Holidays in Heck (2 page)

I took some time off in Guadeloupe, with the excuse that the island was voting on the E.U. constitution just then. Being a Neo-Con, I needed no excuse to visit the aircraft carrier USS
Theodore Roosevelt,
go to Kabul, or mock the docents-fluent-in-Newspeak Field Museum in Chicago. I can't remember what excuse I used to get myself to Venice with a room at the Gritti Palace on the magazine's nickel. But it must have been a doozy.

For my visit to the “Big Stick” I thank my distinguished old friend Frank Saul who introduced me to my distinguished new friend Jim Haynes at the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick dinner in Washington, where many bold plans are hatched. This one still seemed like a good idea in the morning. Jim, former general counsel of the Department of Defense during the George W. Bush administration (and how we miss it), arranged the carrier embark. Thank you, Jim, and may the wind be always at your back and may the road rise to meet you. (Whatever the Irish mean by that—sounds like an Irish description of tripping on your shoelaces).

Among the first and best friends I made in Washington was Jim Denton, who gave me the occasion to travel to Afghanistan. Jim runs Heldref Publications and edits
World Affairs
, America's oldest foreign policy publication. He introduced me to Jeff Gedmin, who was then the head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Jeff, with the help of executive editor John O'Sullivan, had great success in transcending the genre of government broadcasting. He turned RFE/RL into a network of radio stations to which people listen avidly rather
than dutifully. I went to Prague to do a story on RFE/RL for
World Affairs
. As part of that story I visited RFE/RL's Afghan station, Radio Azadi. My journey to Kabul turned out to be a pleasure trip. This, obviously, was due to the people rather than the place. Foremost among these people is M. Amin Mudaqiq, RFE/RL Afghan Bureau Chief. He provided the broadest access, the most wide-ranging introductions, and the warmest hospitality. This gave me material to write a second piece, about Afghanistan itself, for
The Weekly Standard
.

Jim Denton also published, in
World Affairs,
the account of my conversations with manufacturers and entrepreneurs in China. These would have been the mute talking to the deaf if it hadn't been for the help of Celia Garcia, fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Additional thanks to Harvey West and Xiaobo Yao-West for even more and even better conversations at their home in Guangzhou.

Search
is another magazine from Heldref Publications (a company founded by Jeanne Kirkpatrick and her husband). It's devoted to the science/religion relationship. (They need to talk.)
Search
, under the skilled editorship of Peter Manseau, published the first part of my essay on getting cancer. Having failed to die, there was a second part. This was published in the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center's newsletter,
Skylight
, an attractive glossy broadsheet that's more interesting than most of what you read in hospital waiting rooms. Not that they keep you waiting long at competent and considerate Dartmouth-Hitchcock. I failed to die as the result of the efforts of virtuoso oncologist Dr. Marc Pipas and maestro radiologist Dr. Bassem Zaki. I thank you both and so do my wife, my children, two out of three of my dogs, and my life insurance company. My health insurance company says they'll get back to you on that. I also owe
undying, as it were, gratitude to my incomparable buddy Greg Grip. Greg lives on a lake near the hospital. When he heard that I needed to undergo treatments every weekday, ninety miles from my home, he said, “I'm not telling you that you can stay with me. I'm telling you that I will be deeply offended if you don't.” Whereupon he vacated his own bedroom and installed me there, with Elvis-sized bed, giant flat screen TV, and his bird dog to keep me company. You won't get that kind of treatment from from Obama's healthcare plan.

Although I have traveled a lot, I have rarely traveled to the realms of literary respectability. When I did, however, in the pages of
The Atlantic,
I had the rare good fortune to work with editors worthy of respect no matter how respectable they were. First there was the late, much-missed Michael Kelly, then Cullen Murphy, and, after the magazine had moved to Washington, James Bennet, James Gibney, and Don Peck. Under their aegis
The Atlantic
sent me to cover a stupefaction—the Airbus A380—a stupefying—Britain's hunting ban—and the stupid—Disney's House of the Future.

Adrian Dangar took me to the stag hunt on Exmoor and called upon his friends Tom and Margaret Yandle and Astrid St. Aubyn to feed me to surfeit and shelter me in comfort.

The same duties fell to my sterling friend Peter Flynn with whom I toured the giant Airbus A380 and the small, by comparison, city of Toulouse.

When I told the editor of
Ski
magazine, the clever and sagacious Kendall Hamilton, that I wanted to go skiing in Ohio, he didn't laugh. Which was a problem because he was supposed to. But he thought I was kidding. When he
realized I was serious,
then
he laughed. And sent me there. This may have been carrying the joke too far.

All of the articles collected here have been rewritten, some of them extensively—in order that this be a book rather than a recycling bin of old magazine pieces. Although, of course, recycling is a good thing. We don't want to pollute the mental environment by leaving discarded piles of old ideas lying around or deplete the mind's natural resources of new thought. However, one story—my failed attempt to get the family to tour Washington, D.C.—has not been published before. This is because, as you may notice, nothing happens in it. At my age and with a bunch of kids, to have nothing happen is a dream come true. Tina and I were able to live the dream because of the wonderful leisure skills of our splendid Washington friends Andy and Denise Ferguson and their children Gillum and Emily. Nick and Mary Eberstadt and their children Rick, Kate, Isabel, and my Goddaughter Alexandra; and Frank and Dawn Saul and their children Natalie, Charlotte, and young Frank. Tina and I thank them.

