Duran just called me after many months. I’d last seen him in November in Istanbul. Now, he was calling from his native Mexico, where he’d gone on vacation and also to sort through boxes of old things he stored at his house there.

“Moni, guess what I found?” he said.

I have no idea what’s about to come next.

“You know when you asked me about the tapes of Baby Noor? The raw tapes are all here in a box,” he said, coughing from the dust he’d whipped up.

I’d called Joe back in January asking if he had access to the footage he shot of Noor, the infant with spina bifida who American soldiers helped save by shuttling her out of her home in Abu Ghraib and sending her to Atlanta for surgery. Without the operations, she would surely have died.

I was an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter embedded with the Georgia Army National Guard unit that came upon Noor during a routine raid. I wrote about her for the newspaper and several days later, Joe arrived with camera in hand to file a story for CNN.

Our friendship was sealed in the throes of war. When I reconnected with Noor’s family in Iraq earlier this year, I called Joe about the footage. Turns out most of it was in the CNN system and I didn’t need his tapes. But it was good to talk to him about the stories we did back then.

“I can’t believe it’s been seven years,” he said.

I can’t either.

Except that I saw Noor again a few weeks ago.

I was not prepared to see a little girl who could speak and read and write. A girl who fancied pretty dresses and demanded her hair be embellished with colorful clips. She had grown so much.

I returned to Iraq to find her and tell the story of how she was faring all these years later, long after everyone in America who had been involved had lost touch with her.

It was strange that Joe called me out of the blue on the day before the story published on CNN.com.

Here is the link to the story:

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/03/world/baby-noor/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

Posted by Moni Basu in U.S. Army, War
14 Mar 2013

Iraq. Now and then

I stand inside the Al Warda supermarket in Baghdad’s Kerrada neighborhood staring at boxes of dates, but my mind races back to another time.

I used to shop here in 2003, when I shared a room at the nearby Al Hamra Hotel with photographer Bita Honarvar. We were tired of eating the canned beans and rice the hotel served in the restaurant and opted instead for chick peas, lavash bread, yogurt, Turkish biscuits and Iranian sour cherry juice at Al Warda.

Al Warda is still the luxury it was in 2003.

Back then, Iraqis felt a sense of euphoria at the fall of Saddam Hussein.

I wandered around Baghdad, writing about how satellite dishes were sprouting faster than weeds do in Atlanta — after years of darkness, Iraqis now had access to the outside world. Ra’ed Hameed told me how he’d secretly bought a satellite dish on the black market in 1999 and kept it well hidden in his house, waiting for the day he could set it up, the day when television stations beamed in from other countries would no longer be banned. He was ready, he said, to watch “those racy German movies” he’d heard about.

There were a host of new newspapers. And political parties. And real hope that a free and strong Iraq could rise from the bloodshed.

But as the U.S. occupation began, life in Baghdad deteriorated. IED — improvised explosive device — became a part of the vocabulary. Iraqis started dying every month as did American men and women in uniform. A Sunni insurgency against the Americans raged and eventually, sectarian strife between Sunni and Shiite gave rise to fears of a bloody civil war.

I last went to Iraq in 2008, as a newspaper reporter embedded with a 3rd Infantry Division battalion. Five long years later, it was emotional for me to be back in Baghdad.

There is no Hamra Hotel anymore. It closed for good after a second bombing on a January afternoon in 2010.

Electricity is still scarce — on every street I can see the jumble of wiring that connect homes to private generators when the power goes out.

Parts of Baghdad look just as shabby as they were the last time I was here. Tired from the neglect and damage that decades of conflict bring. in Kerrada, near Warda, life seemed to be springing back with new shops, restaurants and even the landscaping of public places. I see crews hard at work putting in place fresh concrete in one of Baghdad’s squares made famous by Mohammed Ghani Hikmet’s sculpture, Kahramana and the Forty Thieves.

I watch Waleed make fresh samoon bread at Zeitoon Ovens. My friend Mohammed buys six loaves for $1 and we sit at a nearby tea shop with our syrupy Iraqi chai and hot, doughy bread. Life seems normal. Almost.

I visit the Mansour Hotel, where a suicide bomber penetrated layers of security and blew himself up in the lobby in 2007. It’s all shiny and new now. I see women in pancake makeup sipping tea with their friends and overweight businessmen in suits who remind me of Saddam’s thugs who spied on people at the Al Rasheed Hotel. I take the hotel elevators all the way up to the top for a spectacular view of Baghdad rising along the banks of the Tigris. I’d seen Baghdad from a Black Hawk but never feasted on the scenery like this.

