Tales from the Press Room: Camping out with journalists in Iraq

By Jane Stillwater
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com

Here I am sitting around the press room in the Green Zone, waiting to go out into Baghdad and find some STORIES.  And then suddenly it occurred to me that there are about 25 really interesting stories hanging around within ten feet of me here, just waiting to get discovered.  Your fearless reporter Jane is on the job!

I’m typing this from inside a room the size of a large trailer — actually it sort of IS a large trailer.  There’s a table for this computer, a table for food, some hook-ups for laptops, four sets of bunk beds, two couches and eleven cots.  Journalists are typing, sleeping, eating Cheerios, sorting through their dirty laundry, chatting and shrugging into their Kevlar to go out on an embed.

“Is there any coffee left?”  Yes.  And a box of Girl Scout cookies too. 

“Where are you off to today,” I asked a journalist from Finland.

“I’m gonna spend another day at the Combat Support Hospital.”  He and about three other journalists spend a lot of time there.  Apparently, it’s like Gray’s Anatomy — so many doctors, so many operations, so many stories.  “You see a lot of tragedy there but the hardest to deal with are the children.  Yesterday there was a four-year-old Iraqi boy with shrapnel in his abdomen.  My son is that age.  It really got to me.”

Message from the Green Zone: Humpty Dumpty was here

By Jane Stillwater
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com

I’m tired of being in Iraq.  I’m tired of facing tragedy here day after day.  This country is in trouble.  This country is screwed. 

I’ve been in Iraq for less than two weeks now and already I’m ready to go home.  Everywhere I look, there is tragedy