Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival in Iraq - Hardcover

This book is a personal account of the more than nine months I spent in Iraq as a reporter for The Washington Post. After a brief visit to Iraq in January 2004, while embedded with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, I returned in May -- arriving eight days after U.S. soldiers on a routine patrol found the decapitated body of American businessman Nick Berg on a highway overpass west of the Iraqi capital. His gruesome videotaped execution at the hands of insurgents -- coupled with the deaths of four U.S. contractors whose mutilated bodies were strung from a bridge in the city of Fallujah the month before -- marked what we only now realize was a free fall into a dark cavern of blood and violence. It will be a difficult climb out.

During the time I was in Iraq, the deteriorating security situation changed the way we covered the news, challenging every convention for how to report on and in a conflict in which we, the press, had no immunity, no white flag to save us from the car bombs, the mortars, the gunfire, and the kidnappers. The bad guys were aiming for us, too. By the fall of 2004, stuck in our fortified bunkers in Baghdad, we were largely cut off from the rest of the country, unable to travel to many parts of Iraq without the U.S. military because of the threat of attacks on foreign reporters. And yet our mandate never changed: Iraq was a story that had to be told.

I reported on car bombs and power plant reconstruction, wrote stories about soldiers in battle, soldiers waiting for battle, soldiers dying in battle. I interviewed hundreds of Iraqis, sometimes without ever leaving my hotel. I met them instead through the scribbled notes of our Iraqi translators. When they came back from an assignment too dangerous for me as a Westerner to cover, we sat together in front of my computer while I grilled them about what they saw. What color were his eyes? Did he really say that? How did he say that? What do you mean he looked anxious? Tell me how he looked. Was he sweating? What were his hands doing while he talked?

I asked each member of our Iraqi staff individually how they wanted to be identified in this book because they remain at risk as long as they work for an American company. Although the full names of our translators are published in The Washington Post in story credits and bylines, connecting their names to additional information about their families might put them at greater risk. For the book, most asked to be referred to by their first names only or by a common Arabic title for mothers and fathers: if a son is Ali, his father is Abu Ali, his mother Um Ali. Our conversations, as detailed in the book, are precisely as I remember them. All of the people are real, not characters. They exist in flesh and blood and blood and flesh, the living story of Iraq. To them, I owe everything.

I never really swam in Baghdad, although the pool at the Ishtar Sheraton Hotel taunted me on impossibly hot days when it seemed Mother Nature had turned a hundred hair dryers on an already brittle split-end. I went to the Sheraton pool once, long after dark. My Post colleague, Robin Shulman, and I had just sat down at the edge of the pool when six or seven members of the hotel staff, wearing sweat-stained white shirts and dark trousers, came out to watch us from the shadows of the pool deck. They dragged on cigarettes, the fiery glow lighting up the night like fireflies suspended in flight. Robin and I tried to ignore them, but eventually, we got up and left, unwilling to give them the satisfaction of a cheap peep show of our bony knees and bare shoulders. We walked by their disappointed faces and disappeared back into the grungy hotel, back into our uniform of long sleeves and long skirts.

From then on, the only swimming I ever did was in my imaginary pool. I called up the image to keep from under the pressure and fright of being in a war zone. A journalist who claims that being in Iraq is not scary is probably lying. I went to my pool during mortar attacks, as I hovered in a stairwell while the hotel shook from repeated blasts. I went during a gun battle in Fallujah. I went whenever I got into a car and pushed out into traffic, weaving between potential car bombers, outrunning the insurgents who chased down foreigners to kidnap for ransom, or worse. I went every time the lights went out, when my military convoy stopped suddenly in the middle of the night, when the rocket landed inside the Internet café at the Marine camp minutes after I walked out. I went when I saw soldiers wounded or dead, when I saw Iraqi people wounded or dead, when I wore their blood home on my shoes.

