It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (14 page)

My shock turned into sadness and then anger within an hour. I threw everything Uxval owned in garbage bags and put his belongings by the door with a note: “I know about Cecilia. You left your e-mail open on my laptop. Get all your stuff out of this apartment by the time I come home on Monday. Do not call me.”

I couldn’t eat for weeks. I forced myself to drink water and juice. My days ebbed into wide-awake nights. Depression was not something anyone in my family ever talked about, unless we were referring to friends or distant relatives. Now I couldn’t get out of bed.

One sleepless night I remembered how wonderful the last year had been for my career: traveling back and forth to South Asia for the
Times
, once my biggest dream, and working consistently with the paper’s Mexico bureau chief; shooting stories for the
Boston Globe
and the
Houston Chronicle
with Marion. I had been so happy.

“You have your work,” I told myself. I even said the words out loud to give me strength.

The next morning I called the foreign picture editor of the
New York Times
and asked if there was a region where she needed more freelance photographers. I explained that I had to leave Mexico City.

“OK, let me think about it,” she said. “Give me a few days.”

In the meantime I had dinner with Uxval’s best friend. He told me Uxval had been cheating on me for months with this Cecilia of Yahoo.

“Who is she?” I asked him.

“She is a secretary for Telmex, the government telephone company.”

I looked up. “Does she match her handbag to her shoes?”

She was predictable and present. I could never compete with a secretary who clocked in nine to five Monday through Friday, who had all her weekends free.

A few days later my
Times
editor called. “I have an idea,” she said. “The paper is moving Dexter Filkins to Istanbul to be close to Iraq, so he’s positioned nearby when the war begins. He is one of the paper’s top correspondents, and I bet we will need a photographer there.”

“You mean you need someone in Istanbul?”

“Yes, Istanbul.”

I knew nothing about Turkey. But Dexter and I had been friends in India, and within months I had packed up my life in Mexico and moved to this country to which I had no ties and whose language I did not speak. It didn’t matter. I would be there for the next war.

Fall of the Taliban in Kandahar, December 2001.

CHAPTER 5

I Am Not as Worried About Bullets

I moved to Istanbul the first week of January 2003 with two bags of clothes, my cameras, and my laptop, and was lonely from the moment I arrived. Istanbul was cold in January; there was a constant gray drizzle outside. I had pictured a biblical Middle Eastern city, more exotic than Western, with narrow alleys and mazelike stone walls. Istanbul’s architecture was modern and industrial, almost cold.

I didn’t know how to say hello or thank you, please or good-bye. I ate
simit
, sesame-covered loops of bread, for breakfast and lunch, because they were for sale on every street corner and I was too shy to ask for anything else in Turkish. The television in my room offered only Turkish channels, and I kept turning it on, hoping that all of a sudden I would understand the soap operas and news broadcasts.

I was biding time before the start of the war. In early February Colin Powell made his speech at the United Nations claiming that the United States had proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and we journalists were just waiting for the invasion date. Although the United States’ war in Afghanistan seemed a justifiable response to the September 11 attacks, many journalists believed that the Bush administration was fabricating reasons to go to war with Iraq. But we were riding this wave of war that was defining the first decade of the twenty-first century, imbued with the same sense of purpose I imagine war correspondents felt covering Vietnam: a desire to be with our countrymen as they were dragged into a dubious American invasion.

The
New York Times Magazine
assigned me to work with Elizabeth Rubin in northern Iraq, the Kurdish region that was opposed to Saddam and supportive of the American intervention. I was to meet Elizabeth in Iran—a country not particularly friendly to Americans at the time, but that did allow journalists to cross the border into Iraq. We would arrive some weeks before the invasion and stay to document the aftermath. In 2003 editorial budgets were healthy. Editors didn’t think twice about putting me on assignment for a month or two at a time, at a rate of $400 per day, just to make sure I was available and in position as a story evolved. Those days are over.

The war in Iraq was the first time in my career the U.S. military offered journalists the chance to accompany them on the front lines of war, that is, to “embed” with the troops. So I had three options: embedding with the U.S. troops as they made their way through the desert toward Baghdad and photographing combat; renting a car and traveling without the protection of the military through the vast deserts of Iraq, which seemed slightly crazy; or reporting from northern Iraq—otherwise known as Kurdistan, home to millions of Kurds who had been oppressed by Saddam—and moving toward Baghdad only after Saddam fell. I chose the last option, because I, like many others, felt it would expose me to the least amount of combat. And it seemed the best way to cover the humanitarian disaster that might follow the invasion: a refugee crisis of Iraqis fleeing southern Iraq to the north. I wasn’t sure I would be able to keep up with the soldiers physically—I still had never actually been in combat—so I decided to work around the edges.

 • • • 

S
EVERAL WEEKS BEFORE
the start of the Iraq war, I was on assignment in South Korea for the
Times Magazine
, photographing North Korean refugees who had escaped to South Korea. In the middle of the assignment, I got an e-mail from Scott Braut, one of my editors at my new photo agency, Corbis. One of his roles in the lead-up to the invasion was to ensure that all Corbis photographers planning on going into Iraq were well equipped with the necessary gear to cover the war, including combat and possible chemical attacks. I responded to him in a state of panic and bewilderment.

