CHAPTER 13

Southern Iraq, 2003

In early February of 2003, Newsweek sent me to the Middle East. War with Iraq was brewing. I spent a quick ten days in Baghdad before the bombs began falling, and left when my short-term visa expired. Then I travelled to Kuwait to follow the imminent ground invasion. I found Luc, the photographer with whom I had worked in Afghanistan, living in an abandoned house in the Kuwaiti desert. Luc knew a colonel in the Kuwaiti military who had promised to help us find a way across the border into Iraq. Until he called, we had nothing to do but wait.

The desert in Kuwait seemed such a wasteland. Goose farms near the Iraqi border yielded huge quantities of shit, which gathered along the sides of the roads and in the yard of the house where we were squatting. When the sandstorms blew, so did the shit, smearing the world with its stench. That patch of desert already felt abandoned to the war. There was no question that it would slide in of its own weight; it was just a question of when. The border — the constant pounding of tanks, the hovering helicopters, and the military police patrolling — was a trembling faultline.

A few days after I arrived, the colonel called. A huge convoy of Americans would soon be moving across the border, he said. He suggested we get ready. We arranged a meeting place and time. Luc and I each drove our own trucks, which we had rented in Kuwait City. We needed two to transport our gear, and also to have as backup in case one broke down.

On the appointed day, the colonel led us into the desert. The road quickly petered out and turned into soft, pliable sand that wound towards the west, through reeds and grass. He was following ancient roadways unused by all but a few shepherds. If we got separated, I would have no idea how to get back.

Eventually we arrived at a series of berms and loose fencing. The colonel stopped his car at a place where the fencing had come apart. The remains of a dirt road crossing into Iraq were visible. The colonel stepped up to the barrier and ripped the barbed wire away, tossing it aside with a flourish. He gestured into the void in invitation. ‘I stop here,’ he said, and chuckled. His sunglasses were low on his nose, and he looked over their tops at us. ‘That is Iraq.’

He told us to follow the road, which ran parallel with the border, for another few kilometres, until we came to a larger berm and a bigger road. Within the hour, he said, an American convoy would come through there, and we could join it.

‘Viens,’ Luc said, and before I could even protest, he was through, skidding close to the fence and throwing up swirls of sand.

I could have left, but I didn’t. I could have walked away from him, and the assignment altogether. Instead, I followed him in.

It wasn’t long before we found the berm and the road. As the colonel had predicted, a massive convoy of American hardware was soon rampaging through the gap in the sand. We joined it, much to the surprise of the soldiers. When I stalled my truck in the middle of their invasion, an American colonel came back to investigate. I told him that we were journalists, and we wanted to join the march to Baghdad. He beamed. ‘Why not?’ he said, and smiled. ‘It’s a free country now, ain’t it?’

Things went well with the convoy for a few hours, but by that night Luc and I had been kicked out. We weren’t ‘embedded’, which meant we hadn’t signed up to any military rules about how to behave and what to report, so we were considered a risk and a danger. They worried that we might disclose information that would put them at risk. The major who shooed us away left us on a hill in the darkness and pointed back to the dark shapes where the rest of the convoy was tethered for the night.

‘Stay here,’ he growled. ‘Don’t come any closer to us. You can stay here tonight, and then you’re on your own. Don’t follow us.’ So I spent a freezing night huddled in my sleeping bag in the driver’s seat, ready to pull away at any moment. Now and again the earth shuddered as bombs reached their targets. I slept only fitfully, waking every hour or so, waiting for the sun, and heat, and some semblance of safety to come.

The next morning, we sat on the dunes and watched the Americans’ lurching crawl. Then we just drove, further and further north, into that morass of war. Minefields lay to the south and the north, and we skirted around them, sneaking past camps, sentries, lines of tanks, and rangers.

As we travelled, larger groups of American soldiers appeared out of nowhere. The desert swarmed with the lumbering shapes of those convoys. When they were close, you could hear their rumbling and see the life inside of them, like some uncoupled train from a lost world, carrying its survivors into the future. Some convoys were heading the way we wanted to go; others were detouring. Sometimes one group or another was clearing a field of mines, or securing it from looters. This way, some of the soldiers would tell us, when we asked where the most forward groups were. This way or that way, no one really seemed to know. But Luc had a GPS, and we used it to navigate toward what seemed like the right place to be.

