Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  Alex explained that the VOA had recently won a grant to start a Kinyarwanda and Kirundi service to broadcast objective news in those languages to Rwanda and Burundi. He had tried to hire local journalists, but they couldn’t seem to overcome sectarian politics enough to send in decent stories. For two thousand dollars a month, he needed someone to file every weekday, but first I needed to write radio news scripts, learn how to use the equipment, and pass a voice test. Alex also said his close friend, AP bureau chief Reid Miller, needed more copy from Rwanda and that I could probably cut a deal with him, too.

  Reid scared me. He talked tough, looked tough, and always had a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette dangling from his lip. I’d heard his voice echo down the hallway in the press center when he lost his temper, and other reporters warned me that he did not suffer fools gladly. When I went into the AP office, I was prepared to explain why he should give me a chance, but I never got it out. He pointed me to a seat, finished editing a story, and then took a long drag off his cigarette and released a lungful of smoke. “I hear you’re going to Rwanda for Alex,” he said. “We need someone there, too. We pay ten cents a word, fifty dollars a photograph, and if you shoot video, we’ll pay you for that, too, when there’s a big story. I’ll give you a two-hundred-dollar-a-month retainer and pay your expenses whenever we ask you to leave Kigali.”

  He asked if I had a laptop, and when I said yes, he told correspondent Terry Leonard to set me up with some software and teach me how to file stories. He then shook my hand and said good-bye. The conversation lasted fifteen minutes at most, and I wondered if he even knew my last name.

  In September, I took a short trip to Kigali to look for a place to live, but during that logistics trip, an aid worker friend, Samantha Bolton, told me about a massacre and took me to the hospital where Médecins Sans Frontières was treating survivors. I dictated the story to Reid’s wife, Pauline Jelinek, also an AP reporter, and she faxed me a copy after it hit the wire.

  Sitting on the front step of the hotel where I was staying, I saw my name at the top of the fax: “Chris Tomlinson, Associated Press Writer.” Tears welled up in my eyes as I read the story and saw how Pauline had taken my notes and quotes and created an AP dispatch. I’d never been happier, and I knew this was how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

  LIFE AFTER GENOCIDE

  I returned to Kigali for good in October and eventually moved in with some people who worked at the UN Children’s Fund. Terry and Pauline patiently took my horrible copy and transformed it into readable journalism. At first, none of my sentences survived editing. At Reid’s urging, I always printed out my original and compared it line by line with what Terry and Pauline had put on the wire. Slowly, I improved, and during a visit to Nairobi, Terry showed me, sentence by sentence, how to write a feature story from my first muddled draft. He taught me more about writing in that single hour than I’d learned up to that point in my life. After the first six months, Reid and Alex asked me to report on Burundi and the refugee camps in Zaire, Uganda, and Tanzania.

  A coup in Burundi took up much of my time late in 1996, followed by the insurgency in Zaire. My VOA stories prompted the leader of the Rwandan genocide, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, to place a one-thousand-dollar bounty on my head, the same price he was offering for the assassination of the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda. Congolese rebels attacked the Rwandan refugee camps in late 1996, and my reports on the crisis hit hundreds of American front pages and appeared in the world’s top newspapers. The AP was thrilled with my work and offered me a chance to become a staff reporter if I would agree to return to the United States and spend a year in a local bureau. The first bureau chief to offer me a job was in Minneapolis. Dave Pyle needed someone to fill in while another reporter went on maternity leave. Over two weeks in January 1997, I went from standing over the bodies of murdered Spanish aid workers in Rwanda to interviewing shoppers in the Mall of America.

  After my year in Minneapolis, I moved to the AP’s International Desk in New York, the last step before assuming an overseas post. The East Africa correspondent’s job in Nairobi opened in the summer of 2000, and I returned to Africa. In the first year, the AP sent me to cover an Ebola outbreak in Uganda, President Bill Clinton’s visit to Tanzania for Burundi peace talks, and, of course, trips to my old stomping grounds in Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo.

