Week in Review

Coming home

Willis Witter, our deputy foreign editor, has been sleeping a lot since he got home from Iraq on Wednesday — a natural enough response to the release from the stress of working in a war zone.

The sleep started coming in waves almost as soon as his plane had safely completed its takeoff from the Baghdad airport, ascending as quickly as possible to avoid any ground-to-air missiles.

Mr. Witter, who came home with photographer Maya Alleruzzo, says he slept through most of the flight to Amman, Jordan, fell asleep again in the taxi on his way into the city center, and yet again in a chair in his hotel lobby while checking in.

What had begun as a four-week assignment involving very real but manageable risks had been extended by two weeks and gotten a whole lot more dangerous.

The turning point was the March 31 murder and mutilation of four American security guards in Fallujah; suddenly the idea of being a foreign correspondent in a war zone became a lot less fun.

The atmosphere deteriorated further when U.S. Marines began their retaliatory action in the city. The view among many Iraqis that the whole city was being punished for the actions of a few brought a change of mood in the capital, with most Americans reporting a hostility from the Iraqi public they had not felt before.

There were a few other things that added to Mr. Witter’s stress level:

• The quick dash to Fallujah with his driver/translator after the Marine offensive began, taking the same road on which a fuel convoy was ambushed and several Westerners were killed or kidnapped a day later; he had to hitch a ride on a military helicopter to get back to Baghdad.

• Having a mortar shell explode close in front of him and bullets fly over his head while covering the battle in Fallujah.

• Dealing with threats against the life of his driver/translator. Several such persons employed by Western journalists have already been threatened or killed as collaborators, though in this case the threat came from people Mr. Witter had interviewed.

• Visiting the home of a Chaldean Christian family not long after two of the children had been murdered in front of their parents’ eyes.

• Coping with a threat by a U.S. military public information officer to pull his press pass and otherwise punish the newspaper because he spoke to a soldier fresh from Fallujah while preparing an article about the heroic efforts of U.S. doctors at a military hospital.

“Those last two weeks were just one thing after another,” Mr. Witter says, with some understatement.

Getting out

Back in Washington, we reluctantly agreed to let Mr. Witter and Miss Alleruzzo stay on a little longer when the twin insurgencies in Fallujah and the Shi’ite south heated up, but were more than ready to get them home by the time cease-fires were declared on both fronts.

Getting them back was something else. The highway to Amman, which they had taken on the way in, was no longer passable, even if there had not been the military situation in Fallujah and further west in Ramadi.

Within two weeks of their arrival in Baghdad, banditry along the remote stretches beyond Ramadi had gotten so bad that no one was risking the drive except in heavily guarded convoys. The same had been true for the road south to Kuwait for some time.

That left the airport, which, despite the threat of rocket attack, is now the safest way in and out. But so many people were leaving that it was five days before our team could get seats on one of the two daily flights to Jordan.

Mr. Witter — inasmuch as he remembers the flight between naps — says there was no applause or cheers from the plane full of contractors, aid workers, reporters and others when the aircraft safely reached cruising altitude, or even when it landed in Amman.

“It was almost an atmosphere of a funeral home,” he says. “Everybody was pretty quiet — there was sort of an atmosphere of a mission not yet accomplished.”

• David W. Jones is the foreign editor of The Washington Times. His e-mail address is djones@washingtontimes.com.