It was probably good that I grew up so sheltered. I was not a brave child. I was convinced that death lurked behind every corner, perhaps the most unlikely future foreign correspondent ever born, the most improbable person to contend with suicide bombs and the real threat of nuclear war. I was scared of the dark, of my dreams, of nuclear weapons, of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who reminded me of Darth Vader. I was a neurotic, everything-o-phobic child, always convinced that any health problem was the dreaded cancer, always worried about stranger-danger.
The peppercorns in cotto salami, and particularly the bluish meat surrounding them, I deemed poisonous and excised with a sharp knife. Halloween candy—a deadly mix of sugar, poison, and razor blades, to be tested first on my brother or our dog. Mushrooms—off-limits, ever since the elephant king in the Babar cartoon died from eating a bad one. Brown pop—it could kill me, even though I had no idea where that thought came from, maybe the Mormon on my softball team. The cloud of ash from Mount Saint Helens—actually nuclear fallout. That bald man down the street—probably a kidnapper or a child molester, I could tell by his shifty eyes. The police asking about the kidnapped girl—probably fake police, or at the very least, police who would take me away from my marijuana-smoking hippie parents. I ran away screaming.
Even when I grew older and slightly braver, my parents had no money for travel. My father may have been an architect, but he was a young rebel, a man who would sooner pay $50 to ship a box of pennies to pay a speeding ticket than just send a check, who when he got upset at a boss would simply quit. We kept moving to more remote places, even to Wyoming, for God’s sake, to towns where fewer buildings were being erected, with fewer firms my father could leave. And by the time we rejoined the grid and moved to a suburb of Portland, Oregon, my senior year in high school, I knew what I wanted more than anything else: out. I studied journalism at Northwestern University outside of Chicago and slogged away on newspaper jobs in various meth-addled industrial towns before landing my dream job at the Seattle Times, where for two years I wrote serious stories about the downtrodden and afflicted and won awards for investigative reporting, which sounds pretty good until you realize how prize-filthy journalism is, with awards for topics as specific as the best interpretation of chemistry or the best witty elucidation of the role of institutions in a free society. I even mastered spreadsheets.
But then came the newspaper strike in Seattle and impending financial ruin. I cobbled together rent money by carrying a picket sign, dealing blackjack, and parking cars as a valet—yes, I wore a black bow tie, and true, I was the only non-felon, the only worker with all my teeth, and the only female. Eventually, my co-workers and lack of money started to scare me. I knew I had to find a new job.
I stuck with newspapers, all that I really knew, landing at the Chicago Tribune in early 2001, at age thirty, with only two overseas trips to my slender first passport, both in the previous two years. One to Jordan and Egypt, and one to Brazil. When the attacks of September 11, 2001, happened, I was asleep in my bed in Chicago, preparing to work a short day before going to see a live taping of Jerry Springer. My roommates pounded on my door to wake me, yelling that nuclear war was imminent, that the Sears Tower was next, and that we had to get out of the city. I flipped on the TV, put on my best suit, and drove to work, the only car heading into downtown Chicago while the highway heading in the opposite direction was a parking lot, jammed with cars trying to flee. I had no choice. As an essential newspaper employee, I had to be at work, tackling the most important stories possible. I spent the day calling gas stations to check the price of gas and interviewing Chicagoans who lived in tall buildings.
Within days, I was assigned to write obits for the victims, up to five a day. But I soon heard that the editors wanted to send more women overseas. I was hardly qualified to go anywhere, even Canada. I had never been to Europe. I spoke only English. I knew little about Al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. I knew about as much about Islam as I knew about Christianity, given my hippie infidel upbringing. But I sensed adventure and a way out from the soul-killing task of asking the families of the dead how they felt. I knocked on the door of the top foreign editor and introduced myself.
“I have no kids and no husband, so I’m expendable,” I explained.
The boss nodded. Apparently, the newspaper had already realized this. He held up a used envelope with my name scrawled on the back, near the names of two other single women with no children.
“We know who you are,” he said. “Get ready to go to Pakistan.”
Within four months, I was on a plane, flying into countries I had only read about. Getting overseas was really that easy. Of course, on my first trip overseas, in early 2002, I made countless mistakes. I ordered sushi from the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which resembled dorsal fins on a bed of rice and laid me up for days. I sneaked into the forbidden tribal areas of Pakistan with a fixer who seemed more interested in scoring hash than in working and called me “princess” when I complained. And then, when I flew to Kabul the first time, I forgot my cash. That was a major lesson: In a war zone, there are no ATMs.
In the beginning, I was a fill-in correspondent, spending most of my time in Chicago, occasionally dispatched to some random country. I flew to Indonesia to write a vague story about Islam, I covered a devastating earthquake and parliamentary elections in Iran, I spent the invasion of Iraq rambling around Afghanistan with Farouq. But I had caught the bug. What better job could there be than working halfway around the world from my bosses, than being paid to travel? When our South Asia correspondent moved to Italy in early 2004, I applied for her old job, based in India. I took it before even telling my boyfriend about the offer. Not a good sign about the priority of our relationship of almost two years, but Chris still volunteered to move overseas with me later in the year. So my life plan was locked up—I was going to be a swashbuckling foreign correspondent, especially so in South Asia, where at five foot ten, I towered over most of the populace. My boyfriend would perfect his comedy script about killer squirrels.
As soon as I flew into India that June, I called Farouq. He had news: He was getting married. He was not marrying his cousin, as is usually the case in Afghanistan, but his family still picked out his future bride, which is almost always the case in Afghanistan. Luckily, after the two were introduced, they fell for each other.
“You have to come,” he told me. “It’s a love marriage.”
That gave me an excuse to go back, which, after arriving in India, land of quick hands and sharp elbows, I desperately wanted. Even though New Delhi would be my home base, Afghanistan felt more like home than anywhere else in the region. I knew why. Afghanistan seemed familiar. It had jagged blue-and-purple mountains, big skies, and bearded men in pickup trucks stocked with guns and hate for the government. It was like Montana—just on different drugs. So with a list of story ideas and a verbal wedding invite, I flew back to Kabul, now a city of about three or four million, bursting at its muddy seams with returning refugees and foreigners. Farouq and our driver Nasir picked me up in a new SUV—clearly, life was treating Nasir well. Kabul, life was treating like it always did, like a fairy-tale stepchild. Little had changed. I started sneezing immediately, allergic to the one thing Afghanistan produced in abundance: dust.