Tina can thank herself for being married to the peripatetic, or peri
pathetic
as it more properly should be spelled. But it is I who must thank her for putting up with it. And also for
inputting
up with it. She got this book computerized while her husband stood around making exasperated noises and pretending his ignorance and sloth represented a principled stand against the indignities of the digital age.

Many other thanksgivings are to be celebrated. Noble soldier pal Lt. Colonel Mike Schellhammer and I, with the help of beer, have been working on the Introduction's rant against modern air travel for years now.

Liane Emond deciphered my raw manuscripts and entered them into the mysteries of Microsoft Word.

Don Epstein, who has been both my friend and partner in business for three decades, and all the hard-working, good-looking smart people at the Greater Talent Network lecture agency kept finding real work for me in an era when “print journalist” is a synonym for “unemployed.” I was a writer for forty years. Now I'm a content provider. And the Internet says, “Content is free.” Not at GTN it isn't.

Nor at the Grove/Atlantic publishing house under the intrepid leadership of Morgan Entrekin—my publisher since 1983 and the Best Man at one of my weddings (unfortunately the wrong one). Anyway, we dinosaurs of the printed page are going to fight this comet collision with new media. Notable among the brave combatants: managing editor Michael Hornburg—who manages somehow to manage it all; associate editor Andrew Robinton—with whom all good things are associated; production director Sue Cole—who directs production like Sam Peckinpah directed
The Wild Bunch;
art director Charles Rue Woods—let's dump all those tired old Picassos and hang the book covers of Charles Woods in MOMA; illustrator Daniel Horowitz—the Piero della Francesca of families packed into a car (and thanks as well to camera wizard and good friend James Kegley from whose kind and flattering photo of me Daniel worked); copy editor Susan Gamer—if James Joyce had known about her you'd be able to read
Finnegans Wake;
proofreader Caroline Trefler—proof that sainthood awaits those who suffer PJ's spelling; publicity director Deb Seager—Grove/Atlantic's one true celebrity; and Scott Manning of Scott Manning and Associates—Lady Gaga would be
really
famous if she had Scott doing her P.R.

Be of stout heart all of you. Books will survive. I'll tell you why:

• As the Good Kindle says . . .

• There is no frigate like a Kindle.

• Throw the Kindle at him!

• I wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder who? Who scanned in the Kindle of love?

• My life is a charged Kindle.

• “Kindle him, Dano.”

• I could Twitter a Kindle about it.

A Former War Correspondent
Experiences Frightening Vacation Fun

A
fter the Iraq War I gave up on being what's known in the trade as a “shithole specialist.” I was too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground. I'd been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn't much happy or cute about Iraq.

Michael Kelly, my boss at
The Atlantic,
and I had gone to cover the war, he as an “imbed” with the Third Infantry Division, I as a “unilateral.” We thought, once ground operations began, I'd have the same freedom to pester the locals that he and I had had during the Gulf War a dozen years before. The last time I saw Mike he said, “I'm going to be stuck with
the 111th Latrine Cleaning Battalion while you're driving your rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet
abeyya
contests.” Instead I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed during the assault on the airport. Mike had a happy marriage, too, and cute kids the same ages as mine. I called my wife, Tina, and told her that Mike was dead and I was going to Baghdad to take his place. Tina cried about Mike and his widow and his children. But Tina is the daughter of an FBI agent. Until she was fourteen she thought all men carried guns to work. She said, “All right, if you think it's important to go.”

It wasn't important. And that was that for war correspondence. I decided to write about pleasant places. Fortunately, my previous assignments—Lebanon, the West Bank, the Soviet Union, apartheid-era South Africa, the jungles of the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Pakistan's Northwest Frontier, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.—set a low bar for pleasant. Unfortunately I had no experience with pleasure travel. I'd always been where people were shooting at each other or wanting to shoot each other or—in the case of my side job as a car journalist—trying to die in horrible wrecks. How, I wondered, does one undertake enjoyably going somewhere enjoyable?

Apparently there are rules about traveling for fun. The first rule is to find the most crowded airplane on an airline that regards its customers as self-loading freight. Bonus points if the cabin crew is jocular about this. Nothing but lukewarm diet soda is to be served and that only on flights longer than three hours in duration. Passengers must be very fat, hold babies on their laps, and make certain the infants are suffering from painful ear infections. Passengers should also
bring everything they own onto the plane in wheelie bags and ram these into my knee as they go down the aisle. This luggage is to be dropped on my head after it fails to fit into the overhead bins, then crammed into the under-seat space in front of
my
feet. Everyone, please be sure to insist on having a conversation if I'm trying to read and also sneeze and cough frequently, get up to go to the toilet every five minutes if you're in the window seat in my row, or kick the seat back rhythmically for hours if you're in the row behind. And no matter what your age or the climate at your destination you must dress as if you're a nine-year-old headed for summer camp. Apparently shorts and T-shirts are what one wears when one is having fun. I don't seem to own any fun outfits. I travel in a coat and tie. This is useful in negotiating customs and visa formalities, police barricades, army checkpoints, and rebel roadblocks. “Halt!” say border patrols, policemen, soldiers, and guerrilla fighters in a variety of angry-sounding languages.