Early in 1992 the United States and European community recognized the newly independent nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, formerly part of communist Yugoslavia. The small country was home to three ethnic groups with ties to people in other Balkan nations: Croats (Roman Catholic Croatians), Serbs (Orthodox Serbians), and Muslims known as Bosniaks.
Within days Serbian paramilitary forces launched artillery attacks on Sarajevo, Bosnia’s lovely capital, and blockaded the city. The Bosnian Serbs, assisted by Serbs from the Yugoslavian army, embarked on a murderous program of genocide, what they called “ethnic cleansing” as they drove Bosnia’s Muslims from their homes across two-thirds of Bosnia. More fighting arose when Croats and Bosniaks also turned on each other in 1992, but their battles ended early in 1994 when they agreed to peace terms. However, the Serbs kept fighting.
The 1995 Dayton Peace Accords established a framework for peace among the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Croatia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. United Nations forces arrived to enforce the peace agreement, especially among Serb forces who resisted. The Serbs kept up their siege of Sarajevo until February 1996.
Late in the 1990s, ethnic Albanians called Kosovars (mostly Muslims who lived in the Serbian province of Kosovo) formed the Kosovo Liberation Army to create an independent Kosovo. The Serbian Orthodox Church has many sacred sites based in Kosovo, and Serbia considered the province vital to its sovereignty. The Kosovars carried out attacks against Serbian police stations, and in 1998, the Serbian government responded with a wave of ethnic cleansing against the Kosovars.
The United States recognized Kosovo as a nation in 2008, but China and Russia have not.
When I look at war, I don’t see military strategies. I see it from the micro level: how is this affecting families, schools, hospitals? I think of supply routes and water tanks and how people get through a winter without electricity and antibiotics.
Sometimes a kid just feels different, that she doesn’t fit in. She grows up in a big New Jersey family with seven children. As she gets older, she starts to realize that her family has secrets and doesn’t talk about unpleasant things, such as the sister who died 10 years before the girl was born or the brothers who hide their drugs in the attic. After all, if you don’t talk about problems, then they don’t exist.
But Janine di Giovanni, the last child born into her family in the mid-1960s, didn’t want to live a life denying things. Plus she wanted to learn as much as she could about other people. She started by writing a high school research paper on the Hopi Tribe of Arizona. She knew she had a gift for writing, so she went to study English at the University of Maine. Like a painter with brush to canvas or a singer who masters a tricky passage of music, her passion was to create—with words on a page.
After graduating, she was awarded a slot in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a coveted spot awarded to only 40 writers each year. But life in Iowa was a lonely existence—she was far younger than her classmates, many of them published authors with long lists of books to their credit, and the competition and petty jealousies discouraged her. She quit the program, taking with her one key discovery: writing, she learned, is an “isolated profession. You’re going to spend a lot of time by yourself and face a lot of rejection.” Somewhere along the line she got the idea to be a foreign correspondent.
Janine moved to Boston and got a job as a beat reporter at a local paper covering the daily round of fires, checking the police blotter, and writing up the dry but vital reports of council meetings and school board news. She faced years of working her way up the ladder toward becoming a foreign correspondent for a US news outlet, so she made a jump. In Europe, she decided, there was an appreciation for people like her, individuals who were “eccentric and out-of-the-box as opposed to the United States where people are far more conventional.” So she moved. She and her then-husband, a photographer, set up house in London. Janine talked an editor into paying for her airfare, and she flew to Israel to get her first story as a foreign correspondent, talking with Palestinians who were in revolt against the government.
Europe gave Janine the chance to “live the life of a writer,” and she became a British citizen. Her marriage broke up, and free of anything to keep her feeling tied down, she left for Sarajevo, Bosnia, in December 1992, where the Serbian army had laid siege to the Bosnian civilians who lived in the ancient capital city. Sarajevo, once a glorious Old World city and host to the 1984 Winter Olympics, was also home to a cosmopolitan mix of Roman Catholics, Serbian Orthodox Christians, and Muslims who had worked together and lived in the same neighborhoods for years.
But the neighboring country of Serbia was on the march, determined to “cleanse” Sarajevo of its Muslim citizens. The Serbian Army had turned the city into a wasteland. Water lines ran dry. Electricity was unreliable. Food disappeared. Children, cooped up indoors for days on end, ran outside to play, and died, shot by Serb snipers. Janine arrived to see a Sarajevo in agony. WELCOME TO HELL, the graffiti greeted her as she was driven into Sarajevo. It was hell, indeed.
She stayed there for months. It was not lost on her or any other reporter in Sarajevo that genocide was taking place in Bosnia. They asked themselves how Europeans and their governments could allow this to happen. The Nazi Holocaust against Europe’s Jews had unfolded fewer than 50 years before.
As Serbian artillery pounded Sarajevo from the mountainsides that surrounded the city, Janine moved into the Holiday Inn in downtown Sarajevo. It was hardly a hotel—half the building was a shot-out shell—but a hardened news corps contingent lived there, reporters for big-name newspapers and magazines, photojournalists, TV reporters, producers, and cameramen, plus an assortment of independent journalists such as Janine, who made a living going from war to war to get interviews and sell the stories to media outlets.
It was freezing cold. Most of the time the Holiday Inn had no heat, electricity, or running water. At night, Janine lit a candle in her fourth-floor room and typed her stories on a battery-charged word processor. Once per week she swapped packs of Marlboro Lights for a pail of hot water she hauled up the steps to her room so she could wash her hair. She and the assortment of reporters, camera crews, and producers who lived in the Holiday Inn ate rice and cheese scrounged from humanitarian food deliveries. Sometimes dinner was chocolate bars and whiskey. To entertain themselves, the more daring hotel guests rappelled from the top floors of the hotel into the lobby below.
