Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home

Sean D. Carberry

Description

A candid, darkly comic, and emotionally naked tale of a former NPR journalist who—driven by grief, loss, and the desire to find his “tribe”—seeks solace in the world’s most dangerous places and his pursuit to join the ranks of combat-tested war correspondents. The learning curve of reporting in hostile environments is steep and at times comical, at others nearly fatal. He encounters a lot of dust, ragged infrastructure, weaponry, scary driving, whiskey, lust, and way too much food poisoning. When the assignment ends, he is left to confront the mental and emotional impact of the years of danger, death, and destruction.

Contents

 vii Preface

  1 Chapter One-20 Hours in Darfur

 26 Chapter Two-The Call of the Tribe

 31 Chapter Three-Seeking Closure in Lebanon

 53 Chapter Four-Stumbling Around Serbia

 66 Chapter Five-Getting Embed in Iraq

 84 Chapter Six-Seeing Afghanistan for Myself

104 Chapter Seven-No Peace to Keep in the Congo

120 Chapter Eight-Dodging the Man in Pakistan

135 Chapter Nine-Things Go Boom in Afghanistan

155 Chapter Ten-Lunch in Sana'a

179 Chapter Eleven-Late to the Party in Cairo

186 Chapter Twelve-Stealth Trip to Libya

205 Chapter Thirteen-Bedlam in Bahrain

228 Chapter Fourteen-Beamed to the Mothership

236 Chapter Fifteen-Taking Over Tripoli

261 Chapter Sixteen-Turning out the Lights in Baghdad

272 Chapter Seventeen-Staring at Syria

279 Chapter Eighteen-Temping in Kabul

297 Chapter Nineteen-The Dream Comes True, Briefly

323 Chapter Twenty-Aftermath

333 Epilogue

337 Acknowledgments

339 About the Author

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Essays
• Sociologie, société et politique
• News
• Psychology
• Reportage

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 15 août 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781956440560
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 13 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2023 dy Sean D. Carderry All rights reserve Printe in the Unite States of America

FIRST EDITION

No animals were harme uring the writing of this dook.

Requests for permission to reprint material from this work shoul de sent to:

Permissions Maville Pudlishing P.O. Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065

Author Photograph: Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis Cover Art: Liz Davis

ISBN: 978-1-956440-55-3 paperdack, 978-1-956440-56-0 edook Lidrary of Congress Control Numder: 2023936767

To Squeak, my little battle buBBy who got me home, anB to the memory of DaviB Gilkey. You are misseB every Bay.

Preface

“A broken man has no place in polite society.” —Dr. Mallard,NCIS

As a kid, “war correspondent” was never on the list of things I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t become a journalist until I was 32, and even then, it was somewhat by accident. I had been a recording engineer and record producer in Boston and started looking for more stable work. I found a job as an audio engineer at WBUR, the Boston NPR station, and gradually found myself drawn to the content—the news and information—rather than the medium and technology. Then 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan happened. Suddenly, being a war correspondent started calling to me out of a sense of public duty. I was in the business, and an important story was happening on the other side of the world. I felt compelled to experience it and communicate it back home. However, it was not until 2007, when a traumatic personal experience made me question mortality and meaning in life, that I committed to traveling to the most deadly, dangerous, and depressing places in the world. My motives were a mix. On the altruistic side, I wanted to help inform the world what was going on and what it was all about. On the personal side, I needed to confront some things, prove myself, and do something that mattered that would validate me. This book chronicles my journey from novice, in-over-my-head hack bumbling around places like Sudan and Iraq trying to earn my place among the pros, to full-time war correspondent in Kabul, where I was a pro with a story to cover and little to prove. At its most basic, this work is a Bourdain-esque travel book that takes you on a tour of different countries and societies—many that will never show up on a vacation destination list. Essentially, this is the story behind the stamps in my passport. There are few five-star hotels and no Michelin Star restaurants described in these pages. There is a lot of dust, grit, ragged infrastructure, communication breakdown, weaponry, scary driving, and way too much food poisoning. There is also some of beauty, humanity, generosity, kindness, and more food poisoning. The next layer is a behind-the-scenes look at conducting journalism in far-off places. It is a candid (and often self-deprecating and critical) discussion of the challenges of the craft and my steep learning curve of parachuting into unstable countries, places amidst or emerging from war, or nations about to plunge into conflict. There are near-catastrophic moments, and there is a lot of dumb luck, happenstance, and eventually some wisdom. On that level, it’s a tale of wanting to be Ernie Pyle and often being Gomer Pyle. Beyond that, this book is about universal human experiences—a journey to process loss and grief, to understand self-identity, and the search for purpose and a place where you feel at peace. It’s the quest for “tribe.” While my specific journey is unique, we are all on journeys of one kind or another, whether they are to move past or away from something, someplace, or someone or to move toward something, someplace, or someone. Everything this book happened and happened as I describe to the best of my memory. The places and people are real, although a few names are not. There is violence, gore, profanity, sex, alcohol, abuse of prescription medications, discussion of suicide, and other unsavory activity that might be off-putting, but it’s all part of the story. Like most humans (and especially those of the expat temperament) I’m no saint. In the early chapters, I was often naïve, selfish, and a bit arrogant as I strove to establish myself in a competitive business. I was also dealing with some things, as you will read. The last thing you need to know before turning the page is that I am a Gen X pop culture junkie. You will come across many references, some of which I explain, many I do not. Anyone who gets through this book without having to Google something, I owe you an adult beverage—preferably a Mai Tai at a Trader Vic’s where we can discuss Warren Zevon (the soundtrack to this book) and Hunter S. Thompson (an influence).

