A War Correspondent’s Inner Struggle
One evening in December 2003, a colleague and I were sitting in our suite in the Hamra hotel in Baghdad. We were part of a small team of Newsweek reporters dispatched to cover the rising insurgency in U.S.-occupied Iraq.
We were always on the alert, wondering when the insurgents might come after the hotel, which was lightly protected and filled with a whole population of desirable targets: journalists, aid workers, security consultants. So there we were, trying to wind down after a long day, when we heard a gunshot. A pause, and then another. And another, and more. Soon we were surrounded by the cacophony of what seemed to be a major firefight. Were the insurgents finally storming the hotel, as we had feared? As we were putting on our flak jackets, our bureau chief called to inform us that bullets were hitting the walls of the hotel. He advised us to seek shelter in the most interior room we could get to—in our case, the bathroom.
Soon we learned the embarrassing reality: The hotel wasn’t under attack. (That would come a few years later, when it was badly damaged by a series of car bombs.) The Iraqi soccer team had just beaten the North Koreans in a World Cup qualifying match, and what we had just experienced was that distinctly Iraqi phenomenon known as “celebratory gunfire.” Still, we had good reason to be scared, I guess, since you can get killed just as dead by a bullet fired in joy as one fired in anger.
This episode recently came to mind as I was reading Rod Nordland’s Waiting for the Monsoon—since Rod was the bureau chief who warned us to retreat to an interior space. (I felt a warm glow of nostalgia as I came across the same advice in a story in the book.) I haven’t seen Rod for years, so I welcomed the chance to take up his acquaintance again—even if only through this daunting account of his encounter with glioblastoma, the same aggressive brain cancer that killed Beau Biden, John McCain, and a host of other well-known victims. This struggle strikes me as a grim denouement for a man who had perfected the art of survival during decades as one of the world’s leading foreign correspondents. Rod wasn’t just an exemplary reporter, a great writer, and a supportive teacher. He was also a logistical genius, a man who could sneak across a border and somehow set up a news-gathering operation under the most daunting conditions.
But you can’t out-organize cancer. You can only place your hope in your doctors and fight. Spoiler alert: Rod is still alive—five years after his first diagnosis. As he notes, that’s an incredible achievement when you’re talking about this particular illness.
The cancer memoir has become a cottage industry, and I confess to a certain aversion to the genre. I generally don’t find ranting about health that interesting—and the bar is even higher when someone is writing about it. Like any other literary category, the cancer memoir hinges on a certain set of conventions: the near brush with death, the triumphant recovery, the reconciliation with estranged loved ones, the emergence of a new appreciation for life, and (sometimes) a new spiritual sensibility.
He dodged snipers in Sarajevo, outfoxed the secret police in Zimbabwe, and reported on Islamist militias in Somalia. By the peak of his career, he had filed stories from 150 countries. New Yorker editor David Remnick has rightly called Rod “the foreign correspondent’s foreign correspondent.”
All of those elements are present in this book. Yet Rod (as I would expect) has managed to give the brand a new lease on life (pun fully intended). Part of it might be the crisp, lapidary prose style developed over long years of telling stories as economically as possible. Part of it might be that he just has such good stories to tell. (My favorite might be one he told us in Kabul, which was repeated in the book. He was nearly kidnapped in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war by a group of armed men as he left the bureau one day. His interpreter, realizing that the men didn’t belong to the faction that controlled the area they were in, gambled that they wouldn’t dare to shoot; he told Rod to run back to the bureau and lock himself in. When he realized that he’d been betrayed by a dodgy office manager, Rod arranged for the man to be shipped off to Paris as an ostensible reward for good behavior—then fired him and changed the bureau locks as soon as he was gone.)
For me, Rod’s book has an added resonance: This particular tale of triumph against daunting odds is set against the background of another dramatic story of decline—the slow death of the profession of foreign correspondent. I spent nearly 10 years in that role at Newsweek, until I was finally forced out of it by the magazine’s ignominious collapse. It was the best job I ever had—but almost as soon as I joined the magazine, in 2000, it was clear that no one at the headquarters in New York had any clue how to manage the transition to the internet. We could feel our bosses steadily and palpably losing interest in foreign coverage as the magazine’s crisis deepened.
One of Newsweek’s veterans told me how a welcoming committee greeted the Saigon bureau chief at the airport at the end of the 1960s; no expense was considered too great when it came to coverage of the Vietnam War. To me and my cohort, such accounts were the stuff of quaint and distant legend. When our Baghdad bureau chief showed up at the home office a few years into the Iraq War, his ostensible boss mistook him for someone else.
As he recounts here, Rod joined the profession in a healthier era. Starting with The Philadelphia Inquirer in the late 1970s (yes, even the Inquirer had a foreign correspondent), he managed to move over to Newsweek a few years later. Soon he became what is known—or used to be known—as the magazine’s “fireman,” a roving reporter who dropped into whichever part of the world the editors considered the most urgent. He dodged snipers in Sarajevo, outfoxed the secret police in Zimbabwe, and reported on Islamist militias in Somalia. By the peak of his career, he had filed stories from 150 countries. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, has rightly called Rod “the foreign correspondent’s foreign correspondent.”
Some will object, I am sure, that I am romanticizing a profession that was, for many years, overwhelmingly male and white. But I am happy to say that this was already changing by the time I joined the group (though perhaps not quite enough). The reporter pool steadily diversified over the years, and, as Rod explains, locally hired fixers and interpreters—often facing the same dangers and material challenges as they helped their charges from abroad—gradually, and justly, acquired bylines of their own.
A growing number of women, in particular, had to find their way in an environment permeated by machismo. But many eventually rose to the highest ranks—like the marvelous New York Times veteran Alissa Rubin, who figures in this story as one of Rod’s closest friends. He helped to organize an effort to save her life after she was badly injured in a helicopter accident in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2014. She then returned the favor after he was struck down by his cancer in India in 2019, ensuring that he quickly got the medical attention he needed.
In any case, the profession as Rod knew it has been transformed beyond recognition. The world is more interconnected now, and few news organizations have the inclination or the wherewithal to put correspondents into the field.
Rod’s account doesn’t leave the reader in a romantic haze about the good old days. This has much to do with Rod’s unsentimental storytelling, but even more with his uniquely traumatic youth. His father was a serial abuser who regularly beat his wife and children and ended his life in prison as a convicted pedophile. Rod doesn’t draw any direct connection between these horrifying origins and his subsequent urge to chronicle collective trauma in places far away from home—though he notes that he always had a particular sympathy for victims of domestic abuse, a concern that now traces a luminous line through his lifetime of stories.
Those of us who have known Rod Nordland often sensed this deeper undercurrent of darkness in him, and I now feel strangely relieved that I know why. I am glad that he seems to have found his peace.
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