A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  The threat was almost always invisible. It could be anything. It defined everything, dogged everyone, caused the adrenal glands to pulse and fritz. The threat was hissing camel spiders the size of tea saucers. It was overhead tracer flare in the night, the bad-news e-mail from home, the eerie stillness on a road. It was anything on either side of the wire that could erupt into disaster.

  Going outside the wire felt to me like being shot into space. One morning I followed a group of infantrymen as they stalked their way through fields of tangled grape arbors, holding guns and metal detectors, looking to investigate a suspicious wire spotted at a distance by an earlier patrol. I took photos and tried to keep up as the soldiers in their combat gear hopped over low mud walls dividing the fields, maintaining a twitchy silence as they crept closer to the worrisome spot. I felt scared, useless, enthralled. My nerves pulsed. A few Afghan boys watched us closely from a dry wadi as we moved delicately, not wanting to trip any bit of buried ordinance, wondering what the boys knew or didn’t know—were they innocent or not innocent?—until at last we came upon the source of the hubbub, the threat glimpsed earlier, now in focus: a sun-withered scrap of rope lying in a ditch.

  12

  The Red Zone

  It is an obvious fact that you can never look ahead with clarity at your own future or anybody else’s. You can’t know what will happen until it happens. Or maybe it dawns on you the split second before, when you get a glimpse of your own fate. I think back to the day when I showed up in Kandahar with my camera and dubious Combat and Survival press pass. There were three Canadian soldiers who couldn’t know then that a roadside bomb was waiting for them and they were soon to die. Back home were three sets of parents or spouses who weren’t prepared for the call. Mellissa Fung, the CBC television correspondent who looked so purposeful and confident, couldn’t know that sixteen months later, on a return trip to Afghanistan, she would get kidnapped outside of Kabul and spend twenty-eight days as a hostage, kept half-starved in an underground room in the mountains. Anthony Malone, the British security guy who got me the magazine letter, would be thrown into one of Afghanistan’s most notorious prisons, charged with fraud and failure to pay debts, and held for two years. Jason Howe, the freelancer I met at the Mustafa, would go on to hit the big time, selling photos to all the major newspapers—Le Figaro, the Times of London, the New York Times.

  I, too, was carrying around my own fate. All the things I couldn’t know sat somewhere inside, embroidered into me—maybe not quite fixed to the point of inevitability but waiting, in any event, for a chance to unspool.

  I left Afghanistan when my money ran out. Maybe I should have felt discouraged by my lack of success as a photographer; after about seven months, beyond one article and some photos in Afghan Scene, I hadn’t published a thing. But I didn’t. I felt hopeful, excited by the challenge of learning a profession. I went home to Calgary to refill my bank account, work on my photography, and make new plans. My plans no longer included Nigel. He and I had fallen out of touch completely.

  I got a job in the lounge of a new restaurant called Seven, a show-offy place that looked better suited to Miami, with white leather couches and white walls. The tips were lavish. The work wasn’t hard. Outfitted once again in four-inch heels and grasping a cocktail tray, I kept my Kabul experiences housed in one corner of my mind. I sublet a room in a condo owned by a girl my age who had an office job downtown, and I filled it with trinkets from the Middle East, hanging photos from Pakistan and India on the walls. For a few hours every week, in service to where I’d been and wanted to go, I took lessons with a local photographer, who was teaching me how to work in black and white and how to use Photoshop.

  *

  Around Christmastime, out of the blue, I was offered a television-journalism job in Baghdad. A real job. A job in Baghdad, with a four-thousand-dollar monthly salary and all my living expenses covered. It seemed unfathomable, but it was true. A guy I’d met months earlier at the Mustafa—an Iranian man named Ehsan who’d been in Kabul briefly, trying to find an NGO job—had sent me an e-mail saying that a television network in his home country was looking for an English-speaking correspondent. When I Googled it, a serious-looking news website came up. Press TV was freshly launched, an international twenty-four-hour English-language network financed by the Iranian government and designed to be similar—in appearance, anyway—to Al Jazeera and CNN International. Just as Al Jazeera had done, Press TV was hiring Westerners to work on camera. There were correspondents already in place in New York, London, Beirut, and Moscow.

