I lost my love in Baghdad

This first book by a Newsweek correspondent in Baghdad is really two books. One is a young war reporter’s memoir of the most horrific period of violence in Iraq, from 2005 to 2007, and of his discovery that he could live up to the extreme demands of his chosen profession. The other is an account of his up-and-down relationship with a lovely and idealistic young woman who followed him to Baghdad and whose life, along with the lives of three bodyguards, ended in a fusillade of bullets and grenades when her convoy was ambushed by Sunni extremists on Jan. 17, 2007. One senses that the war story, conveying an experience that consumed Michael Hastings during a crucial period in his mid-20s, is the book he really wanted to write. It is better written, more vividly rendered, more intensely felt. The love story is told with greater insistence and less conviction, without memorable passages or surprising recognitions. It accounts for the embarrassing title and the whiff of exploitation that hangs over “I Lost My Love in Baghdad.”

Hastings arrived in Iraq as the country was descending into the vortex of civil war and most of the foreign press was streaming toward the exits. His descriptions of the bizarre and grim contingencies that passed for normal journalism will be familiar to anyone who worked in Baghdad over the past few years: the need to keep one’s head below window level on the airport road, the Filipino laborers shuttling across the Green Zone in buses driven by divorced men from Alabama, the clueless stares of the soldiers from the republic of Georgia manning the checkpoints, the black humor of the American troops, the even blacker irony of the Iraqi interpreters. The violence across Iraq is unspeakable, and so is the persistence of a crass routine inside the Green Zone.

Hastings learned his trade and kept his eyes open amid the grotesque history being made around him. Here’s his first sighting of Saddam Hussein in a high-security courtroom: “There he was, in a dark suit and tie with a red handkerchief in the pocket, a thick gray beard. The tyrant, the man America had fought two wars against, the man who was once the most feared dictator in the Middle East, a man who’d ordered the executions of thousands. He took a seat 15 feet away from me. He had the look of a depressed businessman, a former C.E.O. in a corporate fraud case.”

Why is Hastings unable to summon anything like this facility when describing Andi Parhamovich, the young woman whose death prompted him to write this book? “I looked at her face, at her blond hair falling below her chin, her turned-up nose and blue eyes, and near freckles,” he writes of their first meeting, at a party for Jerry Springer that she attended as a publicist with Air America Radio and he as a pseudonymous correspondent for a gossip Web site. “I thought, Here is a girl who would make a great girlfriend. That’s how she looked to me, instantly.” And although we are allowed to read their e-mail and text messages and Skype exchanges, and to eavesdrop on their quarrels, and to learn their pet names when they make up, and to follow them from their tacky Midtown beginning through a wartime romance across three continents, Andi never sufficiently emerges from the fog of cliché to have a fighting chance against the fog of war.

Source: NewYork Times

---