The inner struggle of a war correspondent

One evening in December 2003, a colleague and I were sitting in our suite at the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad. We were part of a small team of Newsweek Reporters were dispatched to cover the growing insurgency in US-occupied Iraq.

We were always on alert, wondering when the insurgents would attack the hotel, which was thinly guarded and housed a whole host of desirable targets: journalists, aid workers, security consultants. So there we were, relaxing after a long day, when we heard a gunshot. A break, and then another. And another, and more. Soon we were surrounded by the cacophony of what appeared to be a fierce firefight. Were the insurgents finally storming the hotel, as we had feared? As we were putting on our flak jackets, our office manager called to tell us that bullets were penetrating the hotel walls. He advised us to seek shelter in the innermost room we could reach—in our case, the bathroom.

We soon learned the embarrassing truth: the hotel was not under attack. (That would become clear 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 qualifier, and what we had just witnessed was that typically Iraqi phenomenon known as “celebration shots.” Still, we had good reason to be afraid, I suppose, because you can be killed by a bullet fired in joy just as much as by one fired in anger.

This episode came to mind recently when I was reading Rod Nordland’s Waiting for the monsoon– because Rod was the bureau chief who had warned us to retreat indoors. (I felt a warm sense of nostalgia when I came across the same advice in a story in the book.) I hadn’t seen Rod in years, so I was happy to see him again – if only through this chilling account of his experience with glioblastoma, the same aggressive brain tumor that killed Beau Biden, John McCain, and a host of other high-profile victims. This battle seems like a grim end for a man who had perfected the art of survival during decades as one of the world’s leading foreign correspondents. Rod was not only an exemplary reporter, a great writer, and a helpful teacher. He was also a logistical genius, a man who could sneak across a border and somehow mount a news-gathering operation under the most difficult conditions.

But you can’t outsmart cancer. You can only put your hope in the doctors and fight. Spoiler alert: Rod is still alive – five years after his initial diagnosis. As he notes, that’s an incredible achievement when you’re talking about this particular disease.

Cancer memoirs have become a small business, and I confess to a certain dislike for the genre. In general, I don’t find ranting about health that interesting—and the bar is raised even higher when someone writes about it. Like any other literary category, cancer memoirs depend on a number of conventions: the near-death, the triumphant recovery, the reconciliation with estranged loved ones, the emergence of a new appreciation for life, and (sometimes) a new spiritual sensibility.

All of those elements are present in this book. But Rod has (as I expected) managed to breathe new life into the brand (pun intended). Partly it may be because of the clear, succinct prose style he has developed over many years of telling stories as economically as possible. Partly it may be because he just has such good stories to tell. (Perhaps my favorite story is one he told us in Kabul, and which is repeated in the book. He was nearly kidnapped by a group of armed men in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War as he left the office one day. His interpreter, realizing that the men were not from the faction controlling the area they were in, gambled that they would not dare shoot; he told Rod to run back to the office and lock himself in. Realizing he had been betrayed by a shady office manager, Rod arranged to have the man sent to Paris as a supposed reward for good behavior—then fired him and changed the office locks as soon as he was gone.)

For me, Rod’s book has an additional meaning: This particular story of triumph against daunting odds is set against the backdrop of another dramatic story of decline – the slow death of the foreign correspondent profession. I spent nearly 10 years in that role at Newsweekuntil the magazine’s ignominious collapse finally forced me to leave. It was the best job I’ve ever had – but almost as soon as I joined the magazine in 2000, it was clear that no one at headquarters in New York had any idea how to manage the transition to the Internet. We could sense our bosses losing interest in foreign reporting more and more as the magazine’s crisis deepened.

One of NewsweekVeterans told me how in the late 1960s a reception committee greeted the Saigon bureau chief at the airport; when it came to covering the Vietnam War, no effort was too great. For me and my colleagues, such reports were the stuff of strange and distant legends. When our Baghdad bureau chief showed up at headquarters a few years after the Iraq War began, his supposed boss thought he was someone else.

As he tells us here, Rod began his career in a healthier time. Starting with The Philadelphia Inquirer in the late 1970s (yes, even the Inquiry had a foreign correspondent), he managed to move to Newsweek a few years later. He soon became what is known – or at least called – the magazine’s “fireman,” a reporter who showed up wherever the editors felt the most pressing questions were needed in the world. He dodged snipers in Sarajevo, outwitted secret police in Zimbabwe, and covered Islamist militias in Somalia. At the height of his career, he had submitted stories from 150 countries. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorkerhas rightly called Rod “the foreign correspondent’s foreign correspondent.”

Some will certainly object that I’m romanticizing a profession that was overwhelmingly male and white for many years, but I’m happy to say that by the time I joined the group, that was already changing (though perhaps not quite enough). The reporter pool became more diverse over the years, and, as Rod explains, locally hired fixers and interpreters – who often faced the same dangers and material challenges when helping their charges from abroad – gradually and rightly began to acquire names of their own.

A growing number of women in particular had to find their way in an environment permeated with machismo. But many eventually made it to the highest ranks – like the wonderful New York Times Veteran Alissa Rubin, who appears in this story as one of Rod’s closest friends. He helped organize a rescue operation for her life after she was seriously injured in a helicopter crash in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2014. She then returned the favor when he was diagnosed with cancer in India in 2019, making sure he quickly received the medical care he needed.

In any case, the profession as Rod knew it has changed beyond recognition. The world is more interconnected today, and few news organizations have the inclination or resources to send correspondents into the field.

Rod’s account leaves the reader with no romantic illusion of the good old days. This has a lot to do with Rod’s unsentimental narrative style, but even more to do with his uniquely traumatic youth. His father was a serial offender who regularly beat his wife and children and was imprisoned as a convicted paedophile. Rod makes no direct connection between these horrific beginnings and his later urge to record collective trauma in places far from home – although he does note that he has always had a special compassion for victims of domestic violence, a concern that now runs like a thread through his life.

Those of us who knew Rod Nordland often sensed this deeper undercurrent of darkness within him, and I am now strangely relieved to know why. I am glad he seems to have found peace.

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