Reporting Under Fire (20 page)

He remembers Nov. 12, when Private Hobbs's vehicle hit the mine.

“There was a sergeant in the hatch, his face all messed up,” the medic said, “and when I got to him he was saying over and over, ‘I've lost all my teeth, I've lost all my teeth.'”

Gloria Emerson's reporting outraged the army's top brass and jangled nerves in Washington. The vocabulary she chose, words such as “futility,” “helplessness,” “boredom,” “apathy,” and “bitterness,” appearing as they did in a single
New York Times
article, helped convince many Americans that it was time to bring their soldiers home from Vietnam. Others blamed reporters like Emerson for adding to the problems the war had created. Angry hawks, backers of America's military mission to Vietnam, accused her and other journalists of undercutting morale among soldiers and airmen.

The following February, the
New York Times
reported that Gloria was named a George Polk Award winner for her articles reporting on how the war had affected individuals in Vietnam.

Gloria Emerson was as sharp as her words. Her colleagues thought she was ferocious, fearless, and generous as well. She welcomed young reporters to Vietnam and gave them advice whether they wanted it or not. On a Saigon street in 1970, she flagged down a young woman named Judith Coburn and took her by the arm:

She [Gloria] jerked me by the arm and brought me into a coffee shop, and she said, “Sit down,” which I did. She said,
“Village Voice,
you're here from the
Village Voice.”
And I said yes. She said, “I'm Gloria Emerson…. So,” she said, “no one is going to tell you how it works here.” And she ordered some ice tea and began talking about her experiences.

I remember dodging the ice tea, because she was gesturing with her spoon and gobs of ice tea were coming out. Finally, I actually managed to get a question into the conversation, and I said, “Well, so what's it like out there? The war, covering combat.” I sort of knew you weren't supposed to ask anybody this directly, but I thought maybe Gloria would tell me. She looked at me and said, “Judith, there is only one thing you have to know about combat. When you get out there, all you are going to have to know, is where you are going to have to go to the bathroom.” I didn't say anything. She said … “The story is what is happening to the Vietnamese. Don't get into that bang-bang stuff, that's what the boys are doing.”

Gloria returned from Vietnam and kept reporting for the
Times
until the mid-1970s. She wrote a book about her personal past in Vietnam,
Winners & Losers.
She taught seminars at Princeton University and creative writing to Vietnam vets in Boston. She was known for her generosity to street people. When others
asked Gloria to reflect on her own Vietnam experiences, she refused, replying to one request that Vietnam was “such a dark and powerful and terrible thing in my life.” She said that outsiders couldn't understand those years in Vietnam, its tragedies and its grief.

Gloria had no patience for grandstanding or other people's pet causes that couldn't compare with the atrocities of life in Vietnam. Unlike many Americans who took out their antiwar views on returning Vietnam veterans by humiliating them or ignoring their problems returning to normal lives, she sympathized with the young men who came home jobless, drug-addicted, or mentally unstable. She took on rock star John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono when they staged a “Bed-In for Peace” against the Vietnam War in 1969, famously calling out Lennon for being ridiculous and naive if he thought he'd saved a single life.

Gloria also disparaged America's second wave of feminists, the angry protesters who took to American streets in the 1970s. She had met women in Vietnam who had lost their husbands, children, homes, and way of life, women whose lives were truly desperate. By comparison, Gloria observed, American women had little to complain about. “I could not rejoice [at feminism] when women I knew went back to school to be lawyers or doctors,” she said later, “when in 1973 I knew 11 Vietnam veterans without college degrees.”

In 1989 Gloria flew to Israel to cover her “second war,” as she thought of it. She lived among Palestinians who lived in homes and camps along the Gaza Strip, where an
intifada
(uprising) against Israel had started in 1987. She was a crusader for the Palestinians and openly declared that Israel oppressed them. She called for a Palestinian homeland, an extremely unpopular view among most Americans, who thought of Palestinians as terrorists, following suicide bombings, hijackings of airliners and
cruise ships in the 1970s and '80s, and attacks on Israeli athletes and US Marines.