The Holiday Inn sat at the end of a street nicknamed Snipers’ Alley, and when carloads of journalists went to work, they roared out of the hotel’s underground garage at full speed to avoid getting shot. Janine was an indie journalist without a car, and she begged rides with TV journalists whose staff always had armored cars. “CNN’s truck was always full,” she recalled, “and they had the reputation of helping no one but their own. The BBC people, however, were more generous, and they usually waved me into the back of their truck. ‘Get in, hurry up.’ The back of the car smelled of gasoline from the stores of petrol in tin cans.”
Then one hot August day she got the nod to go to Zuc, the battle line where the final battle to defend Sarajevo on Gogo Brdo, Naked Hill, took place.
And during those long, hot August days, there were dead men on Naked Hill. Most of them were very young. They were soldiers, they had been killed, and it was too dangerous to remove their bodies. And so they lay where they fell, in the shimmering heat. The men who came down from the trenches for resupply every few days said the smell of the dead wafted down into the trenches where the living cowered, waiting for the next round of gunfire. I did not know what the dead smelled like when they rotted in the sun, but a year later, in Rwanda I would understand it: I would see rows and rows and rows of bodies, the dead mothers holding their children stiffened by rigor mortis, fathers with their eyes melting from the heat, and I would remember again Naked Hill.
The siege of Sarajevo and the war in Bosnia affected Janine di Giovanni in a way no future war zones ever would. Janine, who twice met the legendary war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, learned an essential piece of wisdom about the life she had chosen: “Martha Gellhorn once wrote about loving only one war and the rest being duty. I still feel like that—Bosnia was the war that took and broke my heart in a million little pieces.”
In Bosnia, Janine met hundreds of hungry, suffering people, families who had lost parents, grandparents, and children. The desperation of the very young and the very old—the truly help-less—especially grabbed at her heart. She befriended several, including Nusrat, a small Muslim boy living in an orphanage, and Zlata Filipovic, a 13-year-old girl whose wartime diary was the talk of journalists—they called her the “Anne Frank of Sarajevo.” When the diary was published in English in 1994, Janine wrote an introduction recalling the days she spent with Zlata and her family—how Zlata’s mother, a chemist before the war, was slowly going mad; how the family hid in a “safe room” when the Serbs shelled their neighborhood; how Zlata pointed to the snapshot of her standing with a small friend who was killed, a gesture of remembrance.
It was also in Bosnia that Janine fell in love with a French television cameraman named Bruno Girodon. They had no real future together—their jobs took them to far-flung corners of the world—and the handsome Frenchman with the bewitching green eyes had a longtime girlfriend who, when she learned about Janine, insisted that he never contact Janine again.
Janine moved on. She turned 30, 32, and then 35, earning her living by traveling to war zones to speak with the people caught between opposing sides and telling their stories in magazines and newspapers across Europe and North America. One could track her travels by the articles and books she wrote, long pieces for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the Times of London Sunday edition, reporting from Bosnia, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone. The titles of her books speak of the life she led—Against the Stranger: Journeys Through Occupied Territory; The Quick and the Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo; Madness Visible: A Memoir of War; The Place at the End of the World: Stories from the Frontline.
Then, in 2003, she ran into Bruno Girodon again. The old fires still burned. He asked her to marry him and have a baby, and she agreed. Janine wore a sleeveless, tea-length dress and white gloves at their wedding, which took place in a small Catholic church in the south of France. Then she and Bruno parted ways—he had work to do in Africa, and Janine, pregnant, wanted to make a trip to Jerusalem to interview Palestinians who were caught up in the second intifada, another uprising against Israel. When she got to Jerusalem, her own life turned upside down as she began to have troubles with her pregnancy. One Israeli doctor warned her that she must stay in bed; a second doctor said that it was safe for her to go home to London for surgery and wait out the pregnancy there.
She packed up and left for London, had the surgery, and late in her pregnancy, she and Bruno moved to Paris where they planned to raise their child. Baby Hugo arrived in the spring, early but healthy. Now Janine craved a “bubble of happiness,” a safe and perfect place where she, Bruno, and little Hugo could nest together. But that bubble flew away, far from her grasp.
Janine began to feel fear, as some new mothers do, and developed a ferocious need to protect her baby at all costs. She behaved as though she lived in a war zone instead of safe in her Paris home, which Bruno had so lovingly built for her. She hoarded cash, wrote out escape plans, and stuffed her diaper bag as if she were heading on a long, dangerous journey. Any stranger presented a possible threat. Born a Catholic, Janine went into churches and lit candle upon candle, praying for her dead father and dead brothers and praying that God would keep her little family safe. As she recuperated from an exhausting pregnancy and the first trying days of caring for a newborn, she also had to think about her future: Would she return to work as a foreign correspondent?
Janine needed to ask herself if she was addicted to the thrill of working from a war zone. Bruno urged her to go to work, assuring her that getting back in the field would help her to find out. In late summer of 2003, when Hugo was six months old, Janine flew into Iraq, where the US Army had removed Saddam Hussein from power that spring. She went to work in Sadr City, a slum outside Baghdad where insurgents had rebelled against the American military.
Janine learned a lot about herself on that trip. She missed her baby desperately, and an Iraqi official reminded her that she should not miss his first steps or lost tooth. But going through that experience braced her, and she returned to Paris sure that she wasn’t addicted to her work in war zones. She made a well-considered decision: she would continue to work as she had before, but now she would cram into five days what would have taken a month to accomplish before.
Then their lives changed again. After Hugo was born, Bruno’s back failed him, and he suffered for months. One day he left for a doctor’s checkup and didn’t come home. Janine received a phone call that threw her into confusion.
“He’s suicidal,” the doctor told her. Janine could not believe what she’d heard. Bruno was in a psychiatric unit. When she got him on the phone he said to her, “I’m so tired.” Several weeks passed until he came home from rehab.
