Tell Them I Didn't Cry by Jackie Spinner & Jenny Spinner

Author:Jackie Spinner & Jenny Spinner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Astor knew he would be left behind because his burns were not healing fast enough. “It’s hard to get over it, but you just have to.” His buddies from his unit would come to visit at the hospital and Astor would tell them he is fine. But “deep inside, every now and then you still see the faces of your dead friends.”

I am not a soldier, so I could not relate to this thing inside of them, this desire to fight. Yet I felt a sense of duty and obligation to tell their stories, too. It was the same obligation I felt for writing an Iraqi’s story. The politics of the war aside, the politics of the Fallujah battle aside, I was there to chronicle the human side of what was happening, the people caught up in what was happening in Iraq, for better or for worse.

The press corps was obsessed with the messiness of what we were about to witness and experience. Even the veteran combat journalists expressed concern. I spent an afternoon with Anne Garrels, one of the few reporters who remained in Baghdad when the war started in 2003. I looked up to Anne, admired her courage and her reports from all over the world. I was surprised to hear that she, and many of the others, was scared, too. Before she shipped out with her Marine forward unit, she wrote her husband’s telephone number in my black leather journal. “Call him, if…just…” she instructed me, trailing off. Paul Wood, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, gave me his editor’s telephone number. We wrote our blood type on tape and stretched it across our flak jackets. I put a picture of Aidan and Jenny and her husband, Peter, in the lining of my helmet. Before I rolled out of the wire, the guarded perimeter of Fallujah, I wrote my name and blood type on my hand (in case my head got blown off) and on my neck (in case my arm got blown off).

While the Marines were preparing for their battle, I was preparing for mine, trying to figure out how to cover it from the best spot. I asked Gilbert, the public affairs head, if I could hang out in the Marine command base the night of the battle. I promised not to report what I was seeing until it was cleared so as not to compromise the operation. We had strict rules that forbade us from disclosing troop movements or reporting battle plans ahead of an advance. If we violated the rules, we would be sent packing back to Baghdad on the first available flight. The Marines never censored what we wrote or forced us to clear our copy before we hit the “send” button to our news organization. But they did read carefully what we wrote or aired, monitoring it for breaches of the rules. In a feature story about the Night Walkers, the Marines responsible for the helicopter landing zone at Camp Fallujah, I wrote about their sense of pending battle.

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