From high up, everything seems so serene, so peaceful. I can’t see the garbage and the rubble. I can’t see the sadness and suffering.

Of course, no American soldiers are left here but relics of the years of occupation are hard to miss. The U.S. military left behind a few Humvees and armored personnel carriers that are now painted in white and blue. Concrete blast walls surround the International Zone and other places with high security. In some places, Iraqis have painted tem in cheerful colors. They were no more softer to look at, really. The myriad checkpoints around Baghdad are all manned by Iraqi police now. They are a bottleneck for traffic but necessary in a city where bombings are still common. Perhaps at a checkpoint or a Shiite market or eatery. Or in the central city, as was the case Thursday when four massive explosions rocked an area not far from the fortified Green Zone.

I don’t have to wear a flak jacket or helmet anymore but the truth is that at any moment, things could go pear-shaped. That’s a term I remember former Aussie special forces guys uttering at a hostile environment training I attended in 2005.

I hope not to use that phrase on this trip to Iraq.

Posted by Moni Basu in War | Leave a Comment
11 Mar 2013

Back to Baghdad

At the Roman ruins in Jerash, Jordan.

At the Roman ruins in Jerash, Jordan.

I felt small standing amid the Roman ruins in Jerash.

I marvel at the building accomplishments of people who lived so long ago; they intended to make structures last. How many slaves gave their lives in constructing magnificence not even an earthquake could fully take away?

I think of how I’d stood in this exact place more than a decade ago, when war seemed imminent in Iraq and I was in Jordan, waiting for a visa to fly into Baghdad. Just as I was now.

Time seems fleeting – and not.

Back in December of 2002, no one knew for sure what would become of Iraq. How George Bush would invade, drop bombs, send the world’s most powerful military in to destroy Saddam Hussein.

No one knew what would come next – a de-Bathification program that purged Iraq institutions of knowledge and expertise and left an occupying U.S. force with the daunting task of running a nation.

No one knew how American soldiers and Iraqi civilians would fall. One after another. In roadside bombings, firefights and attacks from an enemy that was often unseen. Or how Iraq would fall into chaos; Sunni fighting Shiite to the point that everyone assumed the worst of a civil war.

I stand under a cloudless sky in Jerash. It is late February but the chill that is normal for this time of air is gone. It is warm. The sun, bright. Like in Baghdad.

I will be there soon, 10 long years after the first time I visited.

saddam-hussein-picture-21Saddam’s face was everywhere then, a constant reminder of the consequences of stepping outside the boundaries of subservient Iraqi life. I remember clearly when I walked down the jetway from the Royal Jordanian plane at Saddam International Airport. “Down With the USA!,” it said. There was no mistaking where I had just arrived.

I was frightened and alone as I navigated my way through the maze of Iraqi controls for the foreign media. I was even afraid to close my eyes at night in my twin bed on a sixth-floor room at the Al Rashid Hotel. I knew someone was watching. Or listening. Or both.

On that trip, I met good people who had given up on life after years of conflict and punishing sanctions that robbed Iraq of material goods and normalcy of life.

A doctor who had no access to modern medicine, current journals or technology. A professor who sat under empty bookshelves – he had sold them all to feed his family. And a bookseller who hoped to make a living hawking outdated computer science books along with “the Great Gatsby” and “War and Peace” on the sidewalks of Al Mutanabi Street.

Where were they all now, I wondered? How their hopes must have risen an plunged like the tides of the oceans. I know I will probably not find them again now – after a decade of war, a decade of convulsion.

But I cannot wait to see Baghdad again. The way it was without American tanks and Humvees. I am anxious to see how the Iraqi capital is faring a decade after the war began and forever changed the course of Iraqi history.

I leave Jerash, my face pressed against the car window, all the way back to Amman. Soon I will be in Iraq, where I spent so many months of my life covering the war. In the midst of tragedy, I came to know a land that I loved in a way that is not always understandable. Perhaps it was because I saw the very best of humanity in conditions that were the worst.

Now I am eager to be there again.

Posted by Moni Basu in Travel, U.S. Army, War and tagged , | Leave a Comment
12 Feb 2013
1 Comment

WAR & Fashion

Carnage: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.

Catwalk: Armani, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent.

War is ugly. Fashion is beautiful. War projects the worst of humanity. Fashion displays sartorial splendor in its highest.

War is fraught with danger, even for journalists and especially for photographers who must get up close to their subjects to frame an image.

Fashion is far less perilous, though photographers must also get intimate with their subjects on and around the runways.
There are photographers who shoot both: battlefields and runways, guns and glamour. At first, photographing war and fashion appear as incongruous acts that are difficult to reconcile. Until, perhaps, you take a deeper look.