For several days, he raced along and I followed. The sandy fields were filled with American tanks, and their turrets beaded on us as we passed, swivelling in unison and following us until we were out of sight again. We slept in our cars, in the lees of dunes, or on the open ground. At night, the far horizons glowed with bombing, and it became impossible to distinguish what manner of destruction was hurtling earthward — human-made or otherwise. Soon it just seemed to merge. The fighter planes flew over it all, racing in and out on bombing runs.

Some nights I wanted to leave — just turn around and go home. One night I called a colleague and told him so. Come on back, he told me. But I couldn’t, really; I didn’t trust my own navigation skills. So I kept going.

As we raced on to Baghdad, the world smelled tangy with diesel. Long hours passed when all I followed was the dust trail Luc’s truck left for me as track. Helicopters sometimes thundered by above us, the bodies inside impassive. I had no idea where I was. But the small lines of the GPS led us north, towards a highway where we knew all the American convoys were gathering: Route 8.

Slowly, the land began to change. The desert started to give way to wet and muddy terrain. Marshes and reeds were visible, and past them, long fields of dark, tilled earth — the first signs of residents in several days.

One afternoon, around 2.00 p.m., we clambered up out of a long ditch in the four-wheel drives and emerged onto asphalt. The engines whined and ticked as the dust swirled off in the sudden stillness, and we came shuddering to a stop. We had come to an intersection and a bridge, and we were stopping to wait for an American convoy. They were going to move soon, we had learned, and we planned to follow behind. It seemed safer to be ensconced within the convoy, rather than drifting across the desert on our own.

Eventually, the road began to rumble. The convoy arrived, and we joined them. As we were doing so, dark figures appeared across the bridge. They waded knee-deep in water, carrying tools and bushels of grasses over their shoulders. Some of them looked at us, and then kept going about their work as if we didn’t much matter.

We drove on, but when we came into a small town, massive crowds had turned out along the sides of the road to see the Americans. The convoy came to a stop. Soldiers milled around their tanks with their helmets unbuckled or under their arms. Children ran around screaming with glee, and bands of young people tittered nervously along the road’s edges. We edged our trucks into the crowds.

Luc wanted to take pictures, so he stopped his truck and stood on the roof to get a better perspective. I stayed behind the wheel of mine. A nervous man came up to my window. He had a sickly smile and rotten teeth, and his mouth was twitching. I couldn’t tell if he was dangerous, scared, or both. He put his hand through the open window, and I shook it. His eyes were wide. ‘No good,’ he said, motioning to the disruption all around us. ‘No good.’ It wasn’t clear to me if he meant the invasion wasn’t good, or the situation the invasion was in the process of altering. Then he leaned in quickly and hissed at me: ‘Bad people here, bad people.’ Before I could respond, he was away, trailing a flow of children behind him.

When the convoy left, we kept driving with them, toward Baghdad. A few hours later the convoy stopped again, and I thought we should too, but Luc wanted to push on. There was another convoy ahead of us, and he thought we could catch up to it before dark. We didn’t know how far forward it was, so we raced ahead. Pretty soon we were going 50, then 60, then 80 miles an hour. The convoy watched us pass, and some waved, shouted, or cursed. And then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they were gone, and we were alone on that road.

It was a vast landscape we were in, and we the only things that seemed to be moving. The sound of the wind was furious, and I rolled my window up quickly.

Suddenly, I saw a man standing by the side of the road. He was wearing green fatigues. He was tall, bearded, and wore a green hat with a bill, Nicaraguan-style. He had a very big gun, and was holding it at waist-level. As soon as Luc’s car reached him, the man began to fire. By the time I came within his range, it was too late to turn around. I had hardly realised he was armed until I was on him.

‘Ils ont des armes, ils ont des armes!’ I heard Luc over the walkie-talkie. Weapons, he was saying, they had weapons.

It all came at the same time, the sound of his voice telling me that the man, or men, had weapons, and the sound of the bullets as they began to hit my car. I realised that they were shooting at me too. I sped up. It had rained earlier, so the ground was wet and dark, including parts of the road, and alongside the road were ditches of mud streaked with shallow and putrid pools of waste. I heard the rounds as they hit my truck. They punctured the metal, penetrating the car and exiting on the other side. There was more than one man firing now. I ducked this way and that. I sped up; I slowed down. I heard glass shatter and figured the bullets were getting closer to me. Luc had gone silent on the radio. I saw his car tearing down the road in front of me, into the distance. And then it disappeared altogether. It just vanished; I was alone. And I collided with my fear — I realised that what I was in was much, much bigger than me.

