Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

that this was the career I wanted. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I called my mom and told her, “I think I’ve found my bliss.”
    SHORTLY AFTER I get back from Sri Lanka in the middle of January 2005, I notice that, professionally, something has changed. TV reporters call me requesting interviews about the tsunami. Colleagues tell me what a good job I’ve done. I appreciate the compliments, and don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the praise makes me uncomfortable. I’m glad people are interested in the story, but when they ask me what it was like, I’m not sure what to say. I don’t know how to sum it up in a sound bite. I don’t know what to do with the sudden spotlight. It’s easier just to go back overseas, so I volunteer to go to Iraq.
    Elections for a new interim government are scheduled to take place at the end of January. They’ll be the first real elections Iraq’s had since Saddam.
    This is my second trip to Iraq for CNN, and I’m still not sure what I’ve really seen. “Everyone has a different war,” a soldier once said to me. “We all see our own little slice; no one ever sees it the same.” Roger that.
    Iraq is a Rorschach test. You can see what you want in the inkblots of blood. Number of attacks is down, lethality is up. Kidnappings fall, IEDs rise. More Iraqis are trained, more police desert. Fewer Americans die, more Iraqi cops get killed. One step forward, a bomb blast back. So many words written, so many pundits positioned. The closer you look, the harder it is to focus.
    On the morning flight from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad you see all kinds: the desperate, the downtrodden, the curious, the convinced, true believers, truth seekers, patriots, and parasites. In Iraq they hope to find money or meaning, or something in between. The plane is Jordanian, the pilots and flight attendants South African. In Iraq, they know there’s money to be made.
    War is hell, but hell, it’s also an opportunity.
    The flight proceeds normally, until the last few minutes. Rather than making a long slow descent to the runway, the plane banks sharply, turning in a corkscrew motion directly over the Baghdad airport.
    “The final part of our descent will be from overhead the airfield in a spiral fashion,” the pilot announces. “It may feel a little uncomfortable on the body but it’s a perfectly safe maneuver.”
    Of course, if it were perfectly safe they wouldn’t be doing the maneuver, but it’s the best protection they have against getting shot out of the sky by a rocket-propelled grenade.
    WELCOME TO FREE IRAQ . That’s what it says on the T-shirts they sell at Baghdad International Airport. Freedom’s great, but so is security, and right now most Iraqis would trade a lot of the first for even some of the second.
    In the Arrivals terminal, a Filipino clutching a machine gun shouts instructions to a gaggle of Halliburton employees who’ve just arrived. Printed on the back of the Filipino’s baseball cap is the name of the security company he works for: CUSTER BATTLES . It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
    Every reporter likes to believe that what they’re seeing and feeling is unique, that it hasn’t already been seen and felt a thousand times in other places, other conflicts. I try to keep the stories separate, not allow what I’ve seen in one country to change how I see things someplace else. It’s not always easy. I set up barriers in my head, my heart, but blood flows right through them. A corpse I see in Baghdad will remind me of a body back in Bosnia. Sometimes I can’t even remember where I was or why. I just remember the moment, the look, a sudden snap of a synapse, a blink of an eye, and I’m in another conflict, another year. Every war is different, every war the same.
    SARAJEVO. MARCH 1993. Bosnia wasn’t my first war, but at the time, it was the deadliest one I’d seen. It had taken me nearly a year after Burma, but Channel One had finally hired me as a