On the possibility of going to Iraq

A friend on the chilly east coast called me the other evening. She couldn't sleep. When my friends can't sleep, they call me. They know I answer the phone, mostly cuz I live on the west coast and have a 3 hr jump on them. I calculate the time, it's 1am her time.

She has a meeting tomorrow with the foreign desk editor. My friend is a producer for National Public Radio. We often talk about how NPR is very white and very male and how her simply introducing Hawaiian music for background effect is a "new" thing.

Anyway, she tells me that the other day they asked around the office if anyone wants to go to Iraq to produce for the two reporters out there now. She wasn't on that day, but had to stop by the office for something else. She tells me that something inside her told her that she HAD to send this email to say, "I'll go."

She doesn't know if this meeting means that she was picked or not, but the possibility is there. Other folks who put their names in didn't get a call to the foreign editor's desk.

What keeps her up this night is thinking about what her mom and sister will say. She doesn't want to give her mom a heart attack. But then again, here she is single, has no kids, and deep down a duty to be a journalist and bring back the stories no one else would see.

She had gone to the Asian American Journalist Association conference. She met a Pinay photojournalist who had gone to Iraq and brought back some amazing pictures. The woman was stopped once at a checkpoint. They asked her what she was. She said she was American but her heritage was from the Philippines.

Unlike the soldiers I know who have been shipped to the Middle east, I didn't have the same feeling of dread for her. Soldiers are definite targets. Radio journalists might be able to pull something more discretely.

The NPR reporters there now are women as well and are very experienced in making their way around the area. That helps.

In one sense, being Pinay gives her a bit of an edge. Do you know any country that is at war with the Philippines? You may tell them you are American, but in their eyes, they see you as Filipino. Plus, there are Filipinos everywhere. We are the contract workers of the world. In one sense, when there are so few Filipinos in an area, there's a sense that they watch out for each other at least for the short term.

So maybe she might not be used to the sandy conditions, but heat, minimum accomodations, it's like going home. And in some sense, depending on where you go in the Philippines no less dangerous.

She keeps the faith thinking if it's her time, it's her time. And despite her worries about how much this may weigh on her family, something deeper inside her says, she should go. Maybe it might not be a good idea to tell her mother, who is apt to worry and is a bit frail, but certainly she says she'll tell her sister.

I had recently read Sean Penn's account of going to Iraq on sfgate.com. His accounts still fresh in my mind. I imagined my friend flying into the middle east and making the 11 hr drive into Baghdad, the rocky ride, the vast desert with various refugees encamped along borders, of sellers along the way. I imagine her nights and her days filled with the sound of distant gunfire that no one jumps at anymore, the way no one talks about the heat and the sand because these things are everywhere. I think of her walking the streets looking at the faces of the Iraqi people, the soldiers and finding her face in theirs. Maybe one of the soldiers will tell her more than is allowed if they converse in Spanish or Tagalog. Maybe the women will allow her one more sentence. Maybe she will find a voice of a story not yet told that in the end will help all of us understand what has happened halfway around the world.

I tell my friend as the hour pushes midnight on my coast, "you should go. If they ask you, you should go. You have to. It's what you've wanted to do. Of course you're going to be scared. who wouldn't be? But like you said, you're a journalist. You'd be great! It's something you can't miss!" It's an experience that will ask of her more than anything she could imagined. But it's an experience she's been preparing for ever since she got into journalism. And it's something I know that will change her life forever. If she goes, it'll be in the next few months.

She feels better. She's ready to get some rest now. I am too. I tell her good luck tomorrow and to just let me know when she's leaving.