Check out this provocative project on CNN. It was our Director of Photography Simon Barnett’s idea. I got to interview some very cool people for the story.  http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/02/world/war-and-fashion/index.html

Posted by Moni Basu in CNN, Fashion, Journalism, violence, War, Women
02 Feb 2013
1 Comment

Terezin

On my last full day in Europe back in Novemeber (yes, I meant to write this eons ago), I hopped on a bus in Prague for an hour ride northwest to Terezin.

Joseph II built the city in 1780 and named it after his mother, Maria Teresia. It served as a fortress to protect Prague from invaders.

But during World War II, the Germans occupied the city. Adolf Hitler told the world that Terezin had been built for the Jews for their own protection. There was even a Nazi propaganda film made there that showed how happy the Jews were to be taken to Terezin. The Nazis even invited the Red Cross to visit Terezin after which the organization determined that the Jews were being treated well.

In reality, nearly 200,000 men, women and children were forced to the ghetto in Terezin. Many were taken from there to concentration camps and likely death.

The Czechs have tried to preserve the town’s history with a Ghetto Museum and tours through the town. I could feel the ugliness the moment I stepped off the bus in the town square. Yes, there were sure giveaways that it was the 21st century like the Stella Artois signs advertising a bar. But I could easily see how Terezin must have been in 1942.

The streets were largely empty. I guessed the houses must have gotten fresh coats of paint since the war but they stood as they were then, inanimate witnesses to acts of brutality.

This was a town of 5,000 people when the Germans drove the locals out. At the height of the war, 55,000 Jews were sent here. We saw in the museum exhibits how disease and starvation were rampant.

Still, many felt lucky to arrive at Terezin. This was not a Nazi extermination camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka. But many were sent there from Terezin.

Perhaps that’s why the town haunted me. That so many human beings sought refuge here and harbored hope in their hearts that they may live.

Just outside the town, in the old fortress, the Gestapo took over an existing a prison. I stood in the commandant’s office and stared at the sign in the courtyard: “Work makes you free.”

Here was a town with such an ugly past that I think many Czechs who were driven out to make room for the Jews, never returned. Why would they?

As the bus back to Prague meandered out of town, I pondered once again the breadth of inhumanity in this world. And why we should never forget places like Terezin.

Posted by Moni Basu in Holocaust, Travel, violence, War
20 Mar 2011
1 Comment

War


Today is the eight anniversary of the Iraq war.

That fact got lost in all the breaking news, most significantly, the U.S. use of force against Libya.

It reminded me of George W. Bush’s intention to remove Saddam Hussein. The term “regime change” did not surface much but that’s essentially what’s going on in Libya, right? The United States would not be leading the charge against Moammar Qaddafi if he were a friendly fellow, even if he did fire on his own people.

Lost also in the news of the last week are the horrific events unfolding in Cote D’Ivoire, where a political crisis has spiraled downward rapidly into bloodshed. The United Nations has reported incidents of people burned alive. Others have had their throats slit. At least seven women were butchered earlier this month — the video posted online showed one who had been decapitated by the power of a big gun.

Crimson rivers are flowing in West Africa — and in the East. Sudan, Somalia. Yet we hear so little in the news.

I hope that Libya does not escalate or turn into protracted war in the same vein as Iraq or Afghanistan. And while that conflict is most urgent, I hope we will not turn away from human suffering in other parts of the world.

Posted by monibasu in Cote D'Ivoire, Libya, War
19 Aug 2010
2 Comments

Leaving Iraq


The last of the 4,000 soldiers in the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, crossed the border from Iraq into Kuwait Thursday. There are no U.S. more combat brigade teams left in Iraq. All is going seemingly well for President Barack Obama’s plan to pull to leave just 50,000 troops there by September.

Hard to think about how it was then.

By then, I mean seven years ago, when the United States invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and U.S. soldiers deployed in droves.

In 2003, I looked at the American Humvees and Abrams tanks rolling through Baghdad. The soldiers wore aviator glasses and pointed their M-16s triumphantly. I stood among crowds of Iraqis and like them, pondered the course of history.

I did not know then that more than 4,000 of those soldiers would die in Iraq, along with thousands of Iraqis, many of them caught in the middle of dirty urban warfare.

By the time I returned as an embedded reporter in 2005, Americans ruled the landscape.

Camp Liberty was a sprawling American base with air-conditioning, movie theaters, stores, restaurants and other amenities the Iraqis lacked. Even now, Iraqis say they have no electricity or other basic services. A young lieutenant who was waiting to catch a plane with me on the military side of the Baghdad airport told me that if the Americans could deliver electricity, they would win the war.

