16
I ordered him to stop. I got out, walked around the car,
pulled him out, and put him in the passenger seat. Then I
reoriented our two-car convoy toward Tripoli’s coastal
section. At every checkpoint, I stopped the car, smiled,
showed my empty hands, and asked: “Novotel?”
Finally, at the fifth checkpoint, a Libyan man smiled
broadly and said: “Ohh, you mean the Baby Camel.”
He pointed up and, there, way atop a modern seafront
hotel, was the image of a big blue mother camel, followed
by a little blue camel. And next to it was marked “Novotel.”
It’s hard to fathom, but rebranding could have killed us.
War stories fascinate. War stories sell. But in the end,
they are depressing.
War, as I have watched it, is chaotic, unpredictable,
and sordid. Men hunt men. The reasons vary, including
ideology, race, religion, or real estate. But the practice is
not glorious. And, unlike two hours spent in a comfort-
able Manhattan movie theater,
real
wars create real pain
and loss.
For me, as an observer, one legacy is a mild case of
paranoia. To this day, I choose a seat in a restaurant that
allows me to sit with my back to the wall, and an eye on
the door. On the upside, war coverage has given me a
healthy appreciation for life and a need for balance.
In Colombia in the 1990s, I was deeply involved in cov-
ering the drug war, so deeply that I was the last reporter
to receive a communication from Pablo Escobar before
he was gunned down on a Medellin rooftop. I received a
fax communiqu
é
from the fugitive cocaine lord, authen-
ticated by his thumbprint.
But, in addition to switching hotels every time I visited
Bogota, I adopted another curious practice. I imposed
upon myself a quota – one “positive” story for every
three “negative” ones. In the case of Colombia, I wrote
about flower exports, improvements in coffee cultiva-
tion, modern art, and the restoration of the Caribbean
coastal city of Cartagena.
Looking back, these stories may have told
New York
Times
readers more about Colombia than the weekly
drum roll of bombings, kidnappings, and guerrilla
attacks. In that light, I am just as proud of my coverage
of the Falklands War as I am of a story I did on Wheels
for Humanity. That 2004 feature, also out of Mongolia for
the
Times
, resulted in a flow of real donations that resulted
in Third World kids getting their first wheelchairs.
The key to good journalism is to get out from behind
the keyboard to talk to real people. Readers relate to
faces, to people.
My career thrived in the Golden Age of paper and ink.
When I was a Sixth Former, 25 copies of
The New York
Times
were stacked daily at the Schoolhouse, free for
the taking for furthering our education. Since then,
technological change has been relentless.
I will never forget a shock I had one day in Angola in
1986. An American working for Gulf Oil Co. said he en-
joyed reading a story I had filed two days earlier, from
Luanda. In Africa, my M.O. was to file and get out of town
– before repercussions hit (and borders closed). But the
American oil executive had acquired a new machine that
watched
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
. The
movie brought back my memories of August, 2011, when
I entered Libya for the battle of Tripoli. That was one
year before the American ambassador was killed by an
Islamic fundamentalist militia in Benghazi.
Working for Voice of America, I, along with a camera-
man, drove in from Tunisia. Driving across the Sahara,
we passed close to the long abandoned headquarters of
General Erwin Rommel, the German “desert fox.” I was
retracing, in reverse, the path of my father, John L.B.
Brooke of the Form of 1926, who, in 1942-43, drove from
Cairo to Tunis as an ambulance driver attached to the
British Eighth Army.
Almost 70 years later, stocked with drinking water,
food, and cash, I drove east from Tunisia into the moun-
tains of Libya’s ethnic Berber territory. Just weeks earlier,
these ancient hills had been liberated from 42 years of
rule by Muammar Gaddafi.
But down on the Mediterranean coast, at the oil refinery
city of Az-Zawiyah, things got sticky. A few hours before
we arrived, four Italian reporters had been kidnapped in
Tripoli, 30 miles to the east.
As the senior journalist in the group, I took on the task
of organizing a “safe” convoy into the capital. Local drivers
were hired and instructed to go straight to Novotel, the
press hotel. Soon after we left, everything went wrong. A
junior reporter in our group had a bad case of nerves at
the site of so many checkpoints improvised by freelance
gunslingers. I gave him my helmet and bulletproof jacket,
equipment I had brought down from Moscow.
At two major highway intersections, NATO bombers
had flattened two Gaddafi military installations. In their
place, the opposition had thrown up street checkpoints,
manned largely by skittish, armed (but untrained), men
from the neighborhoods.
Once in the capital, the streets were empty, but for
roaming “technicals” – pickup trucks with 50-caliber
machine guns mounted on the back, usually by the
opposition. It soon became apparent that our “local”
drivers were lost. It turns out they were indigenous to
the oil refinery town, but did not know the big city, only
30 miles away.
We drove up to one press hotel, only to be waved away
by security men on edge and waving shotguns. Later, we
heard Gaddafi loyalists had attacked the hotel one hour
after we approached.
Our “local” drivers started driving away from the Medi-
terranean, contradicting my gut feeling that Novotel would
have picked a hotel with a sea view. Suddenly, our guides
drove down the avenue next to the Gaddafi compound,
the same free-for-all boulevard where the Italians had
been snatched the day before.
At a traffic roundabout, we were stopped by the debris
of a major firefight; broken glass, burned-out cars, and
about one dozen bodies bloating in the Mediterranean
sun. About 500 yards to the south, a high-rise building
still carried a large Gaddafi poster – a telltale sign that
the neighborhood was in the hands of regime loyalists.
My driver started to head toward the Gaddafi poster.
