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.