I passed through the checkpoint, the gas station, which the attackers were apparently using as cover, but I was still under a fierce hail. The bullets were getting louder, more pronounced, and more frequent. Suddenly, the back of my vehicle caught on fire — I could smell it burning. They must have hit the petrol tank.

I knew I had to do something. Or, rather, my body knew it, and it took over. As more of the windows around me began to shatter, I ducked. As I did, I swung the wheel to the right. But I realised almost immediately that I was going to run off the road, so I veered back left, without being able to see anything. I felt the vehicle begin to fishtail. Shit. Overcompensation of the wheel. I swung back up into the seat to try and regain control. But as soon as I was upright, I saw how far I had swung left, and thought I was going to crash. So I braked as hard as possible.

Luc was long gone by then. There was nothing ahead of me on that road except a long line of grey asphalt that led into a foreboding distance. Behind me were the attackers. And farther behind them still was the American Army, slouching along, or perhaps not moving at all. That stretch of road became, in those moments, my own purgatory — some seventh layer of hell, a huis clos. The possibility of death became real.

The next thing I knew, I completely lost control of my car. My erratic steering left me up on one set of wheels, and then the other. I could feel them shuddering beneath me, coming loose, tearing away, unhinging completely. I tried to regain control of the wheel, but it was too late. I was headed for the island that ran down the middle of the road.

I hit it with my right front tyre and felt the car flip up and onto its side. There was a light pole on the island, and my airborne car headed for it, turning and coming crashing to a stop against it. The last things I heard were the clunking, crashing sound of twisting metal, and then the slosh of liquid.

When I came to, I was sitting upright. But the rest of the world was wrong. My feet were on a window, and the window was on the ground. In front of me was the windscreen, now lengthwise. The smell of petrol permeated the compartment. The car was on its side. I didn’t know how long I had been out, but it couldn’t have been for more than a few seconds because almost as soon as I woke, I heard the sound of pinging again. The attackers were still shooting. The bottom of the car, the hard metal section, was facing them, and whatever was hitting the vehicle was ricocheting off — pinging around me, but not penetrating into the cab. Perhaps they were far away. Perhaps they were bad shots. It didn’t really matter why; the point was they were still aiming for me. I looked up at the window above my head, which was miraculously intact. It was like a skylight, a small square into which the dull light of afternoon poured. Terrified, I pictured one of the attackers popping his head into that beautiful frame and finding me. It was an image of unspeakable horror, that face looming into my life and blocking out the light. There would be two possibilities: the first was that he would lean back, aim his weapon through the window, and finish me; the second was that he would take me hostage. Neither was acceptable.

Realising this, my body leapt into force. My feet lifted off the floor and began to kick at the window. I was wearing military-issue boots that I had picked up at a store in Kuwait City. I kicked, and the window didn’t budge. I kept kicking. I kicked until I saw a crack, then another. A web began to form. I kicked as hard as I could; I kicked the shit out of that window. A small hole began to form, a tiny thing at the centre of the web, and I kicked it until it became about as big as my head. I could hear the attackers shouting nearby. The firing continued. I heard feet. I heard the click of chambers, the dumping of bags, running, panting, breathing.

I wanted to put my head out of the window and appeal to the attackers in my father’s calm voice: wait, stop for a moment and let’s discuss this. Smile, he might have said, you can’t be angry if you’re laughing. In my hazy state, it seemed reasonable to do such a thing; more than that, it seemed like the right thing to do. But I couldn’t do it because I was still terrified.

This was it, I thought, the way my life will end; as Yevtushenko put it, that moment of frankness at the party, when the enemy crept up. It was too fast. I had seen the aftermath of people who had been in positions just like this. That was so much of what war was about — seeing the aftermath, the wreckage. And I had wanted to get closer, as close as I could. Now I was as close to war and death as I had ever been, and I only wanted time to stop so I could escape.

Ideas of war are necessarily big. They are about good and evil. There is a reason we use the phrase ‘war zone’ — because it marks an area inside of which the world is different. Everything inside that zone is different: the energy of people, their motivations, their fears, their capacity for good and evil. All operate on a different frequency. The closer you get to the centre of that zone, as if approaching a bullseye, the more clearly you are able to see those motivations and experience them for yourself. The evil that people in wars were capable of, experienced veterans and correspondents would often say, was equalled by extreme goodness. I parroted that view because I wanted some of it to rub off on me. But I also felt I had a real notion of what it meant.

