"Gazing into the Abyss" a Iraq Travel Page by filmboomer

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Bunker @ Al Jaber Air Base

The Crossing

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you."
- Fredrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

It may or may not be tomorrow that we cross the border but either way, I'm beginning my Iraq "Travelogue" because it's Diane Sawyer's intention to do stories from there, rather than from home base here in Kuwait, which is ably covered by John Quiñones and other correspondents already here.

We may be arising before light to leave at 5:00 AM. I'll get the call later about the call time.

I see Diane Sawyer is on live right now from the air base. We were supposed to go out there with her this morning but he producer took the other crew as they'd been north before. My camera guy is pissed to have that jerked from under us. Me? I don't need the pressure of working with that particular lady who doesn't suffer mistakes and technical problems gladly. I'd rather be in my hotel room, watching the action from here.

The navy meteorologists are predicting severe sandstorms over the next few days. I'm not looking forward to that because I think the producers are going to want to go out there anyway.

The closer I get to moving north, the more nervous I'm becoming. Whatever bravado I had is a wispy memory. When Kevin (the cameraman who brought me with him) asked me a half-hour ago,

"Have you ever been on such a fun job?!"

I responded, "Well, I certainly have had more FUN but this is definitely interesting."

Kevin: "Aw c'mon! You didn't have a great time last week?" I think he was referring to the series of air raid alerts and scurrying around trying to find something to videotape.
I changed the subject as nothing I could say would convince him that (for ME) this is life-changing and compelling but "fun"? Hardly. As we go north, we'll be, at best, living with, in my experience, unprecedented privations. Then there is the aspect of life-threatening danger from snipers, car bombers, mob mentality of a dangerous indiginous people.

That's what's on my mind as I sit here in my comfortable hotel room contemplating the very uncertain future.

My low back went out last night while I was trying to tuck the sheet under the mattress so today I visited a clinic, trying to find someone who knew anything about chiropractic. Good luck! I found a Bulgarian woman physician who took X-rays, gave me a shot of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory/muscle relaxant (non-psychotropic) and was putting electro-stimulation and heat on it when my cell phone rang and I had to jet out of there to return for an assignment.

We're currently waiting (again) for permission to visit a refugee camp near the Iraqi border. No permit, no visit. We have four hours of usable daylight left and it takes an hour to get there. The window is closing.

Tuesday, March 25
2:50PM
The window closed and the new one opened today. Kevin and I went out this morning at 9:00 with another crew to do a Diane Sawyer 2-camera interview with one of the US AID workers who are trying to get medical aid north to the effected areas. We banged that one out in a half-hour and have been sitting around for the rest of the day.

The word has just come down from the network that they're closing the bureau here in Kuwait within 24 hours. Five days into the war and they're getting cold feet around the expenditure. I hear they are spending a million dollars a day for the Mideast bureaus so the cutbacks are going to help stop the bleeding of red ink but there will be no central point for all the footage we'll be shooting from tomorrow on. I guess we'll feed by satellite the balance of our work to London or New York autonomously.

It rained today on the leading edge of what was supposed to be a sandstorm. I don't know what it would look like to have rain at the same time the sandstorm arrives, but it can't be pretty or easy to work in.

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Diane Sawyer & Madigan Hospital folks

Continuing

Today was one I hope is never duplicated.

We began the day at 7:00 AM in a sandstorm and very cold wind, leaving the hotel in a caravan of five vehicles to take Diane Sawyer to Kuwait Air Force Base where the new version of the MASH units are set up. We stopped by the Hilton, a half-hour away to meet with a military escort who advised us to keep moving if we encountered any stone-throwing, traffic lights (pesky things those) or sniper fire, "not that we anticipate anything like that" he said.

We traveled in a 7-car caravan to the medical base and had to pass through three checkpoints and slalom courses of barriers (to ensure no speeding carbomb vehicles) and the maze that is the encampment.

The medical base is incredibly labrynthine and there is no way to see beyond the tents in front of you due to the flat nature of the terrain. Without a guide, therefore, you can not only get lost....you can get detained by very testy soldiers.

We arrived at a series of tents and other soft-sided structures that can't really be called tents, all connected by passageways and sealed off from the world, given their own heating/air conditioning systems fed at head-level through fabric tubes and containing everything a great triage center and emergency treatment facility has at home. They treat every specialty and have the best people the services have.