  In August 2001, my college friend Shalini Ramanathan dropped me a note, asking if she could visit. She was living in Washington, D.C., and her work required her to make frequent trips to South Africa. I invited her along on a reporting trip to Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, where I planned to report on poaching by Arab royalty and write a second story about luxury travel in Africa. We spent a week driving around northern Tanzania in a 1976 Range Rover I’d bought from a National Geographic photographer. By the time I dropped her off at the airport in Nairobi, we were dating. Two weeks later, nineteen terrorists hijacked four airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and into the ground in Pennsylvania.

  THE WAR ON TERROR

  All foreign correspondents in the world saw their careers take a dramatic turn on September 11. Within a week, I was in Lebanon, visiting Palestinian refugee camps and interviewing members of Hezbollah to see what they knew about al-Qaeda. A month later, I was in Bahrain, reporting on the buildup at the U.S. Navy base there, and a few weeks after that, the bombing began in Afghanistan. I spent a month on the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier before AP sent me to Tajikistan, for insertion into Afghanistan.

  The day after I arrived in Kabul, bureau chief Kathy Gannon sent me to Jalalabad, and after I survived an ambush on the road there, she ordered me to stay. Osama bin Laden was hiding in a cave complex called Tora Bora just to the south, so I moved to the front lines with the mujahideen until bin Laden fled to Pakistan and the mountain redoubt fell on December 17, 2001.

  I went back to covering Africa and developed a terrorism beat. Bin Laden’s first attacks on the United States were the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. The men responsible had fled to Somalia, where fighting between clan-based warlords kept the country from establishing a functioning government. Fearing that the anarchy in Somalia might attract a greater al-Qaeda presence, the Pentagon set up a command post on a former French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti. I wrote about Islamic extremists trying to undermine the moderate leaders in local mosques across East Africa and recruiting young men to fight in Afghanistan.

  In the summer of 2002, I got a call from AP headquarters, asking me to make a trip through Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates to write about the military buildup for a war against Iraq. With the war in Afghanistan still raging, I couldn’t believe the Pentagon would open up another front, yet by November, U.S. Central Command had relocated to Doha, Qatar. Gen. Tommy Franks’s top public affairs adviser, a civilian on loan from the White House, showed me around a brand-new command center the Defense Department was building. By the adviser’s tone and confidence, I knew then the United States was going to invade Iraq, and I settled into life in the Middle East.

  The AP moved me to Kuwait in January, where I embedded with Company A, Third Battalion, Seventh Infantry Regiment. The embed put me at the biggest battles, including the capture of Baghdad and fighting in Fallujah. I accompanied the unit from Kuwait to their homes at Fort Stewart, Georgia, writing about every detail along the way.

  Shalini and I continued to see each other when we could, between my long reporting trips and endless travel. She moved to Kenya in 2004, and we were married in a three-day Hindu ceremony in Bangalore, India, that year.

  The situation in Somalia began to deteriorate in 2005, and by 2006 al-Qaeda-backed extremists were fighting Somali moderates backed by Ethiopia and the United States. The fighting continued in the spring of 2007, and after six years covering death, I was growing weary. In addition to war, I’d also covered earthquakes, volcanoes, and a tsunami. I could feel my nerves fraying, and my read
iness to throw myself into horror evaporated. When I learned that a reporter who worked for me, Anthony Mitchell, had been killed in a plane crash while returning from covering a story I’d assigned him, I felt I couldn’t take any more. He was the twelfth friend I’d lost to the job, and I’d hit my limit for sorrow.

  Shalini worked in renewable energy and applied for a job with a company in Austin. They offered her a deal we couldn’t refuse in a city we both adored. We moved to Texas in July 2007. I worked part-time for the AP on special assignments and decided to spend my free time writing a book I’d been thinking about since I was eight years old: a story of two families from a Texas slave plantation, one white and one black, with the same name.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  I would score touchdowns and people would then yell out, “Nigger! Nigger!”

