'Post' Reporter on Covering Iraq: Like 'Driving Into a Hurricane'

By: Barbara Bedway The night before Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner left for Iraq in May 2004, she asked her twin sister Jenny to try on her new protective gear: goggles, mask, helmet, and a flak jacket marked PRESS. Though she had no time for the survival training many of her colleagues had gone through, she did have this secret resource: a twin sister in whom she could confide the truth about her experiences as a first-time war correspondent.

Now, a newly published book she wrote with her sibling, Jenny, about her nine months in Iraq (one as bureau chief) details her terror and elation as she learns what it means to be a sahafiya, a journalist, in one of the most dangeorus places in the world for reporters.

Spinner knew that if she was going to write the book, "Tell Them I Didn't Cry," the way she wanted, "I needed to be honest, and I needed to talk about the struggles I had, the chaos I felt, and the anxiety I still have being home without the same sense of purpose I had in Iraq," she said in February, shortly after returning home from another three-month sojourn. "I think people sometimes look at foreign correspondents, particularly young journalists, and think: How did that person get in that situation? A lot of it is simply luck. I thought it was important to explain how, for the first time in my 10 and a half years at the Post, I kind of stumbled into something that I felt was really my calling."

At a recent reading in Manhattan, she told the audience that David Hoffman, a Post assistant managing editor, convinced her to write the book: "He basically said, 'Look, people are still writing about Vietnam -- now is not the time to censor yourself. You lived through it. You have something to say.'"

Spinner, 34, acknowledges in the book that she was frustrated and "dying a slow professional death" at the Post as she wrote about accounting policies and Iraq reconstruction contracts. She begged for the chance to follow her story back to Baghdad. After a brief trip in January 2003 to write about the reconstruction efforts, she returned in May to cover the court martial of the first soldier to stand trial in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Just weeks after her arrival, she survived a kidnapping attempt outside of Abu Ghraib prison that left her frightened and furious that she'd given herself away, in spite of her head scarf and abaya. She also wishes she had not disclosed to her editor that, in her panic that day, her newly-learned Arabic phrase for "I am a journalist" came out instead as "I am a vegetarian!" That, she says ruefully, "is something I am never going to live down in the newsroom."

Rattled by the near-abduction, she nevertheless argued to stay on, and became close friends with Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter kidnapped in Baghdad in January.

Family members, of course, worried about Jackie all the while. As Jenny Spinner points out, "When you send a family member off to war, your whole family goes off to war, and nobody is ever the same." Jenny's italicized entries in the book read like a kind of after-action report. In one surreal moment, she found herself tapping out increasingly desperate e-mails to the Post's Baghdad office manager, begging him to send a driver to her stranded sister, whose cell phone service was cut off but whose satellite phone enabled her to call home. "Send someone to get her now BEFORE SHE IS KILLED," Jenny wrote.

The author says she recalls "days on end when I was pretty convinced I wasn't going to live." Witnessing the horrific injuries and death toll during the massive assault on Fallujah was a turning point for her, Spinner writes in her book: "The part of my brain that processed fear just shut down. ... I sat there wondering if my new courage ... was a sign that I was becoming a better reporter, or a mentally unhinged human being."

Her sister, an assistant professor of English at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, sensed the change: "I didn't trust her to keep herself safe," she tells E&P. "She was going to do whatever she needed to get the story."

Jackie Spinner says she never censored herself, but was careful to make sure that "If I were talking to a wounded soldier, I would hand him my sat phone and say, 'Call your mother and tell her you're going to be in The Washington Post tomorrow, and it's going to say you're wounded. If you're not prepared to do that, then I'm not going to print your name.'"

She had rules for her own family as well, especially concerning kidnapping: "I had specific instructions not to plead for my case, not to intervene in any way -- to the U.S. government or the Iraqi government -- because I knew that would undermine every journalist who was in Iraq." But she feels differently about paying off kidnappers: "I told my sister, after my grandmother died, to use my inheritance to bring me home if she had to."

Spinner feels the strong bonds she formed with the Post staff -- including cooks, drivers, translators, and bodyguards -- were as essential to her survival as her own family's support, and the strength she drew from her fellow correspondents. "When you're away from your family and friends as long as I was, you have to find another family, and the Iraqi staff was my family. It was natural to me to include them in every aspect of my life," explains Spinner, who writes in her book about the Friday night dinners she cooked for them (with dinner prep occasionally suspended by mortar threats or power blackouts).

"There's not a day that goes by that I'm not in touch with one of the translators," she says, "just checking to make sure they've survived." The Iraqi staff had its own way of looking after her, with the cooks trying to fatten up this single, vegetarian American who mystifyingly excelled at throwing baseballs and kicking a soccer ball.

A frequent topic at the dinners was the often-vituperative e-mail from readers back home. "Either we were being too harsh, or not harsh enough," she sighs. "Here we were, taking tremendous risks, and the very people we're doing this for didn't believe what we were telling them." One reader wrote, "I wish that you had died today instead of that Marine." Her response: thank the person for writing, adding she was sending a copy to her mother.

Though Spinner is back at the Post full time, she and her editors are still discussing what she'll do next. "It's very difficult to come home, to find a story as compelling as Iraq," she notes. "Newspapers are trying to figure out what to do with people like me, looking at ways to make re-entry successful."

One problem, she adds, is that some returning journalists aren't honest about how they feel: "I don't think editors understand that a very simple thing such as being back at the exact same desk before I left for Iraq is hard, that it almost negates the experience I had. It's a silly, petty thing to talk about, but it's hugely important for the psyche of a war correspondent returning home."

Would she return to Iraq? "It would be hard to go, knowing the pain I caused [my family]," she says. "But I'm still a journalist. I drive into hurricanes, and the biggest hurricane of my generation is Iraq."