Like her husband, Janine had watched people suffer. Bad memories stayed with her, especially the pain or loneliness of children. The first time she had watched a gravely injured child crawling on a cot, she had gone outdoors and vomited. Yet over time Janine had disciplined herself when she was on the job to watch, ask questions, and take notes. Only when she was alone would she allow herself to cry, hold her head in her hands, or just stare at the ceiling.
When she returned from a war zone she did not talk about the places she’d been. She didn’t like questions about how many dead bodies she’d seen or whether she’d been raped. Her memories “went into black bound notebooks and the notebooks went into a box and the box went into the basement. From there, I could look at them someday and remember all the people, the places, the red dirt, the rain, and the mud. But for now, I was fine. I always thought Bruno was too.”
A psychiatrist had told Janine that her resilience and her writing had helped her to cope with the horrors she witnessed. She wasn’t a candidate for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Bruno, however, wasn’t built the same way. Like warriors returning from the battlefield, he suffered from PTSD. It was not just physical pain that plagued him; he was having a mental breakdown. Bruno Girodon had watched human suffering through the lens of his television camera for 20 years, and it had taken its toll. He tried to cope with his illness by rehabbing a new flat for Janine and their son, working like a madman in spite of the discs disintegrating in his back.
Janine di Giovanni, Bruno Girodon, and their son Hugo. Courtesy of Janine di Giovanni
Janine learned that five times as many war correspondents as ordinary people exhibit signs of PTSD after living and working in such frightful settings. Bruno showed every one. He was deep into depression. He couldn’t sleep and spent entire nights drinking bottles of wine and listening to jazz. Clearly he was an alcoholic, but for the time, Janine couldn’t confront that fact as she watched her husband crumble in front of her. Denial was a family tradition; the di Giovannis didn’t talk about unpleasant matters. Not until Bruno was nearly arrested for driving drunk could Janine shake herself loose and confront the grim fact that her husband was an addict.
Bruno reentered rehab and then joined Alcoholics Anonymous to help himself manage his illness. He became so obsessed with AA that he practically abandoned Janine and their child for those he met at AA. They separated, agreeing that Hugo would have both of them in his life. Janine makes sure that her son is in the safe, loving care of his father or his nanny when she goes to the field.
Many would question how she could leave her son for such dangerous work, but Janine felt that her work was equal to her responsibility at home. Now, a decade later, Janine continues her mission: to bear witness to scenes of war so that readers can grasp the grim reality of how ordinary people live amid bombs and bullets and to give these forgotten a voice.
When the work demands it, she travels. When she’s home and her son is at school, she researches, interviews, and writes from their flat in Paris. She is their breadwinner, living what she calls a “hand-to-mouth existence,” though Janine admits it’s a “privileged” way to earn her living.
She receives enormous satisfaction from doing what she loves. As much as she has loved her child’s father, she “never wanted to be dependent on a man,” she said. “When my father died, my mother didn’t know how to write a check.” Her dry humor came over the phone as she spoke of a woman friend, a banker who stated flatly, “I never want a man to buy my knickers.”
Janine di Giovanni reported from Helmand Province when the United States and Great Britain were at war in Afghanistan. Courtesy of Janine di Giovanni
Janine di Giovanni continues to board international flights that take her to the world’s most dangerous places. After the Arab Spring in December 2010 launched a series of revolutions and revolts, she traveled into Syria, Egypt, and Libya. She contributes to television and radio news on three continents; Americans hear her on NPR and PBS. Her articles appear in German, French, British, Canadian, and American newspapers including the New York Times, the Sunday Times (London), the Guardian, Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar.
For thousands of years, history has told of continuing war in the Middle East. After World War II, Britain granted independence to territories throughout most of its colonial empire and signed Palestine over to the United Nations in 1947. In turn, the UN announced plans to partition, or divide, Palestine into two states: one as a Jewish homeland for settlers and Holocaust survivors; the other, a state for Muslim Arabs. In May 1948, the Jews established the state of Israel. Jerusalem, sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, stayed divided. And the issue of a homeland for Palestinians was left hanging.
Since 1948, a series of wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors has kept the region in turmoil. In 1988, Yasser Arafat, chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), reversed his position and acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. Six years later, the PLO and Israel reached an understanding, but the violence has continued. A Palestinian nation has never been established.
Iraq invaded its small neighbor Kuwait in August 1991, touching off a series of events that led to the Persian Gulf War. The United States, in tandem with its allies in NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), responded with air strikes against Iraqi military installations and oil fields in January 1992. The Allies crushed Iraq’s military, but its dictator, Saddam Hussein, stayed in power until he was captured during the Iraq War late in 2003.
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States forever changed the American nation. Within weeks the US military invaded Afghanistan to hunt for Osama bin Laden, leader of a Muslim terrorist organization called al-Qaeda, as well as to overthrow the Taliban, Afghanistan’s ultraconservative Islamic government.
Most of the world was caught off guard in 2010 when a young man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest institutional corruption in Tunisia. This act sparked the overthrow of his government and others across the Arab world and was quickly tagged the “Arab Spring.” At issue for Arab nations is whether they can evolve into Islamic democracies or whether they will succumb to ultraconservative Muslim governments who base their laws on a very narrow interpretation of the Koran. Foreign correspondent Robin Wright is among the journalists traveling throughout the Middle East to study and interpret the matter.
The Islamists are not only coming. In several countries, they’ve already arrived.—Robin Wright
In the 1950s, sets of orange-covered biographies of famous women lined library shelves across the America. With large print and characters illustrated in solid black silhouettes, these kid-friendly books drew boys and girls to sit down and read them cover to cover. There was Dolly Madison: Quaker Girl and others on Florence Nightingale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Amelia Earhart. A set stood on a library shelf in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where a schoolgirl named Robin Wright devoured every one. Like the hundreds of people she went on to interview and write about in the next 50 years, these women became part of her journey. Robin Wright wanted to be like one of these women, “women who had done things on their own.”
