May 28, 2003

12 Days Later

BAGHDAD, Iraq – It’s been 12 days since I had last written. Perhaps that’s a sign that I’ve been getting a bit tired of Iraq and need to come out.

And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Some, I’m told, are just done with this place a bit quicker, some a bit longer. Six weeks in Iraq is just about enough I can take for the time being, and I’ve been away from Columbia since March 22.

“Will you come back to Iraq?” I often get asked.

I’m courteous in my non-committal “I don’t know” response. If you asked me right now, I’d tell you, without any shadow of doubt, flatly no. But that’s what I’d said after the first time I’d come to the region on deployment, and the second and the third. This being the fourth, I never thought I’d find myself back here let alone writing e-mail from Baghdad, but I’ve learned never to say never.

So I leave the option open to return. Undoubtedly, I won’t be back before January. Football is way too important to the paper (and me, really) to spend the season in Iraq. I’ve had my share of sport – which I never thought I’d cover here – but it’s just not the same. There’s some mild risk of danger coming to a football (read: soccer) game in Iraq that one just doesn’t get when you cover any game in the States. You just don’t know who might be carrying a Kalashnikov.

Some things I never thought I’d have access to. We walk into hospitals and barely speak before people welcome us into one of the West’s most private places with open arms. As I’d mentioned before, patients and their families line up to tell us their stories, to tell anyone who will listen. Some of them feed us a line, but most have no reason to lie, and are honest sometimes in rather graphic detail.

I walked into the morgue last Wednesday, saw some of the most gruesome things I’ve ever seen and been most welcome to be there. I got permission from a family to photograph not only when they brought his coffin in and out of the building, but to photograph his autopsy for a story about the rising gun violence in Baghdad. Where else are you going to find that?

It’s amazing how open the Iraqi people are. They welcome journalists into their lives at just about every turn, and at some of the most vulnerable times they’ve ever faced. They’re still camera conscious to be sure, it’s quite the opposite of most places I’ve worked in my short career.

Culture shock is always biggest when one returns home. I'm sure that the camera and image conscious subjects back at home base might get on my nerves. I might chuckle, albeit in private, a bit at a camera and image conscious subject who might worry that I’m going to make them look bad. After all, they can’t look half as bad as the corpses I’d photographed lying on a table with extra holes in them, or the one former soldier going into the grave.

- Rich