The War Correspondent

Boredom is a bigger threat to war correspondents than bullets. Armed conflict and blatant war rarely include more than a few haphazard moments of explosive terror. Food from the twilight zone, filth, mosquitoes, cold nights in the open, communications breakdowns and being in the wrong place at the wrong time are the hallmarks of any war correspondent's assignment. A two-month job might result in 10 minutes of seeing war, and watching Tomahawk cruise missiles or F/A-18 Hornets howl overhead, does not count. A gung-ho hack with a penchant for quick journalistic glory is most commonly destined for disappointment. It's akin to being paid to be homeless.

For years I was an ersatz war correspondent. Rwanda, Cambodia, Gulf and lesser skirmishes hither and thither. It was indescribably boring. If I was lucky, some friendly NATO troops would be present, unofficially take me with them on patrol and keep my belly full of weird ration pack food. French ones are the best, as they each have airline-sized bottles of wine and cognac. If I was unlucky I stumbled across a hitherto unknown killing field and ate local food so mysterious that even now I do not want to know what it was. For the record, Rwandan killing fields became easy to detect by the locomotive-type din created by billions of flies. Sometimes they were audible the night before they hove into view. The corpses smelled like undercooked roast pork that had been in a faulty refrigerator for a week.

War zones where the incumbent society's mental and technological development stopped at the time of Adam and Eve are safe areas for reporters. Natives generally have no idea of what news or a reporter is. They proceed with their violent meltdown without inhibition or concept of conscience. A bad joke circulated in one of the Gulf countries I loitered in was that the writing was literally on the wall for these people. They could strip, clean, rebuild, load, cock, orient, aim and fire an AK-47 in seconds, but left messages for each other with antediluvian graffiti on rocks. If there had been a fatal "contact" with their enemy nearby, they would gleefully take a reporter there and pose for happy snaps. Alternative universe Kodak moments, if you like. Safe, and passably good for unread feature articles, but dull as news and absent of glory.

Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was horribly, horribly unlucky. Pakistan was once described by an English cricket player as the place to which all mothers-in-law should be sent, but it has never before been more than gastrically dangerous for the English-speaking media. It remains a truism that print-media writers look more like trampled, chainsmoking intelligence operatives and special forces troopers than Ashleigh Banfield or Geraldo Rivera. They travel lightly with personalized gear, keep quiet, do not wear camouflage and smell atrocious.

Reporters have not routinely dressed as or deployed with regular soldiers since the 1970s, so they carry all manner of knives, phones, electronics and bizarre stuff from Canal St. gadget hawkers and are rapidly attuned to the local lingo. In a lineup it would be nigh impossible to pick a war reporter from a CIA spook if they were found in the same Third World shithole. Foul regimes and terrorists know this, know that even if their hostage really is a journalist then the coverage will not be favorable to their cause, and do not care how many scribblers they kill. With unfounded faith in blackmail, this seems to be how Pearl ended up being chained with a gun against his head.

Five reporters were tortured and murdered as enemy spies by the Indonesians in East Timor in 1975, and one more in September 1999. They were all whiter than white and could never have been mistaken for East Timorese resistance guerrillas. It will not happen again, as several thousand Australian troops, with U.S. Navy and CIA support, threw out the Indonesian junta days after the (London) Financial Times writer was snuffed two and a half years ago. The closest I was to reporting East Timor was writing about special forces operations from Sinem Internet Cafe in Istanbul, where things were bad enough for earthquake-ravaged Turks. The Indonesians involved were M-16-armed and U.S. woodland camouflage-attired minions of the White House and State Dept.'s erstwhile "valued friend and ally" Generalissimo Suharto.

East Timor, close to crucial Arabian-Japanese oil shipping lanes, rapidly became a safe place for correspondents to comb over and rue the lack of rifle fire, glory and bountiful book contracts. No one had to dress as a priest and escape "enemy killing zones," as a friend of mine, Peter Godwin, author of Mukiwa and Rhodesians Never Die and now a resident in Manhattan, did when Robert Mugabe's dictatorship in Zimbabwe hunted him to very near death with North Korean-trained troops. This was for blowing the story of the 1982 Matabele genocide in the south of that once blessed country.

A pretense of a presidential election campaign is currently under way in Zimbabwe, and Mugabe's political and judicial drones have just enacted and enforced fierce antimedia laws. Foreign reporters have been all but banned from covering the forthcoming bogus vote, so maybe the dog collars, rosary beads and holy water will have to come out of more than one journalist's closet. Such disguises would never have been useful to me. Somehow I always looked sincerely bored and out of place, and, in any case, I know that Comrade Mugabe will win with a handsome majority.

This will attract few editorial column inches in the U.S. outside New York Press. Terrorist-led, communist-inspired regimes in Africa are now off the American political and foreign policy radar, and neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post is likely to criticize a crooked, murderous, thieving black bastard like Mugabe. The content of Mugabe's character does not seem to matter; the color of his skin grants him immunity. Truly intrepid reporters will go to Zimbabwe, snoop around and get their stories out, but it is very possible that one or two of them will stay in-country for the wrong reasons, and discover what it is to be Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal. The rest of us have memories of smoking way too many cigarettes, mind-numbing boredom and fragments of innate human wickedness. Maybe that is enough for us and our wives.