In 1991, at the beginning of the Gulf War, I took my first trip to a conflict zone. What follows was written at the time .
Over the past couple of months, life has seen fit to take me by the collar and propel me through the Middle East conflict known to us all as the Gulf War. It has been an extraordinary time, and before I forget it all, I thought I’d try to write some of it down.
From the outset it should be stressed that I was never one of the really gung-ho types. I never went to Baghdad or Saudi, and I was never on the front line. However, I had my own little share of exhilaration, tears, drunkenness, total panic and a small sense of watching history of a pretty gruesome nature being made.
As will be gathered I am a relative newcomer to the wonderful world of news, and before we get under way I’d like to digress briefly.
It’s a strange job for me to be in because as anybody who knows me will testify I am not the most intrepid type. And there is no doubt that there is a degree of implicit macho pressure to do the dangerous thing. Baghdad became the place to be for the real man, with all the talk of ‘going in’. Needless to say, I resisted the temptation, but I felt the pull. As one correspondent said to me “I don’t want a boring life.” I know what he meant and let me tell you news is addictive. The war is now over, thank God, but I wish I was back out there watching people’s efforts at peace. Perhaps a little more tricky than war. It’s all along way from sitting in cosy recording studios, though there have been times in the last few weeks when I would have given anything to be back down the Red Shop, where the only danger was the dB level and the occasional round of chemical derangement. You don’t get bombed in studios, well not in the military sense anyway.
I had done quite a bit of work at TVam over Christmas and the New Year and was promised most of the month of January down at Breakfast TV, while Ed and Trevor Lejeune were in Saudi. I was meant to be running their contract, but a phone call at midnight on the night of January 8th put pay to that. I’d been doing the odd days work for ABC news, in fact it all started when I was at the COI, going there a couple of times with my boss Douglas Hurd (Foreign Secretary), I had stuck my head round the door and uttered the immortal words “Any work going?” On the night of the 8th there certainly was. A four-day trip to Amman, Jordan for Nightline, ABC equivalent of Newsnight. I couldn’t say no and, so with a few days to go before I took over at TVam, at 5 O’clock the next morning I was en route for Heathrow. My cameraman was to be Doug Vogt, whom I’d worked with for one day previously, filming the weather at Piccadilly Circus!
Say what you like about ABC, but the morning got a little lift when someone I’d never met before handed me $2,000. I should have known this was going to last more than four days.
Well here I was flying business class for the second time in my life straight towards a potential war zone to do a job for the top show of the presently highest rated U.S. network and yes I had weeks of experience under my belt. Fortunately, they didn’t know that. I don’t know what frightened me more, the work or the war.
We were met at Queen Alia airport, Amman by some ABC rep. and on payment of our Visa we were on our way to the bureau, which we found to be situated on the seventh floor of the Intercontinental hotel. I went to bed that night feeling very much as I had on my first night at prep school, very much at sea and when I was woken at five in the morning by the unearthly wailing of the Muezzin (boy, those guys like a little echo) this helped the sense of disorientation. None of which was helped by the fact that Royal Jordanian airlines had kindly lost my bag, so all I had was the clothes I stood up in.
Next day the work starts and the next ten days are a blur of working for 15 hours, grabbing 2 hours sleep and then starting again. The first job we had was a round table interview with various Jordanians and Palestinians chaired by Ted Koppel. So here I was close miking 7 people, setting up the mixing desk and making sure the sound got to the three cameras. Bluff is a wonderful thing and somehow it was managed and the sense of relief when it was over was palpable, at least to me.
We do live shots from the balcony studio, interviews, the most important of which is with the King himself.
But hold on a minute, let’s back up a little. My ignorance about the Middle East, prior to setting foot there knew no bounds, and a small incident indicates this. Over Christmas I had attended a groovy meeeja party in Hampstead and due to the inclement weather I had worn a black and white checked scarf. Such was my ignorance that when the Jewish owner of the bar where the party was held, became a little upset at my sporting Palestinian colours on his premises, I didn’t know what he was talking about.
I was soon to learn that in Jordan a red and white checked scarf meant Jordan and that black and white spelled Palestine. I also learned that between 60/70% of the Jordanian population is Palestinian, this presents the King with a few of his problems.
The deadline for Iraq to be out of Kuwait was 15th Jan. and as this date approached so the diplomatic activity increased to avert the war. As we now know this was all to no avail, but on the 11th after recording an interview with the King, we went to the airport to record the arrival of Perez de Cuellar (Secretary-General of the United Nations) in his last ditch diplomatic efforts. In person he looked very old and small. To return to the King, prior to the interview I was as usual fiddling around with some wires when there comes a tap on my shoulder and who is it but the King himself, short fat chap, who shakes my hand.