In a way, he was right. By 2008, Iraqis asked me why the world’s superpower could not give them something as basic as power.

This year, protests erupted over the lack of power. In a land where temperatures soar to 120-plus in the summer, it’s hard to live without a fan. Only two-thirds of Iraqi have their electricity needs met — in Baghdad, it averages to four hours a day.

I thought about the day when I returned to my tent at Camp Striker and the AC unit had shut off. I sat on my cot dripping buckets of sweat and and tried to imagine life for Baghdadis outside the camp.

Seven years after the war, basic services are still a problem in Iraq.

So is insecurity.

Many people like to point to the drop in violence as a marker for success in the war. But my Iraqi friends still worry about stepping out with their children.

A car bomb exploded in Ramadi Wednesday night, killing two people. That may not sound like a lot compared to the height of the war when hundreds died each month. But when it is your husband or your mother, it’s everything.

Another 48 people died Tuesday in an attack outside a military recruiting center in Baghdad.

When will the killing end in Iraq? When the Americans are gone? When the Americans are still there?

When will the government be formed? It has been almost six months since the parliamentary elections and still there are no agreements on forming a new government.

“Iraq is still at the beginning of the story of its evolution since 2003,” Ryan Crocker, the former American ambassador to Iraq, told CNN.

I cannot pretend to be an expert on Iraq and pass judgment on this day being hailed as another milestone in post-Saddam history.

Today, I am in the comfort of my Atlanta home, thinking back to all the suffering I saw in the past.

I think especially of Dahlia, a young girl I met in the barren fields of dust and scrub near Nasiriyah. She was walking testament to her name: Dahlia. A bright flower in the midst of drab.

She wore a crimson and lemon yellow printed robe, her head was covered in a black scarf – at 10, she was old enough to respect the modesty taught by her culture. She stood barefoot in front of a lone U.S. Humvee that stopped before entering the gates of Camp Cedar.

Dahlia’s father was killed by Saddam, she told me. She never went to school — there were no schools nearby. She lived in a makeshift tent with her mother and brother.

I asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up. “Nothing,” she said, as though she knew her fate was bound to the bleak sands of southern Iraq, that she would never break out of poverty.

She thought for a while longer. “I want to work at Cedar.”

That was in 2006. The U.S. military closed Cedar shortly after I met Dahlia. Now so many more of those bases are gone.

No, today, I cannot share in the optimism of all those who hail Iraq a success. I think of the hundreds of Dahlias I met in the midst of war.

Posted by monibasu in War and tagged
06 Mar 2010
1 Comment

The Hurt Locker: Ouch


I’ll be watching the Oscars on Sunday night, though this year, I am not as excited as I usually am. I’ve only seen two of the movies nominated for best picture: Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker.

The former is an entertaining movie even though George Clooney is George Clooney solely because he looks like George Clooney and not because of any Oscar-worthy talent.

The latter had the makings of a great movie, but the director lost me on the very first scene when the words “Baghdad 2004″ flashed on screen and American soldiers were seen wearing the digital green combat uniforms. Those uniforms, of course, were not issued until May 2005. I know this because I was embedded with the 48th Infantry Brigade, the first unit to receive the re-engineered fatigues.

The camera panned wide to show a neighborhood in Baghdad that I instantly recognized as Amman, Jordan. There are no rolling hills in the Iraqi capital.

From there, other inaccuracies skewed my judgment of good filmmaking. I thought director Kathryn Bigelow perfectly captured the tension and adrenaline rush that goes with war, specifically with the job of a bomb detection specialist. But the lead character, played by Jeremy Renner, is too much of a cowboy. There’s no way an EOD team leader would be able to run through the streets of Baghdad in a t-shirt and cammos and make it back to the gates of Camp Liberty and be allowed in without stern questioning and punishment. There’s no way, a lone Humvee would leave the gates without a convoy and find itself way out in the Iraqi desert in a showdown with snipers.

My soldier friends agree with me that The Hurt Locker is rife with errors. So do a lot of EOD veterans who have been interviewed by various media outlets including my own, CNN.

I realize that the movie is a work of fiction. But the Iraq war is so fresh that I felt the film lost credibility by not getting things right. It wouldn’t have taken much to correct those errors.

So while The Hurt Locker beautifully captures the addiction to war and what happens to soldiers who return to lives that seem mundane, the movie missed the mark with me.

I cannot hope that it trumps its contenders Sunday night. For the sake of truth. That’s just the journalist in me, I suppose.

Posted by monibasu in War and tagged ,

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