Iraq is not frightening all of the time. I did not feel in imminent danger every minute of the day or even every day. It felt like a manageable risk. I told myself when that changed I would go home, fully aware that the longer I stayed, the more Iraq felt like my home, the more difficult that would be. I fell in love with Iraq, this horrible, awful, violent, beautiful, hopeful place, where many Iraqis, in spite of the horrors of the insurgency, felt better off without Saddam in power, felt better off with American troops on their soil. I fell in love with the story of Iraq and with the purpose I felt delivering it. I found meaning in the people I met, whose lives unfolded at my fingertips. My life didn't feel on hold when I was in Iraq. It was my life.

I made cookies in the hotel late at night to stay awake while waiting for foreign contractors to be beheaded: literally killing time waiting for someone else to die. I was convinced that if I sent the fledgling Iraqi police guarding the hotel baked goods on a regular basis, then when the insurgents came, they'd line us up and I'd hear them say, "Let the little one go. She made us cookies."

Between stories, I played soccer barefoot on the filthy, musty carpeted hallways of the Sheraton. I cooked dinner on Friday nights and invited Western and Iraqi journalists to eat whatever themed concoction I could deliver with the limited ingredients available in Iraqi supermarkets. We dined on Italian, Cuban, Mexican, and even Thai. After dinner, I washed the dishes in a bathroom sink. I chased these moments, my oasis of joy, stringing together a life among the long hours of reporting and writing, day after day, week after week, month after month. In some ways, I never felt more alive than while simultaneously trying to defeat death and find the truth.

That is the dichotomy of daily life in Baghdad, where survival is about staying sane and staying normal just as much as it is about staying alive. We ordered pizza from the rip-off "Pizza Hot" -- always carry-out because it was too dangerous by late summer of 2004 for foreign reporters to venture out to restaurants, too dangerous for our Iraqi staff to be seen with us. I spent countless hours in the markets searching for the perfect substitute for ricotta cheese to perfect my lasagna recipe. I memorized the inside of my favorite grocery shops so when it became too risky to go myself, I could map out the store to show our driver exactly where he'd find the vegetarian refried beans. (Just before Aisle No. 2, the display on the right with the dusty cans. Evidently, vegetarian refried beans aren't a big seller in Baghdad.)

Meanwhile, back home in Washington, my twin sister, Jenny, was settling into a new job and a new house fifteen minutes away from my empty apartment. In our thirty-four years, Jenny and I had never been apart for more than a few months at a time. My sister always was my identity, the other half of the Spinner Twins. We grew closer in college, realizing for the first time what absence meant as we set off to opposite ends of Illinois to pursue similar degrees in writing. We called each other when we got lonely and looked at the moon from our dorm room windows, our own hokey moment stolen from a Disney movie.

Being a twin, I never felt loneliness. To this day, I have no idea what that feels like. I have always had a soul mate, someone whose thoughts echo within me before they ever are birthed into words. I know instinctively how she feels, and she knows me better than anyone.

When we were about eight years old, late at night, alone in our togetherness, we imagined our worst-case scenario. A man with a gun was going to shoot us both. We wondered who should die first and what would be worse: being the last one standing, grieving, or leaving the last one standing, grieving. We simply could not imagine life without each other. We debated this scenario into young adulthood without finding an answer. We debated it until speaking the unthinkable became too morbid. We replaced it with more realistic fears of cancer and car accidents -- but never war.

Before I left for Iraq, Jenny told me that if anything happened to me, she would never feel joy again. I tucked her voice, those words, deep within me, and off I went, on a journey of a lifetime, on a journey into life.

I went alone.

Copyright © 2006 by Jackie Spinner

Chapter One

The hot cement burned the rubber soles of my sandals as I ran through the barricaded maze of blast walls, sandbags, and barbed wire sealing off the compound of the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad. Behind me, an angry mob of young and graying men chanted in uniform protest and pumped long, black rifles toward the sky. Some of them held signs with American flags crossed out in thick black lines. I could not have looked more American at that moment, wearing black REI sandals, khaki pants, and a white linen button-down shirt. Although my brown, sun-streaked hair was pulled back in a tight bun, I was not wearing a traditional Muslim headscarf that would have better disguised me. I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone spotted me in the unforgiving blaze of the bright May sunshine.

I sprinted toward the guarded entrance of the Green Zone, where American and Iraqi civil authorities had encamped in Saddam Hussein's ornate former presidential palaces sinc...