Transcripts For CSPAN2 Writing About War 20160716 : vimarsan

CSPAN2 Writing About War July 16, 2016

Diseases as typhus and polio. Next is Christina Lamb with the sunday times. Like janine, christinas introduction to conflict reporting also came in the late 1980s, but in pakistan and afghanistan. Came in the 1980s but in pakistan and afghanistan. Her journalism has taken her far and wide including brazil, south africa, zimbabwe and iraq but since the 9 11 attacks she spent quite a bit of time in afghanistan. She cowrote i am melilla and her new book farewell kabul from afghanistan to a more dangerous world highlights the errors and miscalculations made by the United States and its allies in the war in afghanistan. And argues the world has been left more, not less dangerous since 9 11. Our third author is kim barker, whose book whiskey tango foxtrot the taliban shuffle mti strange days in afghanistan and pakistan served as basis for the recent movie whiskey tango foxtrot the taliban shuffle mti strange days in afghanistan and pakistan starring tina fey. Kims first reporting job was in washington state. After joining the Chicago Tribune in 2001 she went abroad and spent 5 years from 2004 to 2009 as south asia bureau chief based in new delhi and islam a bad. She works for the New York Times, the times review of her book called at both hilarious and harrowing, two contrasting adjectives that sum up the frequently mixed experience of war reporting. Mary jordan is a self a pulitzer prizewinning journalist with the Washington Post, mary was based abroad for 14 years in tokyo, mexico city and london and currently covering the president ial campaign. You need that for an experience. War reporting is easier. She told me as we were walking and she just interviewed donald trump today so you might ask her about that. We are getting off track, arent we . Marys most recent book which she cowrote with her husband, Kevin Sullivan of the Washington Post, is titled hope a memoir of survival in cleveland, chronicling the kidnapping and torment of two of the women held captive in a home in cleveland by ariel castro. Please join me in welcoming our panel. [applause] i really feel, three different 5star restaurants. Impossible to do justice to the careers of these three women but we will have fun trying. One of the great newsmen of our times, it is a testament to working, a testament to all the work you have done. I am proud to be here on stage. I want to ask before we get into other things, how did this happen . Others want to run facebook. Why did you want to go i never wanted to be a journalist. I was an academic, in comparative literature, russian and french literature, completely different and wanted to be a professor and literary criticism and i saw a photograph of an israeli soldier burying a palestinian teenager alive in stand. The article was about a human rights lawyer, a jewish holocaust survivor who is one of the few israeli lawyers defending palestinians in military court. It was providence. I flew to israel, i met her, she took me under her wing. I feel like i went to a door i could never go back again and basically couldnt finish my phd. If you have the ability to give a voice to people who do not have a voice and you have an obligation and i was haunted by injustice and i could as a journalist have an impact by doing this and the war in bosnia came and that was a whole other that opened a whole other scenario for my colleagues and i. Did you grow up knowing what you would end of doing . 28 years in afghanistan. I always say never be more fun than i. I loved writing and having adventures but basically i became an invitation to a wedding and what happens, i started after i left the university i worked at the Financial Times in london. Basically going to a lunch with south asian politicians and last minute he couldnt go and he goes why dont you go . I went next to somebody who was Inspector General for the pakistan people and he asked if i would like to interview someone who was living in exile at the time. I said yes and the day i went there was the day she announced her engagement so the apartment was full of flowers and we got on very well. Particularly men. Went back to pakistan. I went to work as a trainee for British Regional tv company, doing flower shows and came home from work and absolutely beautiful gold striped invitation on my doormat and it was to benefit weddings in pakistan. So i went and it was an amazing introduction to pakistan like something out of the arabian nights. If you ever been to a south asian wedding they are very colorful and each evening after the ceremonial event there were discussions about how to take on pakistans military and colleagues were people who were tortured and imprisoned and the most dangerous thing i ever had to deal with was going home after missing the last train in london. I came back to london and said i would live in pakistan. Everybody i went to talk to said we are not interested in pakistan, nothing is going to change but we are interested in afghanistan because the russians are there so go cover that. Being 21 at the time i agreed. Last story i ever did for British Television with a man who sent his car it was Going Forward and it was going backwards. Not a great loss to british tv. You went on to many other places but tell us how your story is equally different from these two about how you got in . Ever since i took a journalism class when i was a sophomore in wyoming and i thought what a great con, the idea that i could get a class and pull my friend out of class and ask questions and write about it it seemed the greatest job in the world so i never thought about being a foreign correspondent. We didnt travel anywhere. I was not the richest person in the world and we never went to canada or mexico, we stayed local in montana and after 9 11 i was at the Chicago Tribune and other people were volunteering to go and the desks would empty out and this person would try it and i felt not that i wanted to be a war correspondent but wanted to see if i could cover the biggest story in the world. I didnt know i would end up falling in love with it and staying for so long but i did actually volunteer for going overseas when i heard they were going to send more women overseas because we