The Conflict in Covering the War

By Pamela Constable

Sunday, December 2, 2001; Page B01

JALALABAD, Afghanistan— The road to Kabul was a Calvary of dust and craters, but the reporter from Dutch television and I were too deep in conversation to mind. As our Jeep jolted along on the morning of Nov. 19, we compared notes on our sojourns in other conflict zones. His translator had been nearly killed in Sarajevo; I had been trapped by paramilitary snipers in Haiti; we had both been caught in riots and crossfire. Yet after each narrow escape, something always drew us to the next high-risk assignment, to the next unpronounceable hamlet where life and death hung in the balance.

Part of it, we agreed, was the addictive thrill of danger that sharpened our senses and emotions. Part of it was the competitive drive to beat other newspapers and networks to the action. Part of it was the fear of surrendering to the complacency of desk jobs and coffee breaks. And underlying it all was the heady conviction that we could reach the precipice without toppling into the abyss.

As we chatted on an exhilarating ride toward a new war, we suddenly noticed something odd. A taxi traveling ahead in our loose convoy had spun around and was racing toward us, the driver frantically beckoning us to follow. A few moments before, there had been two other foreign journalists in his cab; now there was no one. As we turned and sped back toward the city, my stomach knotted with dread and my Dutch friend kept running his hands through his hair. At a gas station, the cabbie poured out his story: Six men with rifles had pulled his passengers out of the car, hit them with stones and begun to fire. He had fled without looking back.

It was a nightmare that made our abstract soul-searching very, very concrete. Our colleagues were probably dead. We had been only a few minutes behind them, and we realized with horror that had we not stopped for a bathroom break, we would have reached the ambush spot at the same time. The implications were so appalling that we simply blocked them out and switched on our professional autopilots. We rushed to locate and interview witnesses, designateda few journalists to inform local authorities and alerted our editors back home to the news.

Almost as an afterthought, we began calling our families. My father, in Connecticut, answered the phone groggily at 5 a.m. For 18 years, he and my mother have followed my dispatches from distant trouble spots, bewildered by my vocation but proud of my success. I usually saved my alarming adventure stories until they were well past, but I couldn't bear to imagine them waking to a news flash about foreign journalists being shot in Afghanistan.

By the next day, word had trickled back that four journalists in two separate cars had died in the ambush. One of them, an Afghan-born Pakistani with Reuters named Aziz Haidari, had been a friend of mine. The night before his death, we had huddled together in our freezing hotel, joking and commiserating over a recalcitrant laptop computer.

At noon, an ambulance pulled up to a Jalalabad hospital, where a growing crowd of cameramen jostled for position with militamen outside the morgue. As the scene grew increasingly ugly and unmanageable, one journalist, a former U.S. Army medic, took charge and warned that if anyone tried to film the bodies, they ran the risk of being shot.An hour later, four of us were allowed inside to identify the dead. They had been placed in plain wooden coffins, and the attendants briefly lifted small lids at the head of each box. I steeled myself to look atAziz's dark and mottled face. I barely recognized the jovial, good-natured man I had known. I was staring at a death that could easily have been my own, and I couldn't help imagining my face in the coffin, my family being told the news, my memories and dreams snuffed out, my goodbyes never said.

The thought was too inconceivable to dwell on; I had to think of Aziz. Not knowing what else to do, I raised my hand over the coffin and murmured a short Muslim prayer. Praise be to Allah, the most merciful and gracious. Then the lid shut, and Aziz was gone.

There were about 50 foreign journalists in Jalalabad that week. Some, like the overeager cameramen, were newcomers to the Afghanistan story from distant capitals. Others were veterans of the region whose careful calculus of risk and reward had suddenly been upended. Every morning we headed out, not knowing what events we would be covering or even whether we would return safely to our hotel that night.

The violent deaths of our colleagues were a mark of Afghanistan's mounting lawlessness. Within a week, another journalist would be dead, killed by robbers in Taloqan. So far, eight journalists have died in this two-month-old war, and the astounding body count from among our ranks has made us all wonder -- as we have wondered many times -- why we have left behind our families and comfortable lives to head for another battlefield headline.