Our vehicles carried Diane Sawyer, three producers, two camera crews, two drivers and two technicians to set up the satellite system for the live Good Morning America feed. Now, I don't know if you've ever wondered what it would be like to try to contain the abovementioned different personalities in one area, given the differing agendas, so let me tell you, it's like herding ducks. We had two escorts...five too few. Pretty soon we were wandering all over the 'hood, poking our noses in here, chatting up the locals independent of supervision...essentially making annoyances of ourselves.

We weren't there a half-hour before a very irate Captain let us know that we were "this close" to being shut down and run out of the area. This message was delivered after he chewed his sergeant up one side and down the other (I'm cleaning up what language I would have used here in case there are children present). We stood admonished and begged his forgiveness, promising never to leave the escorts again and he grudgingly let us stay. Later, when the Colonel told him how COOL it was that we were there, he relaxed into the inevitability of his control being sort of...superfluous.

We shot some B-roll of the medical offices, people going about their business and got permission to videotape one GI who was wounded by some explosion that might have been a grenade...it was never really explained and we didn't push it.

Then the hard stuff came up. We had about five minutes to prep for the "face shots" (this is where the group tells the camera which unit they're with and yells "Good Morning America". We needed six minutes to get the gear switched over for that little piece so we had the producer doing a little nervous tapdance and Diane calling "C'mon people!"

We got that done and then were dedicated to getting the live shots that were fed live to New York. There was one little problem: We had changed all our bulbs in the lights to 220volts to accommodate the local current. The U.S. Army used good old 110 in their generators. You can imagine the scrambling involved in trying to get back to 110 quickly.

The sandstorm was creating havoc in satellite reception; even in finding a bird to lock onto. We had one problem after another in getting Diane the New York director's voice in her earpiece and that of the camera operator (for shot direction) and after that, everything seemed to speed up and become more and more chaotic until JUST BEFORE AIRTIME. That's when my own choice for "star of the day", Aaron Murphy (the other sound mixer) saved the day by picking through all his adaptors to find just the right ones. We had, honestly, no more than three minutes grace and tempers were running hot.

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A-10 flight line @ night

GMA

Meanwhile, we're eating, breathing and blinking away sand and dust.

All-in-all, it was a very challenging day. The only thing that would be worse is the prospect of duplicating it tomorrow or anytime in the future.

I got photos and a few digital video clips sans audio in the process and will gladly share those with you all when I get back.

Tomorrow, we might be going up to Umm Qasr. Diane Sawyer's producer is trying to one of two things for her. Either get her into a helicopter to fly way north for taped coverage of that area; or a flight on a medical evacuation plane with some of the wounded. Diane did say that she wanted to make sure that the medivac flight wasn't just an OB/GYN doctor and a few women with yeast infections...I think that's probably a good idea, don't you?

Enough... I'm totally exhausted but wanted to jot these things down before my memory goes where my hair went.

I'll add a photo or two tomorrow.j

Thursday, March 27

We (Kevin Graf, Brian Hale, P.J. O'Rourke and I) were in the process of going in convoy of buses and private vehicles up to Umm Qasr this morning at 11:35 when the air raid siren went off. Conversations continued as if nothing was happening until BOOM! Some sort of airborne explosion halted all conversations and changed the topics to current events.

We grabbed our masks, hopped in the car and tore off after the source of the explosion. We knew the general direction so headed West toward the Doha port facility, where the Patriot missile battery is located.

P.J. O'Rourke (Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly) said from his experience, that the explosion was definitely Patriot and not Scud in origin. We relaxed a bit and went as far as the port facilities until we realized from interviewing the local soldiers and police that the explosion was most certainly over the bay and no debris would be left.

We returned a few minutes ago to find that the convoy to Umm Qasr was canceled...why is anyone's guess but I believe it has to do with one of two things: either security could not be guaranteed; or their bureaucracy couldn't handle the crush of reporters, camera crews and still photographers in the office and in the buses.

Thursday 4:30PM
We're going to the U.S. Air Base tomorrow to follow A-10 pilots around for awhile, a lå "48 Hours". That is more up our alley; running and gunning for tape..not LIVE!!! I actually look forward to it. We'll leave around noon and return tomorrow night, meaning we'll be shooting after dark.