hadnt tried a lot of women. At one point i went out with a female friend, we both wanted to cover everything and counted the number of men sent out and the number of women and it was 17 men and one woman so i wanted to prove a woman could do it. I was trying to figure out how to to sing with myself from other female reporters that might volunteer, working to send women overseas, i dont speak any foreign languages, i hadnt been to europe but i went in with the biggest argument i had which i introduced myself and said i am kim barker, metro reporter, i am single and childless and therefore expendable. I did say that. He laughed. I said i will go anywhere you want to send me. Get ready to go to pakistan. I called my parents and that im going to pakistan. They said no you are not, why would anybody send you to pakistan . They were wrong. When i got posted to tokyo i called my mother and it was a big deal in the 90s, my mom goes what did you do wrong at work . Let me read you something kim wrote in her book and you get a flavor for how she writes. Afghanistan felt more like homes than anywhere else in the region. I knew why. Afghanistan sounded familiar. It had jagged blue and purple mountains, big skies and bearded men in pickup truck stocks with guns and hate for the government. It was like montana. Just on different drugs. Lets go back for a second. It is, at one point talking in the book, the phone rings, the taliban always calls at the wrong time, how do you balance beheadings with standup comedy . This is on cspan and you asked me the hardest question i have ever gotten. I think any journalist just like when you are a police officer, and emergency room doctor, anybody who has to go through trauma or grows up in afghanistan and pakistan youd use dark comedy to deal with horrible things. Just because you are in a war zone and people are being killed doesnt mean you stop living your life and people stop having small moment and laughter is a healer and away to bring people together. I guess it is also because my dad brought me up watching mash. We didnt go to church every week. I was like i hate that show. The war only lasted a couple years and the show was lasting like 25. It is also like the first author i read that i really loved was Kurt Vonnegut and joseph heller, i absorbed that whole idea of dark comedy being a good way to talk about war and what happened over there. There needs to be a tradition of that until there was no more draft. Once the draft stopped, the whole idea that everybody doesnt know somebody who goes to war, you cant make jokes, you cant talk about how people really live over there. The idea of war and everybody is fighting all the time is just not factual. Through humor, you could picture you there and you were giving us so information which is why the reviews congratulations. The movie they just made, what is tina fanlike . She is serious. I think i am funnier. I am kidding. Kidding. Tina is incredibly generous. I didnt spend time with her before they filmed the movie because there are two kinds of actors, the ones who spend a lot of time with somebody and inhabit them and the ones who take a character and make it their own like you dont want to spend any time with that person. We had a long lunch at i remember complaining about high heels really. We complained a lot about high heels and she told me a story that was really funny and i was proud of myself but couldnt remember what the story was. I told something that made tina fey laugh but dont remember what it was. She was really kind to me and during the whole process every time she was on the latenight show she would mention my name and my book, the original title, by name so i think my publisher was thinking the movie tiein that has her on the cover would end up eclipsing the taliban shuffle because of the movie but because she mentioned it so much the talent and shuffle started selling out all the time on amazon. I cant say enough nice things, she has been generous, very much a supporter of women and i benefited from that. It used to be there were not that many war correspondents that were female but the Washington Post has quite a few and other people do too. The pulitzer for the New York Times covering afghan women, it is very different. Lets talk about how being a woman in a war zone affects reporting. 25 years ago there were very few women and the women that were in the field were not very friendly to other women. Because it was so competitive, so male, so driven, there was no sense of competition, i think now it has radically changed but i have been asked this question over and over again, do men and women reporting different ways . It is very individual. I am a human rights reporter, i go into the field, spend a long time with people on a certain story, i am a terrible scoop reporter or sensationalized reporter. I am not good at going and finding the mother of the last bridge in sierra leone. I need to spend a long time and we were talking earlier about the war in bosnia, it was the watershed moment the changed reporting in our generation. It with our generations vietnam and it was the time when a small group of us were committed to affecting policy and we felt we would not let this genocide happen on our watch. We stuck it out. We lived in sarajevo during the siege, we were sniped, shelled, starved, we didnt have food or water, but we did something i am very proud of and everyone that was in that war feels it changed their lives forever and their style of reporting and we were very committed. I want to drive syria home, a slowmotion genocide similar to sarajevo, the we were calling out must be stopped. Now i live in paris and coming to america for the past two weeks i am really amazed how little attention it is getting, people are being slaughtered, in aleppo, the hospital where i worked the only pediatrician was killed, the first responders, the bravest people in the world, we are not the bravest people in the world, they are. They did people out of the rubble, 5 of them were killed. The gynecologist who delivers the babies was killed in aleppo. Europe traditionally there is more interest, this was an Election Year for america and i do understand that but also syria seems so remote but so did bosnia and there was a genocide of 8000 