The Other Beat Of Her Heart

In Iraq, the Reporter Learns You Go Into Battle Alone

The author with some Iraqi soldiers the night before the battle to retake Fallujah from insurgents in November 2004. (Courtesy Of Jackie Spinner)

That can't be Jill, I whispered to myself, over and over, even as her picture hung on the TV screen.

No, it's not her, I said to myself in denial. Jill? Jill Carroll? Being kidnapped in Iraq, sitting cross-legged with black-hooded, gun-toting men behind you, was there any worse fate for an American reporter in Baghdad? I couldn't imagine it. This was my friend, a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, who, like me, had fallen in love with Iraq.

The day I left to join The Post's Baghdad bureau in May 2004, my twin, Jenny, told me that if anything happened to me, she would never feel joy again. I went anyway, selfishly clinging to an ideal, a quest for truth, grasping for a sense of purpose that even my twin could not give me.

In our 34 years, Jenny and I had never been apart for more than a few months at a time. She was always my identity, the other half of the Spinner twins who grew up in a blue-collar town in the Midwest, chasing lightning bugs and a sense that the world extended beyond the corn and soybean fields surrounding us.

For 13 months in 2004 and 2005, my half was in Baghdad, dodging mortar rounds, roadside bombs and potential kidnappers, while Jenny worried from home that I would not be able to keep my promise to my nephew, her young son. "Aunt Jackie always comes back," I told him each time I returned to Baghdad, to a place that began to feel more like home the longer I stayed.

Although I had tucked Jenny's warning words deep inside of me when I left, I realize now that on this journey of a lifetime, I had gone alone. And I was alone that day outside Abu Ghraib prison, when a stranger grabbed my arm and began dragging me toward a car.

* * *

After the kidnapping and killing of Nicholas Berg in May 2004, journalists were more careful when gathering outside Abu Ghraib to cover the release of U.S. security detainees. These releases occurred outside the secure compound, on an open stretch of highway between Baghdad and volatile Fallujah. Post reporter Daniel Williams had been ambushed on that road, his car raked with bullets. We reporters had become targets, forced to send our Iraqi translators out to interview those being released from Abu Ghraib.

Frustrated with this awkward interview system, I devised a new plan -- to cover the release from inside the prison. No other reporter had done this. It would be a good exclusive. I persuaded the military officials on the ground to let me do it, then consulted with my more experienced colleagues about the best way to get there. We decided it would be safer if a driver dropped me off with Post photographer Andrea Bruce. I had an abaya for disguise and a bodyguard with an AK-47. We would go at dusk. Our overnight bags for prison would be dirty hotel pillowcases, because they looked like the flour sacks Iraqi women often used. Abu Saif, who was working for The Post as an interpreter, made sure I knew a few words in Arabic. "Say it like this," he instructed. " Ani Sahafiya ," I repeated after him. "I am a journalist."

On Sunday night, June 13, 2004, Andrea and I slipped out of the car and walked into Abu Ghraib under a pink sky.

We settled into a small, whitewashed cell in a large warehouse and plotted how to cover the next day's story. The Army had painted the cell's walls, but the stains were still there: sweat, dirt, blood. Saddam Hussein had crammed as many as 64 prisoners into the same space where Andrea and I had two single cots, separated by only an arm's length.

Jenny. Her name often came out of nowhere when I found myself in a nearly unimaginable place. I needed to describe this to her. I needed her to see the colorful murals of Hussein still painted above the cell blocks: Hussein in a white military uniform surrounded by white doves, with the snow-capped mountains of the Kurdish north over his left shoulder; Hussein in dark glasses and a white fedora against a splashy black and orange background; Hussein in a dark suit, his eyes scratched by vandals.