Perez leaves, we film gas masks being dished out at the French embassy, we cover a pro Saddam demo, we do Nightline, which is anchored out of Amman, and little by little the 15th approaches. I’ve found in these circumstances that one becomes almost entirely irrational. You might hear a snippet on the news that suggests that war might be averted and you are immediately elated and feel that this must be the case, or alternatively a colleague might say, with obviously no more knowledge than you, that war is inevitable. You are then plunged to the depths of despair. Perhaps the worst thing was that even if war did come, what did this mean for me? Would Jordan be invaded by Iraq or Israel, would we be stuck for months without a flight out?
Nightline was transmitted in the early morning of the 16th, with Doug and I standing at a location outside the hotel from four in the morning, it was freezing not to say surreal with the Muezzin giving us his 5am alarm call and the sun coming up over the desert.
One of the best things about Jordan is the air, it is a pleasure to breathe it. It is so sweet and pure, probably because of the desert and the lack of heavy industry, they ought to bottle it.
That night feeling somewhat wacked I went to bed early only to be woken at 1am by Doug to tell me that the war had started. I remember feeling physically sick, as if someone had booted me in the stomach.
The next day we were issued with gas masks and chemical suits, the wearing of which was demonstrated by two ex-army guys who were operating the satellite dish. They seemed to take a perverse delight in scaring the shit out of us. You must get your mask on in 15 seconds, if you inhale the gas you have to inject yourself with syringes provided, never give yours to someone else etc etc……a large drink was called for after this little demonstration.
That night Saddam decided to launch his first batch of scuds at Israel and as these would be flying overhead ( check your map ) we decided to don the chem suits. It looked like some strange fancy dress party, with everyone in their camouflaged suits and masks at the ready. As it turned out we were being over cautious, but it all came in handy later.
That same day a rather nerve-wracking incident occurred, when Doug and I were asked to do some filming down at the Mosque in the centre of town. Anti-western feeling was running pretty high, after the West’s highly successful first night’s bombing raid on Baghdad.
When we arrive at the Mosque there is nowhere to park so the driver drops us off with our interpreter, who then also disappears into the Mosque to speak to the Imam about getting us permission to film inside. I still can’t believe this idiot left us alone there. We are suddenly surrounded by a hundred extremely angry Palestinians who begin by telling us we have no friends here and latterly tell us they are going to kill us. Doug and I attempt to leg it, and with some difficulty manage to break away from the crowd, only to find that no taxi will pick us up. Eventually our interpreter finds us and gets us a cab back to the hotel, where we are back in five star luxury, or what passes for it in an Intercon hotel. This kind of work is nothing if not schizophrenic.
In the West it seems that there has been a degree of surprise that Jordan, while not outrightly siding with Iraq during the war, was certainly not against it. The main reason was that, as I have already indicated, a large percentage of the population is Palestinian, and Saddam was seen as the champion of this nation without a homeland. It went deeper than that though, as to many Arab eyes the U.S. intervention in this crisis was seen as good old fashioned Western imperialism, and while many Arabs are aware of the evil ways of Saddam, they see him as the one Muslim leader who stood up to the might of the West. To understand Jordan’s stance you have to appreciate how the west is seen by many Arabs.
A brief story which I don’t think illuminates anything, but maybe goes to show how screwed up the Middle East is, goes like this.
The majority of our drivers in Jordan happened to be Kurds, now as you will remember the Kurds were gassed by Saddam on two separate occasions, and yet despite this, they still supported him. Figure that one out. Their argument was the same, that he was the only Arab to stand up to western imperialism. I was soon to get a very different point of view.
On the night of Saturday 19th Jan, Doug and I were doing some live shots from the balcony, when it was suggested by Laura, the bureau chief, that we might like to go to Israel and for some crazy reason we both agree. Now although on a clear day you can almost see Jerusalem from Amman, the two countries have no great love for each other, and in war time it is almost impossible to cross from one to the other. This proved to be the case, so we were forced to fly firstly to Cyprus, and then charter into Tel Aviv. This was meant to happen all in one day, but on arrival in Larnaca the weather is so foul that our pilot doesn’t want to fly that night. So we overnight in a hotel, where I have a rather alarming dream of travelling along in a train through the out skirts of a city, and as we go along, bombs start to explode on either side of us. Great dream Jim, as we are on our way to scud city.
Before I continue a few words should be said about this Doug who keeps being mentioned. Doug Vogt stand up and take a bow. Despite being Canadian, he’s not a bad bloke. He has done news for about ten years, five of which were in London where he was a staff cameraman, at CBC. Not only is he excellent at his job, but he is someone of immense patience and good humour. He had to be to put up with a panic struck, news virgin like this writer.
A Little London Life 