Famously private, Gloria Emerson refused most requests for interviews in her later years. Joyce Hoffmann, author of
On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam,
asked for an interview and was turned down. Gloria changed her mind sometime later, when she agreed to write the introduction for a collection of memoirs of other women who had worked and reported in Vietnam during the war.

Gloria Emerson never forgot Vietnam. She was in her late 70s when the United States and its allies invaded Iraq in 2003 to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein. Outraged, Gloria vented to her friend Rod Nordland, a younger reporter who was covering Iraq for
Newsweek
magazine. At her memorial service, Nordland spoke about his friend and how her experience in Vietnam had stayed with her:

“It's absolutely disgusting, isn't it?” she'd say. “There's no hope at all. It'll be just as bad as that [Vietnam] was, I can't bear to think of it.” Yet she did, a great deal; she followed [the Iraq War] religiously, she watched every major network and most of the cable news programs on it, read everything we wrote about it, even had computer-using friends print out Web stories on it for her. It wasn't her war the way Vietnam was, of course. The last time I saw her, in July, she said, with some regret, “I'll never be able to go there.” …. Whenever I saw her she'd pepper me with questions about Iraq, and then browbeat me, saying, “You mustn't keep going there,” and then finally she'd add, “but of course you have to, dear,” and just as abruptly she'd change the subject. I think that Iraq and this sense of here we go again, just made her sad.

Being from the South Side of Chicago, where life was real, the romance of “revolution” and “liberation” never captured me.

—Georgie Anne Geyer

In November 1980, a veteran American reporter flew from Chicago to Amman, Jordan, so she could hail a taxi. There was no direct flight from the United States to Baghdad, Iraq, her final destination. But in Amman, Jordan's capital city, Arabs were friendly enough to American journalists, and she hired her taxi with no problem. Accompanied by two male reporters from other newspapers, she sped east 750 miles across the desert to Baghdad. Her name was Georgie Anne Geyer, and her plan was to interview Iraq's minister of information, Tariq Aziz, the mouthpiece for Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein.

The United States had no diplomatic ties with either Baghdad or Tehran, Iran, but foreign correspondents such as Georgie Anne Geyer—Gee Gee to her friends—could go places and ask questions where American officials couldn't. Iraq and its bigger neighbor Iran were at war, both Muslim nations yet sworn enemies divided by culture and religion.

Gee Gee had questions for Aziz, especially about why Iraq had launched an invasion across the desert into Iran. Did Iraq plan to seize Iran's vast oil fields? Was Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, hoping to kill Iran's Shiite religious dictator, the Ayatollah Khomeini? And what was Saddam's thinking on the
ever-present troubles between Jews and Arabs in Israel? Gee Gee had scored an interview with Saddam seven years earlier, and now she hoped for the best: to come face-to-face with his spokesman, Tariq Aziz, an elegant, English-speaking Iraqi Christian who steered his way through his talk with her as carefully as he steered his way as a member of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council.

When she was finally escorted into Aziz's office after a 12-day wait in Baghdad—all her careful planning had never landed her an actual appointment at the Ministry of Information—Gee Gee was direct with Aziz. Why had Iraq invaded Iran? “For one reason only,” he said. “Because Khomeini was trying to put the entire region in flames, to destroy the borders and reignite the struggles of the sixth and seventh centuries, when Islam swept from Arabia to Spain.”

Gee Gee had read wide and deep about the Middle East and its intriguing, violent past, which seemed so strange to most Americans. Now at the age of 45, she felt at ease interpreting this sweep of history for readers of her thrice-weekly newspaper column. She was comfortable in her own skin. The hesitation, shyness, and guilt that might have plagued her in her 20s were gone. After all these years she “simply
knew
things.”