  —LaDainian Tomlinson

  The Waco school district in the late 1980s had an unusual program where all of the city’s sixth graders attended the same school before moving on to junior high. LaDainian said the Carver Center had the toughest kids in the city; there were fights almost every day, and thirteen-year-olds were dealing drugs. He managed to stay out of trouble, and for the seventh grade he went to University Junior High, where he had his first encounter with racism between blacks and Hispanics. But playing sports meant spending a lot of time with Mexican-Americans:

  You get to see people for who they are, and in times where they’re tired, they’re hurt. They may be going through something and you get to see them for who they are, rather than their skin color, especially when you’re all trying to win a game, and after that game, when you all celebrate winning. It’s a happy time that you all worked together for one goal, to accomplish one thing. To fight and try to break that apart, I always felt like it was silly, because there was no purpose in the fight.1

  LaDainian also met an African-American history teacher named Mrs. Miles, who taught him the importance of learning and the opportunities that college offered. She helped him see that going to school was more than just an avenue to play sports.2

  It was just as LaDainian was hitting his stride in junior high sports and LaVar was happy at his school in 1991 that Loreane learned that her mother’s doctors planned to amputate her leg. Loreane’s brothers and sisters in Marlin had cared for their declining mother, but the amputation meant she would need more help than ever, so Loreane packed up the family and went home.3

  Loreane also hoped that living in Marlin would encourage O.T. to see more of her boys, but he rarely kept his promises anymore. Loreane explained O.T.’s problems to LaDainian, and he finally had to accept that his father was human and flawed. LaDainian started his freshman year at Marlin High School and made the varsity football, basketball, and baseball teams. But he didn’t get along with the coaches or the kids anymore. He wanted to return to Waco, which he had come to consider his true home. After Loreane’s mother learned to walk on her prosthesis, the family moved back to Waco.4

  LaDainian made the varsity team at University High and became the class leader along with a white childhood friend, Wayne Rogers. LaDainian was a starting player, either as fullback or outside linebacker, but he really wanted to start as running back. Loreane counseled her son to listen to his coach, learn new skills, and work hard toward his goals. The Waco Tribune Herald frequently praised LaDainian’s performance at Friday-night games.5

  Texas high school football is notoriously competitive, and during a game in Lampasas, seventy miles southwest of Waco, people in the stands started heckling LaDainian:

  I would score touchdowns and people would then yell out, “Nigger! Nigger!” And so that’s when it kind of started to really sink in.

  I felt bad for the one or two black guys that was on their team more than anything, because I knew I was going back to a place where people accepted me for who I was.

  I looked at it as them trying to make me angry. The little things that I remembered growing up about my father telling me about working in the cotton fields, my slave ancestors, my grandfather working in cotton fields. I knew that I wasn’t a part of that.

  We were moving forward now and I didn’t have to do those things. Yeah, my ancestors did, but I didn’t have to, and there was no way we were going back.6

  For the next sixteen years, through college and a professional career, football fans would continue to call LaDainian a nigger from the stands, and he said he never let it make him angry.7

  Just as LaDainian found his stride at University High, his stepfather, Herman, got a job in Dallas. At first, Loreane intended to take LaDainian and LaVar to their new home, but LaDainian was panicking. He knew he needed to get into a great football college to make the pros, and after moving from Marlin High to University High, he knew a new coach wouldn’t know him, recognize his talent, or make him a starter. The college recruiters also wouldn’t know where to find him, since they’d been watching him play at University High for two years. He convinced Loreane to let him stay with friends in Waco for his senior year.8

  Always LaDainian’s biggest fan, Loreane made the two-hour drive from Garland, a Dallas suburb, to watch her son play, and he excelled. Smaller than most players, only five ten, LaDainian was fast, nimble, and capable of taking a hit and getting back up.9