Robin Wright grew up in a family that liked to ask questions. Both of her parents were academics who encouraged her to follow her own path. Her mother, Phyllis, had followed her own muse: she had danced with Agnes de Mille as a young woman and was still in community theater with a role in The Vagina Monologues at the age of 91. Robin’s father, L. Hart Wright, taught his law students using the Socratic Method: series of questions and answers—always to be followed by another question.
At suppertime, her father quizzed Robin and her sister about current events and the world in general. Much was going on— the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had spawned crisis after crisis, even as Third World countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East were fighting wars of independence. At the dinner table, the Wrights played “geography,” tossing out names of countries from Burma to Zambia, as well as the add-a-letter-to-make-a-word game “three-thirds of a ghost.” But these dinner table games extended to another serious subject: the brawling world of big-league sports. In the Wright household, sports held equal weight, and Hart Wright loved them all. He schlepped his daughters to college games and filled their heads with scores and stats. Robin grew up knowing her state and world capitals, and she could talk baseball, basketball, and football for hours.
Many kids who grew up reading those orange-covered biographies went on to study history at the University of Michigan, and Robin was one of them. She had absolutely no plans to become a journalist until she had a happy accident. A sorority sister suggested she write for the Michigan Daily, the nation’s biggest college newspaper, which ran six days a week with 24- and 36-page issues. Robin told herself, “Maybe I’ll go off and join the paper and write an article about sports just as a joke to my father.” She ended up “loving it” and joined the Daily’s sports page. By her senior year in 1969, Robin Wright had worked her way up to become the first female sports editor of a student paper in the United States.
The year 1969 was a turbulent one for American students and Americans in general. Bitter protests against the Vietnam War gripped the Michigan campus. But as hot as the political scene was in Ann Arbor, there was other news to cover. Michigan’s ailing football team had a new coach, Bo Schembechler, and he was turning things around. Robin traveled with the team to Saturday games at Big Ten stadiums, and she had a quiet deal with the players: in return for not following them into the locker room—in 1969 it was unthinkable for women sportswriters to interview players as they showered and dressed—they promised to save some comments just for her. Come Monday morning, Daily readers opened the sports page for an exclusive bit of news by Robin Wright.
On New Year’s Day 1970, as Michigan played in the Rose Bowl, Robin did her part to break the gender barrier in sports reporting. As she made her way to the press box, two sheriff’s deputies blocked her from entering. True to form, the only women allowed in the press box were there to serve food or send Western Union teletypes updating the game. But Wright had a scoop—a U of M player had shared important news with her. That morning, Coach Schembechler had had a heart attack. “I was the only one who had information about the best story of the day,” Robin recalled years later, but she had no way to share it. “The boys in the press box knew I always had good stories,” so she sent them a note about her predicament. In support, “the entire male press corps got up and walked out.” Nervous Rose Bowl officials quickly saw they weren’t going to get any press coverage at all, and they let her in.
Wright earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history at Michigan. When she cast about for a summer internship, there weren’t any in history, so she took one from the Christian Science Monitor, a national newspaper based in Boston. Again, she loved it, another happy accident. But for a young woman who had read those orange biographies, her choice of a career made sense. Robin Wright became one of those women who did things on her own.
Almost from the start, Robin reported from overseas when she moved to Africa, first for the Monitor, later for the Washington Post and for CBS Evening News, when she learned the art of reporting in front of a camera. For seven years in the 1970s, she witnessed the violence that accompanied change as old governments fell and new ones rose. She covered revolutions, interviewed dictators, and watched bloody uprisings as black South Africans rose up against apartheid. Robin got the first story about the murder of black South African Steve Biko, an activist with two small boys, who was “arrested and detained” by the white government and died in prison after being beaten by his police interrogators. She recalled how she “broke the story about Steve Biko when he died. I got in to see his body after he’d been brutalized, and I got the pathologist’s report about how he really died … one of the biggest scoops as a young journalist.” In return, the South African government tried to get her expelled.
A small quote taped to her monitor reads, “The things you are scared of are the most worthwhile.” “The fact is I’m afraid of a lot of things: elevators and airplanes … I’m not brave,” Robin said flat out. “I’m actually hideously afraid of things like war and being in war zones. You never overcome fear, but when I think about the privilege of seeing history play out in front of me, [it] has made that fear worthwhile.” Critics sarcastically tagged young women reporters like her as “mercenary groupies.”
Her job was rarely easy and sometimes dangerous. She occasionally needed financial backing to work, and in 1976 she won a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation to study the dismantling of Portugal’s African empire. She went to Angola to report on five British mercenaries, regular “blokes” lured from day jobs as factory workers and bricklayers with the promise of tax-free dollars as soldiers of fortune in Africa. They commanded a pro-democracy militia in a small town but had no ammunition to defend themselves.
Early in 1976, Robin found the mercenaries in the tiny town of Santo Antonio do Zaire at the Angola-Zaire border, where the Congo River poured into the Atlantic Ocean. Angolan forces, backed by Cuban troops, stormed the town with a tank and machine guns. Civilians and soldiers ran for their lives.
Robin’s first-hand report of the attack appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on February 9, 1976.
This reporter was present during the surprise assault on the coastal city, which is the northernmost point before the Zaire border.
The attack began at 8:45 AM, Feb. 6, with the sound of T-54 Soviet tanks and the crash of mortars falling on the hospital and airfield on the outskirts of town. At first many people thought the sounds were thunder from the gale-force of the rainy season that was drenching this steamy little town located six degrees below the equator.
There had been no warning of the attack …
Within seconds of the first shellings, the entire town was in chaos. People and troops fled down the street toward the river, the only exit on the peninsula.