  I e-mailed back and forth with a female producer for a few weeks and spoke with her several times by phone. I cobbled together an audition tape. At work, I delivered drinks, letting myself imagine what it would be like to fly off to Baghdad. I wasn’t sure what to think about who was hiring me. I knew that Iran had an Islamist government and a poor track record on human rights. But I’d also hung out with Ehsan, who was young and intellectual and hopeful about change in his country. He lived with his fiancée in Tehran and told stories about the place that made it sound full of sophisticated, cosmopolitan people who wrote poetry, went to underground nightclubs, and thought broadly about the world. At one point I asked the producer if there was a certain viewpoint represented by the network, whether I should be concerned about censorship. Her reply was no, Press TV was not biased, all stories were done fairly. In the moment, that was enough for me. The idea of having a salary, of being a TV reporter, and living in a place like Iraq was exciting enough to eclipse any doubts.

  My mother helped pack my bags and drove me to the airport. She’d long since given up on voicing her worries to me.

  *

  I landed in Baghdad at the end of January 2008. Press TV had rented me a room at the massive Palestine Hotel, along with an adjacent office suite. The hotel would have been grand back in the 1980s, but now it was outdated and worn. The office suite had a few old couches in the corner, a fridge, a table, and some desks with video monitors and tape players for editing—equipment that was old and huge but nonetheless did the job. I met Enas, an Iraqi woman with wide-set brown eyes, a plump body, and red-tinted hair that fell to her shoulders, who would act as my field producer. By phone, I was introduced to Mr. Nadjafi, the news director in Tehran who would be my immediate boss.

  Baghdad was not dramatically beautiful the way Kabul, with its lunar brown mountains, had been. It had the same taxis and creeping traffic of other big cities I’d visited, the same oozing smog. It had the same golden light and splaying palm trees I’d seen in Damascus and Beirut and Amman. But with military checkpoints, concrete pylons, and twelve-foot blast walls everywhere, with its characterless square buildings and flat, sand-dusted horizon, whatever inner grace the city held, whatever mythic past it had as a land of milk and honey, was not easily glimpsed. Baghdad seemed harsher, more battle-worn than anyplace I’d been. My room at the Palestine looked out at a traffic circle and a ghostly white bubble-topped mosque. This was Paradise Square, where almost five years earlier an American tank had famously toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein. A block away, the Tigris River slipped past, sluggish and muddy and boatless.

  There were not many Westerners staying at the Palestine. There were not many people at all staying at the Palestine. An American-funded television station called Alhurra, which broadcast information about U.S. policies in Arabic, was based out of the hotel, staffed mostly by Iraqis who came and went during work hours. Otherwise, the place seemed largely empty—in part because at eighteen stories, it was one of the tallest buildings in the city, which made it an easy target for insurgents. On my first night in Baghdad, I lay awake listening to the rat-a-tat of gunfire and the blare of sirens outside the window, feeling afraid, understanding that I was officially in over my head.

  I had a lot to learn. Somewhere during the rushed move from Calgary to Baghdad, I’d downloaded a manual on broadcast journalism onto my laptop, a “TV Reporting for Dummies” type of primer, which I’d gone thro
ugh start to finish several times. In Damascus, where I spent over a week waiting for my visa to be processed at the Iraqi embassy, I began working my way through Robert Fisk’s somber eleven-hundred-page The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, realizing how little I knew. In the evenings, alone in my room, I worked to drop my register from young-lady soprano to a newscaster’s calm, stern alto.