Scott,

I am trying to buy body armor for my impending departure for Iraq, and am starting to break out in hives. I called AKE War Outfitters like you suggested, and they put me on hold for about 3 minutes, knowing I was calling from Korea. I hung up.

I then checked out the websites you recommended, and am not sure if I just tried to read Korean. Basically, I have no idea what I am looking at—ballistic, six-point adjustable, tactical armor, etc. Please understand that this language is not familiar to me—I grew up in Connecticut, was raised by hairdressers.

Would it be possible for you to call Second Chance in the states, and explain to them that I am a photographer, I am going to either Baghdad with the US troops or into Northern Iraq with god knows which terrorists and tribal leaders, I am not as worried about bullets as I am about shrapnel, don’t want anything too heavy (guess this would mean ceramic plates), don’t want to spend a million dollars (though my life may be worth a fraction of that one day), and these are my measurements: (sorry if this is too much info for you, but I photographed for 13 hours today, it is 1:30am, and just want to get this planning over with . . .)

I am 5’1”, I have no idea what the circumference of my head is for helmet size, and certainly have never measured the distance between my nipples. I would go downstairs and ask someone at the hotel for a measuring tape, but I don’t think the people at reception would send me anything to measure my head at 1:30am, because it would take them about 3 hours with the Korean English dictionary to figure out what the hell I am asking for, and I would surely jump out my window before going through that process right now. So, let’s say I have a medium head. As for the vest, my waist is about 29”, my chest is 34, and I have big boobs.

Also, the NYT Magazine says that the NYT bureau in Turkey might have a gas mask and a chemical suit I can use. It will most likely be sized for a large, burly man (as most war correspondents tend to be), but at this point, I don’t think I’d be able to slip my body into it within the 13 necessary seconds before the chemical gas arrives, anyway, so it should be fine. As for the camera gear, I would be forever indebted to you for an extra Nikon D1x battery, and for my feet, a pair of those warm socks you mentioned.

Thank you so much. Call if you have any more questions, and please let me know the cost of the vest before you go ahead and get it.

Lyns

 • • • 

S
OMEHOW, BETWEEN
body-armor-planning sessions and anxiously watching the news, I strung together a semblance of a personal life. Eventually I gave in to Uxval’s proclamations of love and regret and invited him to live with me in Istanbul. I had one foot out the door, but I was lonely and I loved him, he was persistent, and this time he had a vision for our life together. Uxval was the son of two successful Mexican painters, and compared with them, he seemed directionless after leaving his previous job, and with an artistic calling he had never fulfilled. After we met, he started photographing, and he taught himself video to enable us to work alongside each other in Istanbul. I met him at the airport, brought him to our new home, and handed him a set of keys. The next morning I left for Iran and then Iraq, where I spent the next three months.

 • • • 

I
N
T
EHRAN
I met Elizabeth for the first time and was immediately struck by her attractiveness, the way she managed to remain feminine in a profession that cloaked femininity with androgyny. Early on in my career I always dressed like a man—jeans or army pants, sturdy hiking boots, a modest top. I rarely wore colors other than black, brown, or gray and tried to dress as sexless and boring as possible. When I went home, I made up for months of this behavior by wearing tiny miniskirts and high heels. Elizabeth, who had worked in this business longer than I, seemed to have realized that retaining a bit of femininity was crucial to her sense of self or maybe to a sense of normalcy. I hadn’t realized yet how important that illusion of normalcy would become.

That week, we crossed into northern Iraq by road. Dozens of foreign journalists had made the journey before us, and we breezed through the checkpoints bordering the two countries. Elizabeth’s ease with everyone—the Iranian officials, the border guards—reflected the fact that she had spent ten years in conflict zones: Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Chechnya. She never took herself too seriously, and laughed easily with her subjects. Everywhere Elizabeth and I went, often as a friendly team of long-haired brunettes, people opened their doors to us. I wondered if they underestimated us because we were women in a part of the world dominated by men. Whatever the reason, I found it a great advantage: Elizabeth was one of the smartest journalists I had ever met.

About a hundred foreign journalists were shuttling between the Kurdish cities of Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, and we eventually settled in the latter. Sulaymaniyah was a progressive city, with a wide avenue cutting through the center that was lined with low concrete buildings mixed with modern, glassy office towers. We took a room at the Ashti Hotel, a simple place with a dark lobby and seventies-style furniture that was chock-full of journalists. The only thing better than a nice hotel room was a nice hotel room where all the other journalists camped out: It was a way to keep up on the latest developments and conquer the boredom of our evenings.

Friendships form fast in war zones. At night, we gathered in someone’s hotel room at the more luxurious Palace Hotel. I knew Ivan Watson, the NPR correspondent, and Quil Lawrence, a BBC World Radio reporter, from Istanbul and Afghanistan. We bought bottles of wine from the Ashti with labels that dubiously read
BOTTLED IN EUROPE
. Quil sometimes put on salsa music, and we spun around the hotel room for hours. But the invasion was looming, so few of us got out of control. Anyone on assignment in northern Iraq represented a major news outlet, and the pressure to produce stories every day was enormous.