At the port where half a dozen fishing boats were docked, women and children were fighting and pulling each other out to get a place.
… This reporter and one mercenary headed for the single small motorized boat that had just been repaired the night before. Approaching the vessel—smaller than a tiny tugboat—we saw it, too, was swarming with people clawing for space.
Of the 350 people in that small town, 22 made it out alive, including Robin and the two mercenaries. The attackers slaughtered the rest.
Robin returned to Angola when three captured mercenaries went on trial, and the revolutionary government tried to call her as a witness. She refused to testify, on the grounds that she was a journalist, not a participant in the fighting. Accusing Robin of spying for the CIA (the Central Intelligence Agency), the Angolans put her in prison, which she described as “a memorable week.” In 1977, she won the Overseas Press Club award for the best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initiative.
In 1980 Robin moved to Rome. Often the only woman on the plane, she traveled with Pope John Paul II as he faced down a military dictatorship in Brazil and Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt president of the Philippines. The next year she moved to Beirut, Lebanon’s capital city. Once known as the “Paris of the Middle East,” Beirut had been leveled to rubble during Lebanon’s civil war. Robin made Beirut her home for five years. She reported on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and watched the rise of Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim terrorist organization backed by Iran. In the early hours of October 23, 1993, she was awakened by a huge explosion five or six miles distant: a suicide bomber had driven a truck loaded with explosives into a barracks and killed 241 US Marines as they slept. As of 2014, the bombing represented the single worst attack on a group of American military since World War II.
The years moved on, and Robin grew to learn more and more about life in the Middle East. She talked with hundreds of people on the streets of Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Morocco—virtually every Middle Eastern nation. She already spoke French, widely used in the Middle East and North Africa, but she regretted she didn’t know more Arabic or Farsi (the Persian language spoken by Iranians) so she could better understand the people she met. She started to look at current events in mathematical terms. “If you know enough about a region, then it becomes like a mathematical equation. You figure what all the numbers are, and you figure out the solution…. Then, if something changes, there’s a new variable. You throw in that factor and there’s a new outcome.”
Robin Wright makes regular appearances before college crowds to discuss developments in the Middle East. Courtesy of Sam Colt
In late 2010 a new, shocking variable changed the equation in the Middle East when a young man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest corruption in Tunisia, an act that sparked the Arab Spring. The sight of women and men filling the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria caught Western governments off guard. But to Robin, the Arab Revolution was no surprise; she had seen it coming for years. “All the change in the world—the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, the end of apartheid and minority rule in Africa, the end of military dictatorships in Latin America—has all been part and parcel of the same phenomenon, and that is globalization.”
Equipped with her historian’s view over the long term and a gift for words, Robin uses a journalist’s skills to interpret events as they unfold. “All these events—including the Arab [Spring] uprising—it’s all part of … the whole idea that we’ve come up with a form of government democracy that will play out in lots of different ways. Whether parliaments, presidents, what kind of parties run against each other—the idea is that the people have a right to participate. It’s far from over; we’re only at the beginning stages. But this is arguably the single most important change in 500 years since city-states became nation-states. Now we are taking that next big step with nation-states moving toward globalization.”
In a powerful piece she wrote in 2011, Robin told of one young woman’s efforts at reform, Muslim-style, that have taken hold in Egypt and other Arab nations. Robin herself rarely wears a headscarf as she moves along the streets of the Middle East. However, her subject, Dalia Ziada, proudly wears the headscarf—hijab—as a sign of reform. Dalia is a member of Egypt’s “Pink Hijab” movement, named for the vibrant heads-carves that young Muslim women adopted as their symbol for women’s and human rights in Egypt.
For many young women, hijab is now about liberation, not confinement. It’s about new possibilities, not the past. It provides a kind of social armor that enables Muslim women to chart their own course, personally or professionally. For Ziada, hijab provides protective cover and legitimacy for campaigns she considers to be the essence of her faith—human rights and justice.
“Families feel much more comfortable allowing their girls to be active, to get higher education, or jobs, or even to go out alone at night when they are wearing hijab,” [Ziada] told me. “It’s a deal between a Muslim girl and society. I agree that I will wear hijab in order to have more space and freedom in return.”
In its many forms, hijab is no longer assumed to signal acquiescence. It has instead become an equalizer. It is an instrument that makes a female untouchable as she makes her own decisions in the macho Arab world. It is a stamp of authenticity as well as a symbolic demand for change. And it is a weapon to help a woman resist extremism’s pull into the past. Militants cannot criticize or target her for being corrupted by Western influence.
Robin Wright appears regularly on Sunday morning news programs and shares her expertise on television and radio broadcasts in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. She has written four books about Africa and the Middle East and has more to come. She chose a punk rock hit as the title for her 2011 book on democratic change in the Muslim world; Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World relates how young Muslims are creating their own brand of Islamic democracy with hip-hop, comedy, poetry—and the pink hijab.
Following lives of ordinary people who rap and write poetry has been key to Robin’s understanding of world events. “A lot of big-name correspondents like to swoop in and talk to top officials,” she said, “but the danger is they live in a bubble that’s divorced from reality. I really like getting out on the street and just talking to people.” She notes that many of today’s correspondents “do drop-bys … they come in for a couple weeks or months and go home.” But that’s not how she has lived her life or done her job.
She shares little about her private life. She never married, “not my choice,” she emphasized. “I always thought I would, but you don’t have time for everything and I’m not going to do something just for the sake of doing it. In the right situation it might have happened.” That said, there have been special men in her life. “Interesting characters,” she mused. She is much more open about her childhood, about her mother, who was an “inspiration,” and her father, a veteran who would not tell his stories of World War II until Robin herself had experienced combat. Then, she said, they developed a whole new relationship, an almost unspoken understanding that they had a shared experience of war.