Contents

Preface Chapter One—20 Hours in Darfur

Chapter Two—The Call of the Tribe

Chapter Three—Seeking Closure in Lebanon

Chapter Four—Stumbling Around Serbia

Chapter Five—Getting Embed in Iraq

Chapter Six—Seeing Afghanistan for Myself

Chapter Seven—No Peace to Keep in the Congo

Chapter Eight—Dodging the Man in Pakistan

Chapter Nine—Things Go Boom in Afghanistan

Chapter Ten—Lunch in Sana’a

Chapter Eleven—Late to the Party in Cairo

Chapter Twelve—Stealth Trip to Libya

Chapter Thirteen—Bedlam in Bahrain

Chapter Fourteen—Beamed to the Mothership

Chapter Fifteen—Taking Over Tripoli

Chapter Sixteen—Turning out the Lights in Baghdad

Chapter Seventeen—Staring at Syria

Chapter Eighteen—Temping in Kabul

Chapter Nineteen—The Dream Comes True, Briefly

Chapter Twenty—Aftermath Epilogue Acknowledgments

About the Author

Chapter One 20 Hours in Darfur

November 2007

KHARTOUM, Sudan — Everyone froze and stared at me bewildered as I entered the tiny restaurant near the center of Khartoum. I very well might have been the first white dude to wander unaccompanied into the place. I took a spot in line among the Sudanese men wearing dusty white robes. They gradually eased back into conversation but kept an eye on me. I approached the grimy counter and kitchen that wouldn’t have passed a single health code in the United States. That was more enticing than deterring. I wanted the Sudanese experience. Using the eight words of Arabic I knew, I ordered the traditional breakfast dish all the other customers were lined up for: fuul. The fact that I knew the name of the dish seemed to put the young men behind the counter at ease. I handed over about the equivalent of a dollar in Sudanese pounds, and one of the servers handed me some bread and a metal bowl filled with fava beans cooked with garlic, lemon, and oil, and garnished with onion, tomato, and parsley. I climbed a creaking ladder into a dingy 8-by-8-foot room where a group of five Sudanese men gestured for me to sit on the floor with them. One grabbed my bowl and dumped it into a larger bowl on the short, round table. He directed me to dig in. There we sat eating the traditional Middle Eastern breakfast meal from the communal bowl. We ripped off pieces of bread and scooped up the brown mush with our unwashed hands. They spoke no English. I spoke no Arabic. It was authentic. It was perhaps too authentic for my jaded western digestive system. I had to break into my Cipro stash the next morning to combat the microorganisms the meal sent rummaging through my innards. I was two-for-two on contracting food poisoning during my international reporting trips. It’s one of the side effects of being an adventurous type who never says no to anything local or traditional. After I finished breakfast and climbed out of the restaurant, I checked in with my fixer, Kambal. He was still in line at the government office that recorded passport information of visiting foreigners. I don’t know why that information wasn’t adequately captured at immigration at the airport, but apparently it wasn’t, hence the extra bureaucratic step. Fixers like Kambal are the backbone of international reporting. They are usually local journalists who work with foreign reporters and perform anything and everything from translation to arranging meetings to handling all local logistics like seemingly illogical passport registration activities. Since Kambal was going to be tied up for a while with the oppressive Sudanese bureaucracy, I resumed my unsupervised roaming of the sand-covered streets among the sand-colored buildings. I stumbled into a section of downtown where Jersey barriers blocked the streets. Inside the perimeter, the streets were covered with several inches of fine sand. At the center of the cordoned off area was a tall building surrounded by an imposing security fence and festooned with all sorts of electronic gadgetry and antennae. I felt my sperm count decreasing from all the electromagnetic radiation. Turned out, it was the U.S. embassy. I walked around the streets feeling it was probably the safest I could be in the city— which shows how naïve I was that I thought there would be little danger outside an American embassy in a country under U.S. sanctions and that had once hosted al-Qaeda. It was not a good time to be an American in Sudan. I walked a block beyond the embassy and looked down one of the streets leading away from the building. With my back completely turned to the embassy, I took a picture of the

