Baghdad Dispatches

A first-time war correspondent explains what she risked to cover a dangerous story.

TELL THEM I DIDN'T CRY

A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss,

and Survival in Iraq

By Jackie Spinner with Jenny Spinner

Scribner. 265 pp. $23

After I returned home from a recent reporting stint in Baghdad, a friend invited his 10-year-old son to ask me anything he wanted about Iraq. Immediately, the boy replied, "Why would you risk your life for a story?"

Sometimes it takes a child to ask the sensible questions that adults won't. In her poignant Tell Them I Didn't Cry , Jackie Spinner, a Washington Post reporter first sent to Iraq in 2004, helps explain why we journalists get lured to the front -- and then have trouble going home.

Spinner's fresh eyes, unlike those of more war-weathered correspondents, provide an honest look at what it means to cover a country that often appears to be coming apart at the seams. Without pretending to be a Middle East expert, Spinner focuses on her relationships with the Post's Iraqi staff, who become her family in Baghdad, and gauges how living under the constant threat of bombings and kidnappings is straining her ties with her real family back home. It is a tale she weaves well, bolstered by the moral, spiritual and literary support she gets from her twin sister, Jenny, an English professor at St. Joseph's University. Together they chart the strange inverse relationship that so often develops when covering a page-one war: As Spinner's career skyrockets, her health deteriorates. Even though she recognizes the toll it is taking, Spinner becomes unable to pull herself away: She's got Iraq and its people under her skin. This is the same kind of unbridled dedication to the story that kept my colleague Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor freelance reporter kidnapped in Baghdad last month, working in Iraq nearly year-round since 2003. Spinner's willingness to lay bare her posting's side effects, from the droll to the devastating, sets her book apart.

She also helps explain a breed that is no longer the rare bird it was in, say, Vietnam: the female war correspondent. Spinner captures our simultaneous urge to prove how unflappable we are -- she took the title Tell Them I Didn't Cry from her own shell-shocked but defiant words after escaping a terrifying kidnapping attempt -- and balances it against her unmistakably feminine impulses. She bakes cookies to win over suspicious policemen, forges intense friendships with her translators and just happens to be the person in the bureau who whips up fabulous Friday night dinners.

None of which, of course, answers the 10-year-old's question. Why put ourselves in harm's way, only to have readers complain (as many of Spinner's did) that press coverage of Iraq is negative and unpatriotic? "I didn't become a journalist to serve my country," Spinner explains. "I became a journalist to serve the story." That means documenting the anguish of a country for which Americans now bear enormous responsibility. It means telling the truth and hoping that our Iraqi colleagues, many of them as fearful of insurgents today as they were of Saddam Hussein, will do the same. It means showing readers that the lives of Iraqis are just as important as ours. Spinner reminds us of all of these essentials, and then some. "If you're there, risking your life," she writes, "you want someone, anyone, to understand why you are there." Her fine book widens the circle of people who will. ·

Ilene R. Prusher, Jerusalem bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, began covering Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.