Robin said she fears that American kids today don’t know enough about the world, especially because globalization will define their lives in the 21st century. Third World kids, she says, “do get it … they speak English and multiple languages. They probably know more about American geography than American kids.”
For any young person thinking about a career as a foreign correspondent, Robin recommends learning everything possible about the world. “Know the world … and know the world well. Speak at least two other languages, only one being another European language and the other involving a whole different alphabet—Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Arabic—something to bridge the cultural gap.”
Writing is only 5 percent of a journalist’s job. “I tell young people, ‘Don’t major in journalism … you can learn those skills working on the student paper or taking a good writing class. Major in the field you want to cover. It requires an extraordinary amount of expertise to be able to understand what the truth is.
“A lot of young correspondents have a theory about what’s happening and look for someone to give a quote that supports it … but you have to have a blank slate and carry out your own public opinion survey of what’s really going on and how people really feel. It’s not talking to five people; it’s talking to hundreds of people … what’s the public mood, [and] among officials, talk to all the different wings of government…. [It’s] a much more daunting and demanding profession than most people understand.”
Forty years as a working journalist and her depth of experience have earned Robin Wright recognition as a scholar in Middle Eastern issues. She flies to the Middle East regularly to observe and report on its changing politics and societies. She maintains a web page at robinwright.net, and she tweets from @wrightr.
Robin Wright isn’t the only woman to specialize in Middle Eastern affairs. Women correspondents have long headed to the Middle East in search of the truth about what’s going on there. Martha Gellhorn covered a Palestinian uprising, as did a younger reporter, Janine di Giovanni. Martha Raddatz has reported from there for both NPR and ABC News. Others include Christiane Amanpour, an Iranian by birth who made her name with American TV watchers on CNN during the Gulf War, and Marie Colvin, an American reporting for the Sunday Times of London who was killed in Syria in 2012. There are more: NPR’s Middle East correspondent Deborah Amos, CBS correspondent Martha Teichner, and CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier, who was gravely injured in a 2006 car bombing in Iraq that killed everyone around her.
The one reason more than any other that I love the news business is because I learn something every single day. Every single day.—Martha Raddatz
About 9 PM EDT on Sunday evening, May 1, 2011, Americans were getting ready for the week, thinking about Monday morning and going back to work or school. Some in the East and Midwest sat down to tune in to Desperate Housewives or The Amazing Race when reports trickled in that the president was preparing to speak to the nation—a most unusual event for a Sunday night.
ABC News foreign correspondent Martha Raddatz was sitting on an airplane waiting to take off on a long, tiring flight to Afghanistan, one of many she’d made since the United States had gone to war there in 2001. Her BlackBerry phone buzzed, and the next thing she knew, she was off the plane, her luggage retrieved, sitting on the floor of a terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport talking on two phones at once. She’d gotten a tip—probably the biggest of her professional life. Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States, had been shot dead by a select team of American soldiers at his hideaway compound in a Pakistani city.
Martha spoke to her son, at home with friends, knowing that he’d be worried not just about his mom but also about what was going on. She swore him to secrecy, shared the news, and emphasized that he tell no one. (He complied.) Then she got back to work. Raddatz, an on-camera reporter, is one of the most visible parts in the well-oiled machine that is ABC News, known to media types as a “news operation.” It’s an operation, all right: massive amounts of research and prior planning, copy written, videos shot and edited beforehand. There was new information, only hours old, gleaned from sources at the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA—how the raid was kept secret, how the compound was laid out, who was living there, and how bin Laden died. Money was spent, lots of it, so that Raddatz and her ABC colleagues could get on the air with full coverage by 7 AM Monday. Americans were sure to tune in.
That morning Martha Raddatz gave a live report from the Pentagon. She stood in front of the memorial whose 184 benches, evoking the tail of a crashed airliner, stand in honor of the men and women killed when a terrorist flew a hijacked American Airlines plane into the Pentagon. As computer-generated images of bin Laden’s compound appeared on screen, she reported on the logistics of killing him—“Bin Laden was ordered to surrender but refused. The SEALs shot him in the head, likely a double-tap, two shots to ensure a kill.”
Martha Raddatz looked the complete professional as she reported from the Pentagon that morning—conveying information in the calm, purposeful manner that one expects from a veteran correspondent. She’s an expert on so many aspects of the bin Laden story: the September 11 attacks on the United States, Middle Eastern politics, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military, the White House, the Pentagon. Bin Laden’s death was one endpoint—there will be more—of a long, complicated and never-ending news story, one that has taken Martha from Washington to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan so many times she has nearly lost count.
A career in TV news wasn’t what she’d planned on. Martha grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, a Protestant. Her father died before she turned three, and Martha’s mother raised her and her sister. When she was a girl, Martha had “absolutely no inkling” what she wanted for a career, but her mom’s Saturday morning trips to the library stand as a bedrock experience. She read— a lot. “I liked to read biographies,” she recalled. “Maybe that’s the first inkling you want to live a life that’s not the one you’re living.”
She went to college at the University of Utah, with no firm grasp on career plans when opportunity knocked during her senior year and a job opened at a small TV station in Salt Lake. Martha dropped out of school and took the job, which on reflection she admitted “was stupid.” She moved up from grunt-work tasks to shooting her own film (still part of the job at small stations) and going on camera when she was 24. She moved to Boston and instantly adored living there. She stayed for 12 years.
“Before she was Martha Raddatz at ABC News, she was Martha Bradlee here at Channel 5, WCVB-TV, and she was a heck of a reporter,” wrote Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen. She married her first husband, Ben Bradlee Jr. (son of the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee), and they had a daughter, Greta. Martha’s job at WCVB took her out of town and overseas frequently, but she was able to plan her travels ahead of time, which made her family life somewhat easier to balance. She and Greta’s father divorced, and Martha married again, an attorney named Julius Genachowski, with whom she has a son, Jake. Jake was 10 when Martha started reporting from war zones. (Today Martha is married to NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten.)