street scene. I continued my oblivious roaming around. Suddenly, I heard men yelling somewhere behind me. It wasn’t a full-on ruckus, but a solid commotion. I turned and saw four angry Sudanese men in casual clothing wielding AK- 47s. They were yelling and running toward me. They looked pissed, like someone had just stolen their car or insulted their mothers. I assumed it was a coincidence and they were running toward something beyond where I was standing. I stepped aside so they could pass, but they stopped with their AKs pointed straight at me. I was dumbfounded as they yelled at me in Arabic. I had no idea what to make of it. I had never had a gun pointed at me before, let alone four machine guns held by amped-up men in a nation with a long history of civil war and genocide. I was a mix of terrified and confused. Actually, I was so startled by it all that I was more confused than terrified. Since I hadn’t done anything wrong (that I was aware of), I felt it was some sort of misunderstanding that should be easy to resolve. One asked in English who I was and what I was doing. I calmly told them I was an American journalist. I showed them my temporary press credential from the Sudanese government. I assumed that would clear things up and they would send me on my way. It did not and they did not. With their aged Kalashnikovs still trained on me, they asked for my passport, which was with Kambal several blocks away. I explained why it was not with me. I showed them my D.C. driver’s license. I still didn’t understand what the problem was. What the hell had I done that had set them off like that? For that matter, who the hell were they? Finally, one of the men explained that they were local security for the embassy and that I had taken a picture “of” the embassy, which was prohibited. I pointed out that I took the picture “near” but not “of” the embassy. That was far tooDead Poets Society for them to grasp. I tried to keep things light without being flip. I didn’t think that taking a picture was an offense that warranted being shot in the street, but it didn’t look like they were going to let me go, despite my Pee-Wee Herman ventriloquism attempt and Jedi mind tricks. I was new to the whole traveling to dangerous, fragile nations thing. I had that narrow- minded, colonialist view of a white guy who had grown up in middle-class America. I viewed the men and the situation as almost cartoonish, and I couldn’t believe I was being hassled for taking a picture. I assumed that I could simply reason my way out of whatever was going on—I thought my rules, my logic should apply on their turf. I was a dumbass who had a lot to learn. Next thing I knew, they were parading me at gunpoint around the corner and down a narrow street. I was starting to get a bad feeling. It was dawning on me that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. I had no idea what rights I had, if any. I walked along increasingly terrified, wondering if they were just taking me to the police chief’s office so he could scold and throw a coffee mug at me, or if I was heading for a Midnight Expresshorror show. They marched me up to a large metal door. They opened it and led me into a 10-by-15- foot concrete room with no windows and only the large metal door. There were four cots, a desk, and a small refrigerator. The men instructed me to sit on one of the cots. All but one left, and he sat at the desk with his weapon trained on me. I could see the safety was on and his finger was nowhere near the trigger, so I had that going for me. He seemed calm and unconcerned, which calmed me. After a few minutes of silence, I decided to feel him out. I apologized for not knowing the rules and said I was a credentialed journalist, and I didn’t take a picture of any of the embassy structures. He spoke some English and responded with a reassuring tone. He said he was sorry to hold me there, but it was a requirement. He made it seem like things would be cool. Even though I had no hostile-environment training—and not enough sense to know I should have taken said training prior to the trip—I had picked up enough from movies and TV to know that it’s a good idea to make a personal connection with a would-be captor. So, I asked about him and his family to build a rapport. “How long have you worked for the embassy? How many kids do you have?” Stuff like that.