My father, it had always seemed to me, was involved in big ideas, too. The ‘struggle against communism’ was one such idea, and in its purest form it was an absolute. Defeat concerned millions of people, potentially. War wasn’t just about fighting. It was about years and years spent cultivating a mindset that you believed would somehow triumph, even over the unseen inventions of future humanities. Those years on Camp Peary, spent teaching generations of young people how to think about their world and their country, and how to defend it, were part of an organised system, perpetuating itself year after year. It was a climate of constant war sheeted with the thinnest patina of civility and bucolic peace. Even as a child, I could sense that. Tyranny, liberty — these were big, attractive ideas, and they stirred something in me. It was rousing to hear speeches about freedom or throwing off the yoke of oppression. I wanted something of those big ideas for myself. But in that moment, on that desolate stretch of Biblical road, there were none. It was just a bunch of guys trying to kill me; it was paltry and unexalted. They had their reasons, and they were the same ones in the speeches — resisting occupation and fighting for their country — but they no longer seemed grand because I realised that at the centre of it all there was only fear.

Finally I managed to create a hole in the window large enough to escape through. I poked my head out and looked around. Nothing. First my head, then my shoulders — I pushed my way out of the cab and fell onto the ground. For a moment I lay there, unsure of what to do. I was afraid the car might explode. I considered popping my head up above the hood, waving a white shirt, and surrendering to the men who must still be nearby, but they would likely shoot me. Then I heard them shouting gleefully, probably thinking I lay dead inside the car. There was some more shooting, but it was sporadic and it didn’t seem directed towards me. I guessed they were almost 200 metres away, even though I could hear their laughter as if they were right on top of me.

My car was up on the median strip. From where I was hiding I could see that the strip stretched off far down the road, an island made of dirt about two metres wide. The attackers might be on their way over to investigate the car, and loot its considerable riches — a computer, two satellite phones, several thousand dollars, multiple tanks of gas, warm clothes, a generator, and the little brass horse my father had given me. If they found me there, well …

So I began to crawl away, along the median. I lay on my belly and made myself as flat as possible. I smeared my face as far down into the dirt as I could, filling my mouth with it. I closed my eyes, ostrich-like, and tried to keep my movements as infintesimal as possible as I crawled forward. I was protected by the truck for the first few metres, but was soon exposed. A few more shots rang out randomly. I lay still for a moment, wondering if they had seen me, trying not to breathe too much. A dung beetle appeared next to my face, moving doggedly. I had never seen a more endearing creature, with its perfectly rounded shell; its crooked, spiny legs; and its measured gait. It was going in the same direction. I began to crawl again, too.

I moved and didn’t look back. I must have crawled on my belly for at least another hundred metres, like a lizard, pushing my legs up to my hips and back down, swivelling my torso as I did. Please, I kept muttering to myself, please, please, please. And fuck: fuck, fuck, fuck. I did that until I was far enough away that I could get on my hands and knees, and I moved along in that way for a bit. I was far enough away by then that I felt safer. But I was in the open, on a median strip in the middle of the desert. I had nothing; everything had been destroyed and left behind. The road ahead was filled, I was then sure, with similar people who would kill me if they saw me coming. And there was no question of going back. I couldn’t stand up. There was still plenty of daylight left, and not a hill in sight to hide behind. So I just crouched and looked around. I felt like a wild animal — I would have attacked anything that came my way. I was panting furiously and muttering to myself. There were bloodstains on my pants. I must have stayed that way for several minutes.

And then I heard a low rumble in the distance. It was faint, at first, and then it grew louder, and unmistakably stronger. It was the US Army coming my way.

The first vehicles that arrived were tanks. The only people visible in them were a couple of small, goggle-wearing heads, like warts on a turtle. They rolled on by. I thought one would stop, but none seemed to. So I began to wave. As more tanks passed, trucks began to appear, then some humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles, but those too passed. I got up some courage and stood up. I began to wave more vigorously, and started to run alongside the convoy as it passed. The noise was deafening, but I began to shout anyway. Pretty soon I was running as fast as I could, shouting at the top of my lungs. Still no one stopped. Eventually a few soldiers began waving back at me, like beauty queens on a float. I must have looked so dirty, so ragged and unshorn that they mistook me for a war refugee. ‘Stop,’ I kept yelling, ‘I’m an American.’ But no one did. And soon the tanks and large trucks were all gone.