Martha’s interest in military issues expanded over those years. She left Boston to report from the Pentagon for NPR in 1993 and was drawn to the war in Bosnia during a horrendous time, when another woman correspondent, Christiane Amanpour of CNN, provided inspiration. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that woman was so brave,’” she recalled. Martha went to Bosnia five times. Reporting on the US Department of Defense and the US military intrigued her. The Pentagon beat, a “microcosm of society,” fascinated her. Martha understood that reporting from the Pentagon encompassed more than the nuts and bolts and bullets of making war. “It involved death,” she explained. “It involved society’s issues.” The human dimension—stories of real men and women—compelled her to become an expert on the American military. This has taken more than 20 years. Like Georgie Anne Geyer, Martha has worked at building her “institutional memory” for decades. Like Geyer, she simply “knows what to do.”
She moved to ABC in 1999, returning to work in front of the camera as a State Department correspondent. On June 22, 2001, she contributed to an ABC News report:
US Navy warships have pulled out of Persian Gulf ports and a Marine Corps exercise in Jordan was halted following the detection of an “imminent” and specific terrorist threat against Americans, ABC News has learned….
And less than a month ago, four followers of Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi exile suspected of sponsoring terrorism, were convicted of involvement in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.
Shortly after that verdict, on May 29, the US government issued a worldwide caution for Americans, warning intelligence had been received in early May that American citizens abroad might be the target of a terrorist threat from extremists linked to bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization.
US authorities also suspect bin Laden associates were involved in the attack on the Cole. [A suicide terrorist attack on the USS Cole when it was docked in Yemen killed 17 US sailors in October 2000.]
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Martha was at home in Arlington, Virginia, when the first airplane hit the World Trade Center in New York City. Tom Gjelten, reporting for NPR at the Department of Defense, rushed to the Pentagon. Martha hurried to her office in Washington, checking in with Greta at Amherst College and with Jake’s school as well before she got to the State Department:
The State Department was being refurbished so the press was in a downstairs temporary facility with one large TV. My young producer, Phuong Nguyen, was already glued to the images. Before we knew any details about where the planes came from, I remember thinking that no US pilot would ever fly into those buildings, even if there was a gun to his or her head, so I assumed that the planes must somehow [have] been stolen. Officials I was calling assumed the same.
Nothing made sense that day. And then less than 20 minutes after arriving at the State Department, there was a report of an explosion at the Pentagon. Just before we evacuated the State Department, it was confirmed that a plane had hit the Pentagon, although it was unclear on which side it had hit.
It was chaos outside. As soon as we were outside we heard reports there was a car bomb that had gone off at the State Department. I knew that was not true and reported that to ABC. Then Phuong and I walked to the Memorial Bridge, the one behind the Lincoln Memorial, and I looked across the river toward Virginia. A huge pillar of black smoke was coming from the Pentagon.
Martha wondered if Tom was all right, and then decided to be optimistic and assume, because news reports were coming from another part of the Pentagon, that he was OK.
I spent the day on that historic bridge watching the Pentagon burn, smelling it, and seeing fighter jets streaking down the Potomac. I knew I would not be back home for a very long time and that when I finally did [return], all of our lives would be changed.
The September 11 attacks on American soil also changed the direction of Martha’s reporting. She got a transfer to the Pentagon in the spring of 2003, just as the United States went to war in Iraq, and embarked on a long series of visits there, sometimes to follow the defense secretary or generals as they inspected operations, and sometimes embedded with American soldiers as they carried out day-to-day operations in Mosul or Fallujah or to the desert in Al Anbar. “Embedded” was a new term in those days— a term coined to describe journalists who lived and worked alongside troops in a war zone, sharing meals and living spaces.
Martha Raddatz and two US Marines in Ramallah, Iraq, in 2007. Courtesy of Martha Raddatz
By the summer of 2004, matters had turned deadly for the Americans in Iraq as insurgents rose up against the military with accusations that the United States had “occupied” Iraq. Martha, about to leave for home after a trip to Iraq, was having dinner with a group of generals when General Jack Keane shared details on a briefing he’d heard concerning a battle back on April 4. Eight soldiers had died that day after an attack in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City. A platoon from the First Cavalry Division, thinking they were on a peacekeeping mission, were caught in a “platoon pindown.”
Martha expressed interest in doing a story for ABC’s Night-line on the attack, but she was about to go back to Washington. The general offered his help, and two days later the army flew her to Sadr City, where a group of survivors awaited her. She later recalled this story for a reporter on C-SPAN.
I knew 8 soldiers had died, 60 were wounded. I sat down with these soldiers and it was one of the most incredible stories I’ve ever heard.
And it was a time I thought, OK, this is not policy. This is not the administration. This is these human beings who have been in this horrendous battle. And there was one in particular. There was this staff sergeant named Robert Miltenberger, who was sitting over in the side and kind of grumpy. And I thought, “This is the last thing this guy wants to do is talk to me.” And they brought over Sergeant Miltenberger and he sat down. And I asked him one question about this, and he burst into tears and talked about how he’d had one hand on a sucking chest wound in one soldier. They were in back of the open truck, that he had the knee on the leg of another one. One of the soldiers was paralyzed, and he kept telling him he was OK.
And Sergeant—you could just see the pain in this man’s face like I’ve never seen before. He was awarded a Silver Star for his heroics, all the time he’s continuing to shoot.
There were others, Martha knew, the families at home at Fort Hood, Texas, who had gotten early word on the battle from CNN. Some would get the dreaded knock on the door from an Army chaplain and a fellow officer to provide official notification that their soldier had died. She knew there were family preparedness groups, networks of army wives on call to bring food and offer a shoulder to cry on to grieving wives and children.