Gee Gee Geyer was out to know the truth, to discover what made people tick. As a girl growing up on Chicago's South Side, she had watched people up close and personal. Life was like that for kids who lived with their families in tidy bungalows in her neighborhood, folks trying to keep food on the table as the United States lived through the Great Depression. Gee Gee's father was a dairyman. Robert George Geyer, a giant, ham-fisted man of German ancestry, lived out his principles of honesty, self-reliance, and hard work. He refused to have anything to do with Chicago's political machine and its crooked building
inspectors, who sent Mafia men to collect $5,000 and $10,000 bribes and were perfectly willing to see small dairies like Geyer's swallowed up by big ones. “If you were not Irish or one of the machine ethnic groups, you weren't in—especially Germans, with their individualistic tendencies toward their own businesses,” Gee Gee wrote about her dad. As a youth, he had steered clear of a gang of Irish toughs on the streets, including a boy named Richard Daley, who grew up to become Chicago's mayor and political boss of the city's Democratic machine.

Gee Gee Geyer inherited her father's hatred of bullies, never to become, as she said, “one of those suburban relativists, bred in suburbia where liberalism was easy.” On the city's tribal streets she knew there was “a very real bully on every block.” There were other reasons to feel uneasy on the streets of Chicago; most of Gee Gee's white neighbors feared or hated Chicago's black residents, who lived in their own parts of town. Sometimes Gee Gee broke the rules and ventured into the city's black neighborhoods to sit and talk with the old men on their front stoops when the weather was good.

Gee Gee was an intense young girl. She
needed
to learn about these old men and about so much more in life. She asked serious questions about human existence, questions that many adults never considered. She lay awake at night wondering about her own place on earth. “What if one person in the world knew the truth,” she asked herself, “and that person was a woman and she could not speak?”

Her mother, Georgie Hazel Geyer, taught Gee Gee how to write and to dream of travel to faraway lands, even as she complained about her own load of housework. Though Gee Gee's mother clearly felt stuck in her role as a homemaker, she expected Gee Gee to grow up, marry, and become a housewife too. Decades later, Gee Gee wrote, “My choosing a profession,
I am sure, struck her as a betrayal until later in life, when she came to understand and even prize it.”

It was Gee Gee's brother Glen, 10 years her senior, who became another source of strength in her life. Glen, like his mother, had a creative soul and grew up to be a well-respected dress designer in Chicago. He played with his little sister, creating for her a charming fantasy world that fed her imagination, and he encouraged her to become a journalist when she grew up.

“My family simply told me in every way that the world was open to me,” Gee Gee Geyer wrote when she looked back on her long career. In the fall of 1952 she entered the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. There she learned the ins and outs of becoming a
reporter
—not a media specialist or journalist as such men and women called themselves in later times—but a
reporter
trained to learn the facts of a story and write it well. She adored history, political science, and literature, and she despised the hands-on classes that Medill required.

I particularly resented typesetting. There I was a senior ready to go out in the world and wanting to be prepared for it by knowing everything—history, philosophy, physics … things that might lead a seeking person to knowledge and wisdom. And
we
seniors, at the height of our searching, were standing two full afternoons a week, setting type
by hand.

No matter that newspapers no longer set type that way. No matter that they were wasting our time with woebegone formalities. That was required.

Gee Gee didn't embark on a career in reporting when she graduated. She won a highly prized Fulbright Scholar Award, and in 1956 she headed to Vienna, Austria. In October, she
awoke to the news that neighboring Hungarians had revolted against their Soviet occupiers, and refugees poured across the border into Austria. The uprising was short-lived. The Russians crushed the revolution, imprisoning thousands of Hungarians who had demanded their freedom from Communism.

With a busload of students, Gee Gee rode to the border, her first time as an eyewitness to true human suffering. She served food to stricken refugees who had nothing but their freedom. Heartbroken, Gee Gee asked herself how such things could happen. “Heroism had failed. Goodness had lost. What was the matter with the world?”

Then the world turned on her. When Gee Gee returned home the next fall, she was desperately sick with hepatitis. She spent an entire year in bed, two months of that in a coma, and marked her slow recovery by how high she could raise her hands over her head. It was a tough lesson for a young woman who had felt invincible, and it taught Gee Gee the value of patience, that sometimes she would have to play the waiting game.