Lemondrop

Megan Stack didn't exactly dream she'd ever be face-to-beard with a feared Afghan warlord who had a vicious crush on her, but sometimes life takes strange turns.

Back in 2001, she was a reporter for the L.A. Times who happened to be on vacation in Paris on September 11. Before she could scarf down another croissant, she was sent to Afghanistan to report from the front lines of America's War on Terror.

That was nine years ago. Today she's written about war, terrorism and, most poignantly, the lives that fall between the cracks -- from 22 countries, including Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq. Oh, and along the way, she was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.

Most of all, her book made us appreciate war from a woman's perspective, which is about a lot more than guns, guts and glory. And her job is so cool that for a brief moment in Chapter 11, we did contemplate running off to Yemen to try to get kidnapped just so we could write a memoir like "Every Man in This Village Is a Liar." Instead, we flipped the page, shifted on our towel, and asked someone to grab us another beer.

This is why we need women like Megan.

Lemondrop sat down to ask her how to fend off a warlord and what she thinks of the whole concept of conflict now that she's safely, well, back in Moscow as the L.A. Times bureau chief.

Lemondrop: You say in the book that you were called to be a foreign correspondent since you were already away in Paris on 9/11. Was this something you'd always wanted, or did you fall into it at first?
Stack: I always knew I wanted to write, and to see the world, so foreign correspondence was something I'd daydreamed about. But it was mostly just idle, ill-informed fantasy, and I didn't really expect it to come true. I expected that, if I wanted to get overseas, I'd have to work for years and years, and have a lot of luck, and then maybe, someday, I'd have a chance. And then it happened so fast. September 11 came, and I found myself in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those were all events that you couldn't have expected; even as it was unfolding, it didn't seem real. I had the sense of having slipped into somebody else's life.


Was there a moment when you realized it really was a calling, despite your mother begging you to come home?
Well, to be fair, my mother never begged me to come home, although I'm sure she wanted to. She understood that I really wanted to be there. She's a feminist and also a journalist who fought gender discrimination in newsrooms in the 1960s before stepping away from her reporting career to raise three kids. So I think it was probably very mixed for her, because on the one hand she was scared, and on the other hand she was living vicariously, a bit. I knew it was hard on her, and I felt guilty, but she tried to shield me from her emotional responses.

Early on, you mention the Afghan warlord who fell in love with you, sneaking in while you were sleeping, stroking your hair. How did you fend off his advances, and how did this make information-getting harder or easier as a woman?
That was the first time I had to deal with being hit on by a source while covering conflict, but it wasn't the last. It's a tricky thing to navigate. On the one hand, here is somebody who wants to talk with you. On the other hand, to be very blunt, you are aware of the threat of rape. There is no exact system to deal with this. It comes down to instinct, to the sort of psychological profiling and subtle manipulations that reporters are constantly practicing, whether they're conscious of it or not. And to some extent, you're gambling.

As a reporter in these situations, there are some benefits to being a woman, but also some drawbacks. If a man wants to sleep with you, does that necessarily mean he's going to sit down and talk with you coherently about military strategy? Maybe he wants to spend time with you, but doesn't regard you as worthy or capable of that conversation. And, yes, in a conservative society I, as a woman, have the unique chance of speaking freely with local women, which may produce some good features.

But will it create news headlines? Maybe so, maybe not. The bottom line is, when it comes to reporting, I don't apologize for taking advantage of any edge I get. There are reporters, for example, who have served in the military before. And I assume they bring that background up when trying to get commanders or soldiers to talk with them. As a reporter, you're constantly trying to make connections with people.

What were your thoughts on war going into Afghanistan, and how do you feel that they've changed after being stationed all over the Middle East?
Before Afghanistan, war was something I'd seen fictionalized on TV or read about in books. And those images, those passages, tend to dwell on firefights, explosions, snipers -- action. So I had the impression that war was all drama and blood. Isolated moments. Glory and guts. Now I see war as something much bigger -- as a force that involves and forever alters everything it touches. It's not just that a lot of war is really sitting around; there's a well-worn adage about hours of tedium punctuated by moments of terror. That's true, but even that is a soldier's perspective, and only a small part of the bigger picture.

Now I see how the wars you have fought overseas come home with you. Now I see how they affect ordinary people who will never see even a drop of blood. They change countries and generations. That's what made me want to write this book – to try to portray the massive effect the fighting has had on me, on my own country and on the countries in the region. Now that I've been in war, I don't really have patience for a lot of the blood-and-guts depictions anymore. To me, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five is one of the best war books. And the funny thing is, the narrative never actually gets into depicting any violence. It stays on the margins. The margins, in a way, are where war really happens.

