The Perils of the Frontlines of War

Do you want to know what it’s like to stare in horror, and fascination, at a human head so thoroughly perforated by bullets that it’s folded in on itself like a melon rotted in the field? Or to watch, helpless, as refugee babies die of dehydration, their mouths opening and closing like fish gasping in the air? Maybe you’re interested in the taste of sweat and dirt when you’re under fire and trying to get low on the ground, and lower, impossibly low, with your face crushed against the earth.

Probably you did not want to know any of these things. Not really. And neither did I. And I don’t much like to remember them now. But in more than a quarter century as a Newsweek correspondent, writing about a few wars that people remember and many that they’ve forgotten, I have learned, inevitably, a lot about the way death comes, and sometimes some of the reasons why.

A wise war correspondent tries to stay out of the action. Bullets and bombs don’t tell stories—people do. But at times you have to go looking for the action to get a clear picture of what’s really going on and, often enough, it catches up with you anyway.

After spending years with The Washington Post covering guerrilla wars in Central America and terror attacks in the Middle East, I joined Newsweek in 1986. My basic assignment was to look at how American foreign policy played out on the ground, which often meant going to a place that the United States was about to attack, and watching that happen.

In 1987, the United States sent its big guns to the Persian Gulf, using a variety of pretenses to deploy a fleet bolstering Saddam Hussein in his epic fight against Iran. To get a closer look at the fight on the water, a TV colleague from Britain and I chartered a work boat that could take us into the war zone. It’s hard to imagine a dumber, more dangerous move. We set our course through seas full of naval mines dropped almost at random by the Iranians. Day and night, we watched for the protruding prongs of the floating bombs. But all we saw were dead sheep thrown overboard by livestock haulers. Bloated and round, their little legs sticking up in the air, they looked very much like mines, but didn’t blow. We saw a lot of warships and burning oil platforms. And we were lucky enough to live to tell the tale.

The following year, an American guided missile cruiser shot an Iranian airliner out of the sky in the confusion of a skirmish on the water with Iranian gunboats. All 290 people on the plane died. At a makeshift morgue, Iranian guards handed me paper tissues to block some of the smell. Many of the bodies pulled from the sea were mutilated by the blast, but one very little girl, I remember, still wore a tidy blue dress, white socks, shiny black shoes, and tiny gold bangles on her wrist. On a slab nearby, a young mother continued to clutch her baby as she had done at the moment they died. I remember afterward hearing an Iranian Air Force general asked a leading question by a British reporter who wanted him to say the Americans meant to shoot down the plane. But the Iranian officer’s answer was more subtle than that. The Americans “did not care enough to be careful enough not to shoot it down,” he said.

At the end of that decade, the war I had lived with all my life—the Cold War—came to an end. I flew into Berlin in November 1989 as one of many Newsweek correspondents covering the fall of The Wall. I roamed, sleepless and exhilarated, through the city in those first uncertain hours after all the East German guards abandoned their fearsome barrier. Beneath an impossibly bright moon, men and women and children picked and chiseled away at the concrete as if digging for diamonds. The world had changed, for sure. A new era of peace seemed at hand. But of course that was not to be.