  Fans recognized LaDainian wherever he went in Waco, and he told me the attention and living away from his mother made his senior year difficult. He had to deal with the same temptations as any other teenager, and one evening an older cousin visited LaDainian and brought with him some alcohol. LaDainian said he didn’t get drunk that night, but his mother found out and was furious. She’d seen alcohol ruin the lives of too many young black men. LaDainian said he also knew the dangers:

  Even in my neighborhood there were certain drug dealers that would always try to get us younger kids to sell some drugs for them, and I always resisted drugs and partying and drinking and all those things. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I did go to a party here and there, but it wasn’t something that I hung at all the time on weekends.

  Honestly, I had seen it from older cousins that had played in high school but didn’t do the right thing, didn’t continue on playing. I didn’t want to be like that. I remember my dad telling me about my older brother, Terry Tomlinson, that he had potential to be a great running back but couldn’t deal with the fame and being talked about. He kind of succumbed to alcohol and all those things.10

  LaDainian wrote his mother to apologize:

  Hello Mom, how are you doing, I guess you’re wondering why I am writing you a letter when I can talk to you on the phone or face to face. The reason is I want this letter kept until I fulfill my goals, and when I am feeling low I want to look at this letter and remember what I said on this letter. Mom I love you so much that every time I say it or write it, it brings tears to my eyes. One day you will be the proudest Mom in the whole world, because I am going to college and graduate and, if God is willing, go on to play pro football. And be the best person I can because that’s how you raised me. Mom, I thank you so much for everything you have and is [sic] still doing for me, because it is hard not having a father who I could talk to and get advice from. You did the very best.

  (Sorry so sloppy. Kept crying.)11

  LaDainian was Waco’s star football player, college recruiters were calling him, and he was living with another family while his mother was two hours away in Garland. He had to grow up fast and learned from his temporary family:

  They had a great family structure. His dad was there, his mom, the whole family. I think more than anything it allowed me to see what I wanted in life, the structure of the family that I wanted because I never had that.

  I feel like God always does things and puts you in certain positions to help you down the road, to help you become the person that he wants you to become. So seeing that family structure allowed me to say, “This is what I want one day.”12

  His senior year, LaDainian set the University High record for yards gained
—2,254—and the team made it to the state championship, no small feat in the nation’s second-largest state, where football is a religion. The University High Trojans eventually lost to the Calallen High team from Corpus Christi, but LaDainian was the star. Coaches in his district named him the year’s most valuable player.13

  COLLEGE BALL

  LaDainian knew he needed to play for a university with a high profile, a good record, and a shortage of running backs if he were to reach the National Football League. Unfortunately, many coaches thought LaDainian was too small for college ball, let alone the pros. He also suffered from a lack of statistics, since he had played running back only in his senior year. Only three schools offered him scholarships: Baylor University, in Waco; the University of North Texas, in Denton; and Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth. On National Signing Day in 1996, La Dainian sat before dozens of journalists in Waco to announce he’d chosen TCU. He was one of only two players at University High to get full scholarships.

  TCU’s team, the Horned Frogs, held several advantages for LaDainian. He wanted to play on natural turf, which he felt was easier on his body, and his mom and brother could easily make the forty-five-minute drive to attend home games. During that first year, LaDainian began to suffer migraines, made worse by direct sunlight or bright stadium lights. His doctor recommended wearing a shaded visor on his helmet, and this became LaDainian’s trademark. LaDainian also continued a habit he’d started in high school, remaining silent on game day to prepare mentally for the field.14

  LaDainian started TCU when African-Americans topped 9 percent of the students at Texas universities, but those who got into college sometimes found a hostile environment. White fraternities at many schools continued holding racially charged events celebrating antebellum southern culture and portraying negative images of blacks, often attracting protests. The University of Texas at Austin employed only 52 African-Americans on its faculty of 2,300 in 1993, and officials complained they couldn’t find enough blacks with Ph.Ds.15