Following them were other trucks and smaller vehicles. I ran closer and shouted even louder. Some of the soldiers smiled, or gave me a thumbs-up. More than one made a motion for me to lie down and pointed to the rear of the convoy, as if to illustrate that he understood what had happened, and that more danger was on the way. A couple of times I did actually lie down, but then, seeing the convoy rushing past, jumped up and began chasing it again. I was jogging alongside it, waving my arms when I could, shouting, smiling — anything to get someone to stop. And eventually someone did stop. A humvee pulled out of the line and rolled off to the side of the road. The man in the passenger seat beckoned me over through the window. I approached with my hands up in the air. ‘I’m an American,’ I said. ‘I got attacked. Please help me.’

The soldier had his hand on his pistol. ‘What are you doing out here?’ he asked.

‘I’m a reporter,’ I said. ‘Reporter. I’m American.’

‘Who do you work for?’

‘Newsweek. Newsweek magazine.’

His face broke into a broad smile. ‘Really? Cool. Get in.’

We pulled off, and the specialist in the driver’s seat spoke up. ‘We saw you go racing by us back there,’ he said. ‘We thought you was one of them CIA guys running around.’

‘No!’ I laughed. ‘Nope.’

He turned around and cast me a quizzical glance.

‘I promise,’ I said. ‘Not the CIA.’

I couldn’t reach my father that night. He was in Afghanistan. For a while, though, the world — the parts that were paying attention — thought I was dead. Someone even wrote a story about it. My editors called Janet and told her they feared I had been killed. Faced with my possible death, Janet suddenly seemed to melt, overcome with reserves of love she had, but had never been able to show. Yet on the other side of the country, my mother hadn’t heard a thing. I wanted to spare her the pain of worrying, so when I called I chose not to tell her very much about what had happened.

I finally reached my father by email. He was spending more and more time in Kabul. The psychological war was growing, and he was deep inside it.

About a week after the attack in Iraq, the military kicked me out of the unit that had saved my life and sent me back to Kuwait City. I began to dissociate. It started one day when I began to have death fugues. I was stopped at a traffic light when I suddenly became acutely aware that I wasn’t certain any longer whether I was dead or alive. I realised I was confused about it.

The light changed. Cars began to honk. I wasn’t sure what to do. Eventually, I determined that I was alive, and drove on. But the fugues continued for weeks, even as I returned to Baghdad for several months that spring and summer to report on the incipient American occupation.

Over time, they morphed into a deep and unshakable depression. When I finally left Iraq, in August 2003, I spent a few days in New York, seeing some friends. Eventually I made my way to my father’s house in Washington State, but I don’t remember much about that trip. Years later, my father told me that we had taken a hike, and at one point I had stopped in the middle of the trail and started sobbing. He had put his arms around me and asked what was wrong. I was afraid of his death, I told him. I was terrified.

What I do remember is arriving in Seattle the day afterward. I had a hotel downtown, overlooking the wharf, and I rang him from there.

‘Is everything okay?’ he asked. ‘I’m worried about you.’

I mumbled something noncommittal just to reassure him and hung up. I went into the bathroom, turning on the shower. Steam began to fill up the room. I stood for a while watching the shower spew. Then, fully clothed, I climbed in and sank down onto the floor, under the heat, and dissolved into tears. I stayed that way for hours.

Back in Mexico, where I returned after spending six months reporting from Iraq, I rented a hotel room high above the rest of the city, and sat in front of the mirror, staring at myself. I believed my soul was infected. I wanted to kill it, and in the process kill a part of me. But I didn’t know how, so I sat in my room and prayed for it to end. Panic swarmed across me in waves that seemed unending. When I wasn’t at the mirror, I couldn’t get off the floor, or stop crying. The thought came to me: was that why I went to Iraq, to kill myself? I tried to purge myself of it, to cry myself clean. Sometimes the old self-punishing voices came to the surface, and I could hear myself saying things over and over. I choked on my breath. The face staring back at me from the mirror was full of hate. I tried to scream, but couldn’t. I sweated and drooled. I vomited and dry-heaved and spat, and still it didn’t go away.

