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How did you decide to do this piece? Did you write it and then submit it to the Virginia Quarterly Review? If it was indeed not written to fulfill a contract, it's a very ambitious piece to be written as a labor of love in the hopes it would be accepted...
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This piece was written using “leftover” material, without a contract, without even an idea of where I would try to place it. I simply came away from Iraq and Ramadi believing I needed to tell the story.
The piece grew out of a trip I took to Iraq to report a story for National Geographic. The Geographic piece focused on the military medical system—the rapid movement of wounded troops from the battlefield to hospitals in Iraq, and then finally back to the U.S. To do that story, the photographer and I spent a lot of time at field hospitals, in operating rooms, or embedded with helicopter medevac units. But I felt my end of the story wouldn’t be complete unless I saw the missions soldiers and marines were doing; in other words, I needed to see where they were getting wounded, in what circumstances, and I needed to see the nature of the threats they faced. To do that, I embedded with combat units.
National Geographic has a unique style and readership and generally doesn’t publish stories about war. The medical story alone was a stretch for them. So in the end, none of the material I gathered about the political situation in Iraq or while accompanying combat units made it into the Geographic story. I had a lot of homeless material, and the Ramadi experience had left a really strong impression on me.
It was one of the first times in my career where I had the sort of moment I’ve heard other journalists speak of—where I just had to write it, put it out there, whether or not it was published. I wrote in my spare time and tried not to think about of where I would send it or what would happen to it. When I decided it was finished, I sent it cold to VQR. Ted Genoways, the amazing editor there, decided to take a chance on it. Later I asked Andrea Bruce if she’d contribute photos to go with the text. It was off the cuff; I’d only met her once, briefly. But she’s really good and she had been in Ramadi a little while after me.
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What were the particular challenges to reporting and writing the piece? (A number of things are apparent from your piece itself, and feel free to reiterate, but we're also interested in any challenges that surprised you.)
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The physical challenges jump into my memory first for some reason. It was June and very hot. Although the Marines went out at night, it was still sweltering. Add the body armor and the darkness and the danger and it made for a very physically demanding story. I tried to take notes in every scrap of light, during every pause. When we got back to base at the end of the missions, usually a little before dawn, I’d stay up and write a dispatch to myself in an email, just to keep the details close and ordered. I don’t want to emphasize too much the danger of it, but certainly that was something I had to make choices about. Violent things never happened when I was actually frightened; they always came when I was falling asleep on my feet and not expecting anything at all.
Access was also a challenge, at first. When I requested the embed, the Marine command wasn’t letting journalists into Ramadi. I kept talking to them and requesting it through different channels. I made one good contact and kept working with her. Finally it came together. But it literally took a month to get there.
Writing. Usually I get very distracted, and it’s not easy for me to sit down and write. With this piece the distractions fell away. I don’t mean to say it was easy to write. I struggled figuring out how to structure the piece. I felt that I had to do something unique, chop it up temporally, or give it some weird variation on narrative arc or something, because plenty of good stories had been written about Iraq by that point. In the end I chose a very straightforward, linear narrative. Once that happened, the structure felt very natural. In a sense, I envisioned the piece almost more as a travel narrative, and laying it out that way allowed me to find good breaks and move fluidly from one section to the next.
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In retrospect, is there anything you wish you had included, or information that you know now that you would have included if you'd known it before the piece was published?
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There were some scenes that I wished I could have included, strong scenes about individual Marines or moments during their patrols. But I tried to think back to what Barry Siegel of the LA Times once said—at a Nieman Conference, no less. If you string too many scenes together they become like a series of long pauses and the story never gets anywhere. It never achieves that critical momentum that carries a reader along.
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You have written on many non-military topics. Do you approach war reporting any differently than reporting on wildfires or the Arctic?
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Much of the best war reporting comes more than anything else from the strength of firsthand observations and the insights a reporter gains into the people and situations around him or her. I concentrated on getting the details, the feel of the place, the fear of it.
Working for National Geographic carries specific challenges that don’t arise at other publications, mostly because the magazine is heavily geared toward photographs. The stories tend to be about “subjects” or places, many of them with underlying scientific themes. There is usually a need to go “outside”—meaning, to rely on experts and add their voices to the story. Writing about war freed me from that. So much of the value lay simply in what I had experienced with a group of other people who then became characters.
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Is there anything else you'd like to say about "Ramadi Nights"?
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I was fortunate to find willing collaborators in Ted at VQR and Andrea from the Washington Post. Finding them—looking for them—made the story more than it would have been on its own. The other thing that keeps coming to mind is the idea of time. The more time you spend with people, or in a place, the better a story will usually be. I had to keep working the phones to get into Ramadi. Then the marines had to accept me, so I needed to spend time with them, just sitting around, talking about nothing, proving I wasn’t an asshole and that I was truly interested in what they were doing. I had to release expectations about what the experience should be, or whether there was journalistic “value” in it.
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