  Enas, the Press TV field producer and translator, became my friend. She was about thirty-five and had a bright smile. She carried a purse full of plastic-wrapped candies and could strike up easy banter with just about anyone. When we were not working, she and I went shopping for head scarves and visited the juice bars in Karada Market. Later in the winter, we went for walks along Abu Nawas, the beat-up corniche that runs east along the Tigris, which recently was reopened after being closed off to civilians for several years. According to Enas, Abu Nawas once teemed with bohemian art galleries, strolling couples, and fish restaurants that served cold beer. Now many of the restaurants were closed, their walls pocked with bullet holes. The riverbank park was overgrown with weeds, but in the evenings Iraqi children showed up to climb over freshly erected playground sets donated by European aid agencies.

  Enas was Muslim, but she wore a head scarf only when she felt like it, and she didn’t pray five times a day. None of the Iraqis I got to know—people on the Alhurra staff, the freelance cameramen I worked with—prayed like that. They were Muslim the way many of my friends at home were Christian: They observed the major holidays, went to a mosque on Fridays, and had worked out their own private arrangements with God. They found strength in the Koran but were not governed by ideas that struck them as ancient or overly restrictive. They were as afraid of radical Islam as the rest of us were. Most seemed to agree that the war was muddled both by religious fighting—the Sunnis, the Shias, the quarreling subgroups within each—and by foreign interest in Iraq’s oil.

  If working for the Iranians made Enas uncomfortable, she didn’t show it. She hummed as she made us strong black tea and ran through the day’s schedule with a legal pad on her lap. Iraq had invaded Iran in 1980, when Enas was a child, and the countries then spent eight years at war. Half a million people had died. Neither country had prevailed, but the resentment was still active. Iraqis regarded Iran with generalized suspicion. A few people I tried to interview politely turned away once they learned I was with Iranian television. “I am sorry,” one man said to me in a marketplace, declining my request. “I do not want to get you in trouble with your bosses. It is just that Iran has caused so many problems here.”

  I was a part of the propaganda machine. I realized this right away. As Enas and I drove around with a cameraman, reporting stories on street children, wounded civilians, and cease-fires that didn’t cease anything, Mr. Nadjafi collected my footage and edited it in ways that cast American troops and American policy in the worst possible light. He rewrote my scripts so that any mention of the war would be described as “the American-led invasion” or “the American-led occupation.” The Koran was “the Holy Koran.” Our assignments often took us into Sadr City, a dilapidated and violent Shiite district where the Mahdi Army frequently did battle with U.S. troops. Mr. Nadjafi rejected my requests for more money so that Enas and I could hire a security guard. I began increasingly to feel unsafe and taken advantage of.

  In the evenings, from my room, I called my mother on Skype, clinging to the sound of her voice any time I was feeling uncertain. Worried about the lack of a security budget, she urged me to find a new job. Hoping to improve my skills, I scoured the Internet, studying the work of some of the big-time correspondents and photographers based in Baghdad, trying to figure out what they covered and how they covered it. I sent inquiries to Canadian newspaper editors and managed to talk an editor at my hometown paper, the Red Deer Advocate, into letting me write and shoot photos for a weekly column. I would get thirty-five Canadian dollars for each story and twenty-five for each photo that ran.

  Driven by loneliness, I moved myself and the little Press TV bureau to the Hamra Hotel, in a residential neighborhood a couple of miles from the Palestine and more populated by Westerners—a mix of journalists and foreign contractors, some of whom were rotating through Baghdad, many of whom appeared to be there indefinitely. The Hamra was built around a courtyard with balconies that looked over a central glimmering pool surrounded by white plastic loungers. There was a small bar that sold Heineken and Lebanese wine and a restaurant serving Iraqi food. High blast walls had been built around the entire compound, which included a couple of houses, one of which served as the Washington Post bureau. The Los Angeles Times had staff living at the Hamra, as did NBC News, USA Today, and a few others.

  At night, people drifted out of their rooms and down to the pool area, bringing with them bottles of Bombay gin bought at the military PX. Hotel staff set up tables and brought glasses and ice for the alcohol. They delivered beer, wine, and food orders from the restaurant. On one of my first evenings at the Hamra, I got a little dressed up and headed down to the pool, ordering a beer from a waiter and trying to look like I belonged. All around, I could hear journalists chatting about their workdays, describing their meetings or griping about delays. I felt a wave of excitement. Finally, I’d found people I could talk to, who could teach me something.