I began to see a psychiatrist. He told me that I was having borderline dissociation. I looked it up in a medical dictionary. The fugues were a ‘state or period of loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with flight from one’s usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria or epilepsy’. That made sense; I had had several epileptic episodes in college. The psychiatrist told me I was bordering on psychosis, recommending I begin a treatment of antipsychotic medication. I refused.

The depression got worse. And as it did, I realised that very often my thoughts were coming back to my father. Again and again, whenever I sat down to write, or to look at myself in the mirror, I talked to my father as if he were there. Sometimes these conversations were filled with love and tenderness; at other times they were hate-filled screeds. I thought of the fugue, the loss of one’s identity, which was exactly how I felt whenever I thought about him. I began to fear that I was losing my mind. I was so paralysed by fear and anxiety that I almost gave up work altogether. My mind was ragged and violent, as if one part of me was pursuing another. The more I tried to stifle my fear, the more it raged, until I could no longer control it at all, and invariably I would sink to the floor, or the bathtub, or the bed, unable to move or speak, or sometimes even to cry.

‘You don’t have a fucking clue about who I am,’ I wrote one day to my father. ‘I would bring you down here and treat you like a king, to show you that I can do it, that I can be stronger than you. Those are elements you’ll have to deal with. That’s how much hate I have inside of me.’

Then, on another day, I wrote to him, ‘I know you’re never going to stop loving me. Deep, deep down, someplace that I’ve never been, somewhere truer than I’ve ever been with myself, or anyone else, I believe those words.’

But the more I thought about him, the more I realised that there was something missing. There was a barrier to our experience of each other, but I couldn’t see it. I could only feel it.

I called my father one night. I was so depressed by then that I don’t remember much about the conversation at all, except that at some point I tried to confess my fears to him again.

He said, ‘Don’t worry, son, you’re not going to lose me. I’m not going to stop calling you, or loving you, or writing you.’

But then one day, amid the updates about what was happening in Kabul, he wrote to me that he had run across another American journalist with much experience in Afghanistan. During the course of their discussion, he had told her that his son was a journalist who had been in Afghanistan. Paranoia, which was growing more acute by the day, swept over me. I wrote back a feverish reply:

I wish you hadn’t chosen to tell her about me. I can’t emphasize to you how small our world is. It may do no harm to you, or to your work, to tell people you meet about me. But it could do enormous harm to me, or to people I work with. It’s very important to me that you make no reference to me. It comes down to security, and to credibility. I don’t want to put mine, or anybody else’s, in jeopardy.

I told him I hoped that he understood, and that I knew I was being paranoid. ‘It’s quite possible,’ I went on, ‘that at some later time, with people I know I can trust, the situation would be different. In any event, it has nothing to do with you as a person.’

My father wrote back right away. ‘I understand completely your not wanting to have us linked by anybody other than some-body you might trust and so designate. I do want to emphasize that the journalist didn’t ever learn my name or with whom I was affiliated, other than a general reference to AID projects. However, I appreciate you reminding me of the walls that must be maintained.’

The walls that must be maintained.

This correspondence between us was the first time since my childhood that either of us had explicitly acknowledged the existence of the big secret between us, and the need to treat it with care. Its sudden emergence shook me. Those walls were inside both of us, and they were becoming harder for me to manage. Sometimes I wanted to tear them down, rip them apart, destroy them in a mighty cataclysm. But more often than not I found myself erecting more of them, building others, constructing new and ingenious labyrinths for us to creep through. Maybe both of us were rats, trapped in a maze of our own design.

Sometimes — often, in fact — it was easier just to escape. So I returned to Iraq in the late spring of 2004. As soon as I was there I cadged some Ritalin off a friend, and began a month-long speed-induced binge of manic work. I wrote for hours on end. I listened to one song, David Gray’s ‘Babylon’, for nine hours straight one afternoon. I took needless risks, being driven at all hours through dodgy parts of Baghdad in the back seat of a sedan with the window rolled down. I visited warlords in terribly overrun slums, went to every car-bombing site I could, and partied with great abandon with anyone who was willing.

I carried on with a hazy desire for self-obliteration until, one day, I collapsed on my bed with pounding chest pains. I felt my pulse. It was racing at more than 150 beats a minute.

This period of frenzied activity went on for several weeks, until my allotted time in Baghdad once again came to an end. Then, a week later, I left Iraq and flew to Europe to find my father again, this time in the former Yugoslavia.