Two months later, Martha was back in Iraq, again in Sadr City to do follow-up interviews with men from the First Cavalry. A second general, Peter Chiarelli, encouraged her to go to Texas to speak with families at home—a different story she could talk about on Nightline. Martha flew to Fort Hood.
Out of Martha’s long talks with soldiers in Iraq, the wounded in hospitals, wives and parents at home, and army officials, came her book The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family, published early in 2007. She didn’t ask ABC for time off to write it, preferring to stay on the job and work into the wee hours to finish the manuscript.
Her book offers countless tiny details about the people whom Martha interviewed about the horrific attack, details that grieving people were willing to share. She took time to get to know them, to ask questions and to listen carefully. “No one asks them,” she explained. “We say, ‘What was it like? Did someone get killed?’ And [we] don’t really say, ‘And then what happened? How did you find the courage? And how did you keep going on?’”
Her book garnered good reviews and a thumbs-up from a New York Times reviewer, whose skepticism about the freshness of the book—Martha’s story had already played all over television—declared that The Long Road Home offered “searingly vivid evidence of the toll our soldiers pay.” Others, including an antiwar columnist writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, questioned how she can maintain an objective view of the US military when she spends so much of her time living and working among its men and women.
Martha Raddatz states categorically that she can keep her reporter’s objectivity even as she’s embedded with US forces in spots like Iraq and Afghanistan. “I say things they don’t want to hear,” she once told an audience, “but I can never be objective about sacrifices and service. I have lost friends. I have had friends wounded.”
Issues of personal safety are always in war reporters’ minds, but it was rare for one to be attacked or killed in action until the past few decades, when journalists, producers, and photographers became fair game for enemy combatants. The Iraq War came home to ABC News in January 2006 when two of Martha’s colleagues, coanchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, were gravely injured when a roadside bomb struck their military vehicle. And in February 2012, American journalist Marie Colvin, a veteran writer for the Times of London, was killed in Homs, Syria, reporting on the suffering of 28,000 civilians caught in Syria’s civil war. One year earlier, CBS News reporter Lara Logan and her crew, including her producer, cameraman, and translator, were attacked in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The moment their camera battery lost its charge, a mob of men attacked. Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted, and nearly died.
“I think you take what safety precautions you can,” Martha emphasized. “Bad things are going to happen. With Marie Colvin I don’t think death had anything to do with her being a woman. She was the bravest journalist around, period. Lara’s attack was horrendous, and I know she took precautions and had security men … you have to do what you can to mitigate that threat.”
Lara Logan was criticized for leaving her two young children to report from a war zone. Martha Raddatz’s kids are grown, but she has thought deeply about the issue. She is not sure she would have left them when they were little, and as teens, Martha said, they were more into their own problems than worried about hers. A smile stirred in her voice when she looked back on a trip to Bosnia when her daughter, Greta, was a young teen. Martha hadn’t been in touch for two days. She set up a satellite phone to make a quick call home, and Greta answered. “Mom, thank God you called,” she said. “I’m thinking of dropping Latin.”
Martha Raddatz (right) pictured with her ABC News producer, Ely Brown, in eastern Afghanistan. Courtesy of Martha Raddatz
Of course, when children become young adults, their worries change. Years later, when Greta, by now working at the University of California, Berkeley, got a call from Martha with the news of the explosion that injured Woodruff and Vogt. “My mom began to cry, and her tears fueled my own,” Greta wrote. “I cried so hard I was gasping for air. I’d obviously heard the horror stories about journalists being wounded, kidnapped, and even murdered in Iraq. But this was different—it could easily have been her.”
My mother’s own experiences in Iraq have certainly made this war more meaningful for me. On Easter Sunday last year, my mom attended a sunrise church service at Camp Victory, the main military base in Baghdad. After the service, she flew out of Baghdad on a military cargo plane. The following is an excerpt of an e-mail she sent that day:
“When we walked onto the plane, we saw in the middle four flag-draped coffins, stacked side by side. On the way home on Easter Sunday. The passengers were seated on the sides of them. Our luggage was next to the coffins. The retired general I was with walked back and touched the flags. I cannot describe how emotional it was to see those coffins so close to you, not knowing who they were but knowing how they probably died.”
Martha Raddatz is appalled at the gap in understanding between the lives of everyday Americans and the soldiers who fight for the United States in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’ve got a country that doesn’t connect with the military … one in five are coming home with mental health issues and the suicide rate is enormous,” she told a group of college students and their parents.
She points to the “war weariness” of Americans at home, where returning veterans and their families all too often fall through society’s cracks. Multiple deployments—as many as three or four separate combat assignments—result in posttraumatic stress that plagues veterans throughout the ranks, from infantrymen on up to soldiers with stars on their shoulders. “One of the stresses we don’t talk about is the stress on the generals, quite frankly,” she said. “The horrible, horrible suicide rate” among the military is “an absolute crisis.”
On a PBS program, Martha explained her concerns further:
Multiple deployments are so underappreciated by the American public. Sometimes they [returning servicemen and women] don’t really engage when they come home. They can’t … I have found that through the years, frankly. You’re going back and forth, and you’re in this horrible situation and you can’t quite relate … when you come back, with friends or with your family because they weren’t there.
Magnify that by a trillion times with these soldiers who are fighting, who are seeing the most horrific things that you can imagine, and then they’re expected to come back and drive the minivan.
Martha Raddatz is now chief global correspondent for ABC News. In October 2012, she moderated the vice presidential debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Congressman Paul Ryan. The morning after the bombing at the Boston Marathon in 2013, she tweeted, “A crew from overseas on my plane to Boston to cover the attack. Usually it is me going overseas to cover their attacks.” Follow her on Twitter at @MarthaRaddatz.