  I walked up to a few guys standing by a table. “Hi!” I said. “I’m Amanda!”

  We smiled and shook hands all around, like colleagues, comrades. All three looked to be in their early thirties. For just a second, I felt buoyant. And then one of them asked who I worked for.

  “Press TV.”

  “Who?”

  I found myself explaining about the Iranians, making sure to mention that I was planning to quit as soon as I could line up different work.

  The silence that followed was long and disdainful. The lights reflecting off the pool threw a wavering green over all of us.

  “What about you guys?” I said, trying to shift the focus. “Who are you here with?”

  They named their media organizations—all American, all serious. Legit, legit, and legit. We talked another minute before each one managed to excuse himself, drifting off into the shadows, and I was alone again.

  During those first weeks at the Hamra, it seemed that I had no good answer for anything anyone asked me. It took nothing to size me up.

  Where was I from? A little town in Alberta, Canada. Where had I gone to grad school? Um, I hadn’t actually gone to university, let alone grad school. Who did I work for before I came here? Well, nobody.

  Theirs was a language I couldn’t speak; their world was entirely foreign. I had never been to Washington, D.C. I didn’t know New York. Even as I paid attention to the mainstream news via the Internet, I knew little about the American media scene. I’d come to Baghdad by way of all the other places I’d been—Beirut, Aleppo, Khartoum, Kabul—but I hadn’t been to Yale or Columbia. I worked long hours and took every opportunity to ask questions of the established journalists, but almost always I felt awkward and out of place.

  Not everybody was standoffish. One evening I struck up a conversation with the NBC reporter Richard Engel. He was handsome and fit and shorter than I was, with a big-wattage smile and hair that had been cut high over his ears like a marine’s. When we got to the inevitable moment when I confessed that Press TV was funding my stay in Iraq, he was sympathetic, telling me he understood the scramble to get by. He’d first come to Iraq in 2003, crossing the border as an uncredentialed freelance journalist with a handheld video camera. Now, five years later, he was the big-shot reporter at NBC News. Several weeks after we met, he’d be promoted into the role of chief foreign correspondent for the network.

  “Everyone’s got to start somewhere,” he told me. “Use it as a stepping stone. But you’re going to want to move on quickly.”

  *

  After another month or so, I managed to quit the Press TV job, supporting myself with freelance assignments from France 24, an English-lan
guage television station out of Paris. I reported a culture story on Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra. I sold a story on Iraqi refugees returning to the country and one on the plight of the Palestinians living in Baghdad. As when I reported for Press TV, I was often humbled by the Iraqis I encountered—an overburdened doctor at a local hospital, a teacher in Sadr City sweeping up glass after an explosion blew out her classroom windows, two orphaned brothers selling Kleenex on the street. It was impossible not to feel perplexed and saddened by the war. Bearing witness to it, even in my own small way, felt like a privilege.

  I was making just enough money to get by. For every minute of my work that aired on the network, France 24 wired fifteen hundred euros into my bank account, though most of that went toward the expenses of hiring a driver, translator, cameraman, and editor, on top of the three thousand dollars I was paying monthly to live at the Hamra. I continued to write my column for the newspaper back at home. And I’d made a real friend, a shy freelancer named Daniel, who was American and, like me, had been shut out of the mainstream media crowd. He and I sometimes stood on my balcony at the Hamra and watched the swirl of journalists—the Fancy-pants, we’d taken to calling them—laughing, boozing, swimming, and dancing below.

  I had another friend, a gentle-voiced American named Julie who was about my age and working for a big news service. Julie was one of the Fancy-pants, but we had a sort of bond.

  One night she came by my room. I poured her a glass of wine. “You know,” she said, “that everybody’s mad at you, right?”

  “What?” I said. I’d just returned from a few weeks of vacation time in Portugal, traveling again with Kelly. I looked at Julie in disbelief. How could anybody be mad? What could I have done?