men and boys and we said it would never happen again and it is happening now. Jenins book, she spends a lot of time with different people, you cant indelible images of horrible things that happened but back to the question if you pick it up, do women bring something to correspondence especially in a war zone you wouldnt get otherwise . There has been lots of talk about women at the peacemaking table . Are they different or do they bring something, the reason we need diversity in war correspondents . Women and men right differently on war, i think male recruiters focus more on the actual fighting, i covered war for 28 years so i can tell the difference between incoming and outgoing but i cant tell you what kind of weapons are being fired or where. It is on other people behind the lines. When you see war on tv, or places on tv, it looks like everything is frightening. When you actually go to the country there are millions of people still living their lives trying to educate their children, feed them and protect them and those tend to be the women. I spent most of my career in the middle east. It is impossible for male reporters to go into womens quarters so i am getting access in a way a lot of my male colleagues are not. My husband Kevin Sullivan spent a lot of time in war countries and even the coffee shop only the women are on one side and men on the other and felt cut off. It is in upside to have women reporters there. What are the downsides . Are there downsides . You get this question all the time. I never reported as a man. It is difficult. I feel somehow you could. Difficult for me to say what is different. It is like there are downsides, with the personal life you are living over there you have to be careful with what you are doing and there have been books written, noreen wanted me to talk about sex, right . You really couldnt live like that as a woman. You had to be careful. The followup on cspan. Dont know what to do, the emergency nothing to do with anything else. Nothing happening, dont have to worry about it. What i was saying is you are protective of your reputation, you always have to be careful who you are going out with, you are working with afghans a lot of time, had to make sure they wanted to protect you so you had this obligation to refute the idea of being a western loose woman, that would come up a lot of times, came up in pakistan, india, afghanistan where you think you are being friendly to people that you get phone calls in the middle of the night and your editors might call, you call on ramadan at 4 00 in the morning and i love you and you are like thanks but i need some sleep and you couldnt turn your phone off. Irritations like that, being grabbed in public. I write a lot about the fact that i am tall, 5 foot 10 and i punched out a lot of guys because i got so irritated, that was dangerous. My fixer didnt like that because he would get in trouble for that, in india and pakistan i dont like it to the punch. They didnt like it. They just ran away. I was like all this stuff was like it is funny because the current Prime Minister buying me an iphone and the similar experiences, i had a guy on twitter who was like this is really unprofessional because all the hitting on you stuff was probably off the record. Dont think you are allowed to be off the record when hitting on somebody, i think that is on the record and also writing about that stuff shows i will pretend to be this very religious man in public but behind the scenes it is okay to behave this way with women. Everyone says the difference between men and women, i resent it when they say women cover orphanages and hospitals and men cover war. I have done a lot of frontline stuff. Not interested in guns but i have done a lot of military work. The moment the changes for me was when i had a child and the line completely, male colleagues, now you are entering the club where you will read bedtime stories by satellite phone. It is a risk saying this, carried the child, give birth and i will never forget when my son was 6 months old, not the most sensitive paper in the world to women, my editor deliberately sends me back to iraq where i had been living for two years covering saddam, the invasion and the war and i was still breastfeeding and didnt want to go and begged them to send me but they use a clause in the contract to send me and said we have a war reporter the wont go to war. Nowhere says i am a war reporter. I am a correspondent, senior foreign correspondent, not a war reporter, send me to paris or brussels. I went. My it was a macho little scene, the guy running the office wanted me to do something incredibly dangerous the first day i got there that would have amounted to two lines in a story sent in from washington and i said no and i heard him on the phone cackling to his friends going she lost her nerve now that she had a baby and it was so awful but i remember getting on the phone calling my husband and crying and he said that is a good thing. Isnt it a good thing you lost your nerve and are afraid . You are supposed to be afraid. You cant be in the middle, you have to feel like a human being. After you had your baby what changed . Did you stop doing certain things . I very much felt before that i worked in africa for years, i was very happy to embed militias in sierra leone or the ivory coast. I got afraid in a normal way. You have been serious several times. It is a conflicting thing because i realized, this sounds very selfish and some might think im irresponsible and i cannot argue with you about that. What i do is much more a calling and i believe in what i do and it is hugely important there are reporters that bear witness to atrocities and Human Rights Violations and without eyes and ears on the ground we dont get a window into what happened. Do you know what is happening in aleppo right now . Know you dont. I felt in some way i had to make this breach. I cant say it has been easy. It happens all the time to all of us, you balance work and life but it is one thing to balance work, life, family when you are an insurance person in pittsburgh but if youre trying to manage risks, going to the worlds most dangerous place all of you have been repeatedly. How do you balance . Is thi

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