Having been on the ground from the beginning, through Tora Bora, what do you think will be the endgame in Afghanistan now?
My fear is that NATO troops will stay for years, more people will be killed, more internal strife will be stirred up -- and that, in the end, the public will lose its stomach for the war, and the world will slowly give Afghanistan back to the Taliban, who will then fight against other groups for control of the country. And then, slowly, it will drift back into what it looked like before 2001 -- except with even less infrastructure. That's my fear. Sometimes I just think, whatever else happens, a lot more people are going to get killed. And that makes me feel a little bit sick. But, again, I hope I'm wrong.

Reading the book, I really appreciated the way you brought the human toll of a war to light. One of the early scenes I loved was you sitting on the floor with a group of the women in Afghanistan who, by then, rarely left the house. You watched them braid their hair, spray on drugstore perfume, and dance to celebrate the birth of a new baby -- all in the secrecy of the living room because of the Taliban. How do you think they're faring now? Are they actually better off?
I wrote about this in the book -- my discomfort with the oversimplification of women's rights in Afghanistan. With the Taliban taking on greater power, of course, women are going to stay marginalized. And it's not only the Taliban -- the Taliban, in some ways, are simply reflecting the most rigorously conservative strains of Pashtun society.

Restrictions on women also come from the tribes, from the families, etc. I don't know how those particular women are doing now. I've lost touch with the whole family. They were the relatives of a translator who worked with me. He got in touch with me out of the blue long after I'd left Afghanistan; by then, he was translating for the US Special Forces. I never heard from him again. I wonder if he's survived all the years since then, especially working with the military. I think about all of them, him and his family.

What do you think is America's -- or Americans' -- biggest misconception about the war we're fighting?
The US is a country that was founded in revolution, and in the historical scheme of things, that wasn't very long ago. So it always surprises me that many Americans seem to lack a clear understanding of military occupation, of what that means, how destabilizing it can be. We don't seem to think much about what it means to have foreign troops on your soil. We forget that no matter what the intentions are, in the eyes of the local people, there is an inherent humiliation and violence underlying our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It surprises me that Americans don't seem to think of it in those terms, because I know that we, as Americans, would absolutely never accept, say, a Chinese occupation of US soil. A few years ago I was in Beirut, and I went with some other journalists who'd also been in Baghdad to see "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" (a film about the Irish war for independence). And it really shook us up, because the cycles were so familiar from what we'd seen in Iraq -- the radicalization of ordinary people who'd witnessed an act of violence from the foreign soldiers; logistical support for the insurgency among old women and children; the fracturing among the Irish themselves, and so on. There is this old question: How do you maintain a "peacekeeping" occupation when the occupation itself is driving violence? That's really what we're looking at in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

At one point, after being stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, you come home to the U.S., but seem to find yourself so out of water that it was easier to go back to reporting from the front lines. What do you think was the biggest shock of trying to fit back in to the life you'd left?
In retrospect, a lot of that had to do with it being my first war. Later on, I'd leave a conflict and slip into a funk, but it was a familiar feeling, and I knew it would pass. That makes it easier. The first time, when I came home from Afghanistan, I didn't understand why I was feeling so dislocated, emotional and lost. It's not something people talk about a lot.

I understand now that if I'd just waited a while, it would have gotten easier. And then, too, it was always extremely strange to start out in a place where U.S. policy is having this enormous and often disastrous effect on people's daily lives – and then get on a plane and come back to the States and find many people disengaged from what was happening. But after a while, I started using trips back to the US to tune out, too. I became leery of discussing my experiences with people back home, because it was so politicized, especially Iraq. Some people would try to get me to admit that Iraq wasn't really as bad as the press reports were suggesting. Others would try to get me to admit that things were even worse -- that US soldiers were carrying out atrocities every other day and nobody was reporting the truth.

Can you tell us more about Atwar Bahjat, the brilliant young Iraqi journalist who was killed while reporting a story? For readers who don't know her, can you tell us who she was, what she represented, and what message her death leaves behind?
Atwar Bahjat was a courageous and ground-breaking Iraqi woman who worked as a war correspondent. She campaigned for Iraqis to overcome their sectarian differences. She was killed while reporting on the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samara in 2006. I had interviewed her two years earlier and was in Iraq when she was killed. Her death always seemed to me the ultimate symbol of all the hope that was being crushed in Iraq at that time. Iraq had gotten into a tragic cycle that was killing off or chasing away many of the country's best and brightest: The scientists, athletes, professors, writers, thinkers. It was like watching the raw materials for the country getting crushed, day after day.

What was your ultimate goal in publishing "Every Man in This Village Is a Liar"?
I felt compelled to write the book because I was frustrated by all the things I had never found a way to write about in the newspaper. There were so many people and experiences I'd never touched upon. I couldn't stand the idea of it all going to waste. I tried to write the book in a way that would make it accessible to everybody -- not just academics or specialists in the region. I wanted people to feel, when they finished the book, as if they had lived through those years too, and gained the understanding and knowledge that came out of them.


Carrie Sloan is the editor of Lemondrop. She still would really like to go to Yemen.