The easiest answer is the professional one. For more than two months, most of us had worked around the clock, chasing the foreign fallout of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.For a week before the slayings, we had scrambled desperately to find a way across the border from Pakistan, barely pausing to ponder the risks. Ahead, there were American bombs falling, U.S. special forces hunting for terrorists and Islamic militias fighting for political control. At the moment, it was the biggest story in the world, and we were damned if we were going to miss it.

For me, Afghanistan also held a peculiar but powerful mystique. I had visited the country nine times under Taliban rule, where every moment was tense, every step dogged by an official guide, and every basic tool of journalism, from taking photographs to visiting homes, prohibited. And yet each time, I came away with compelling images and stories: police whipping beggars waiting in bread lines, families huddled around forbidden TV sets, war urchins tormenting monkeys in a dilapidated zoo, stern and illiterate Islamic clerics intrigued by a visitor's cell phone.

Now Afghanistan was on the brink of being liberated from Taliban control. Fear of chaos had replaced fear of oppression, but the country was rapidly opening up to the foreign press. Men were shaving off beards, women were emerging from veils. The possibilities were endless, and I was dying to turn them into poetry.

Trapped in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, I arranged a rendezvous with Afghan guides who never appeared, argued with bureaucrats who refused to sign exit visas, and sat fuming in a police car while a convoy of luckier journalists sped toward the Afghan border. Finally, I secured my visa, but could not find a ride to the border. The sun was setting, the checkpost wasabout to close, and my colleagues had left me far behind. As I stood in a Peshawar parking lot, furious and humiliated and feeling like a failure, I burst into tears.

I made it through the checkpost gates at last on the night of Nov. 17, flooded with relief and excitement. But 72 hours later, with four colleagues dead, my urgent flailings suddenly seemed ludicrous. Had I lost all perspective in the rush to compete? Was a byline from the Afghan front worth dying for? Pushing away questions I could not bear to confront, I found that when the time came to sit down and write the news story about the killings, I could barely type. The words came out reluctantly, each sentence making the unthinkable more true. I felt no spark of creativity, no professional satisfaction, only a dull sense of guilt that I had survived to tell the tale.

Later, when I began to write this essay, I found that I was using the collective "we" to explain how the deaths had affected the press corps here. It was partly a professional's habit, to carefully edit ego out of every story. But it was also a reluctance to acknowledge why I had chosen this peripatetic, high-risk life.

For years, my visits home have been largely confined to Christmases in Connecticut and two summer weeks in a cottage on Virginia's Eastern Shore, where I read to my niece, sip wine with old friends and watch the sun set over the marsh while a solitary heron fishes in the reeds. These are the moments that mean the most to me, but the truth is that they are made far more precious by the months I spend in places like Afghanistan, struggling with cold and germs and loneliness in search of human drama. It is the ability to jet between comfort and strife, I have to admit, that makes my life worth living.

The other journalists in Jalalabad have made similar choices.Although we shiver in a grim hotelat night, listening for the rattle of gunfire and the whoosh of American bombers, mourning the deaths of four colleagues, not one of us wants to leave. But over dinner, we find ourselves solemnly recalling friends who have been killed in the Middle East or the Balkans, and passing around snapshots of our children and pets.

In the process, our competitive instincts have been replaced by a spirit of platoon-like solidarity. We are sharing information rather than keeping it to ourselves, traveling in groups, checking on each other's whereabouts. None of us expects to die here, but we are no longer sure our passports and sophisticated gadgetry will protect us. We need each other.

This revelation came home to me on Thanksgiving. The holiday fell three days after our colleagues' deaths, and we decided to celebrate as a way to lift our spirits. We found some live turkeys in a bazaar, purchased a mountain of vegetables and made a pact that no matter what happened that day, we would not write any news stories. For at least that moment, journalism no longer seemed important.

By evening, the turkeys had finished baking in a row of campfire ovens, the barren hotel restaurant had been transformed into a magical setting of flowers and candlelight, and a Los Angeles Times correspondent had produced a single bottle of Bordeaux. We gathered around the long table, heaping with bounty and warmth, and raised thimblefuls of wine in a toast to our families, our friendship and our late colleagues. Then we tucked into the feast, and for the first time since Sept. 11, we felt we were no longer only journalists, but human beings again.

Pamela Constable is The Post's South Asia bureau chief.