'GET ME TO VUKOVAR'

HEADNOTE

The Lure of the Dangerous Road

It was a typical foreign correspondent's experience. Seventy-two hours before, I had been in an urban combat zone in Iraq's Sunni triangle. From a nearby military airfield I

caught a ride in a Marine helicopter to another airfield, where I spent the night on a dirty cot on a cement floor. The next day I hitchhiked on another helicopter to yet another airfield, deep in Iraq's western desert, where I slept in a half-opened tent dviring a dust storm.The day after, I caught a Russian cargo flight to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. At Sharjah, I said goodbye to the crew and made my way in the dark to the civilian arrivals terminal. Suddenly, I was under bright lights amid noisy crowds of Europeans on holiday, clad in fine clothes and jewelry. A half-hour taxi ride brought me to a luxury hotel in Dubai. I hadn't bathed properly for a long time. My clothes and backpack were layered with filth. People looked at me strangely.

In the lobby, on the way to my room, I noticed a newsstand. The front pages were all about Falluja, where I had just been. It was as though I were at the center of a scandal that everyone was reading about, in which even the most accurate accounts were unconnected to what I knew and had actually experienced. I felt deeply alienated.

Yet I also felt so alive. Following weeks of danger and deprivation, I exulted in a few days of hot baths, fine food, and wine. My silence, too, was a form of pleasure: surrounded by lively young marines for so long, I enjoyed not having to converse with anyone, outside of ordering meals.

In Yemen the year before, my ordeal had been different, and so was the enjoyment afterward. I had decided to travel alone through a tribal area near the Saudi border, where al Qaeda was known to be active. I tossed and turned in bed the night before departing, gruesome scenarios spinning in my mind. Morning brought a skull-like, lack-of-sleep sensation. But the worries and precautions quickly dissolved in the reality of the journey and the associated screw-ups, including the fact that my tribal bodyguards never showed up. During the trip, I was virtually alone with my unarmed driver for long stretches in places where officials in the capital of Sana'a had told me abductions were likely. Yet nothing untoward happened. Emerging on the other side of the dangerous tribal area into the Wadi Hadhramaut of eastern Yemen, I found a charming hotel overlooking an oasis. Its white walls were lined with pink oleanders. I slept deeply, and woke to the meditative sound of birds and the smell of fresh flowers. The tense experience of the previous days seemed like ages ago. I spent the day admiring the mudbrick mini-skyscrapers of the Hadhramauti towns, with their wooden latticework and sky-blue window frames.

On another occasion the return to civilization was less exhilarating. I had just completed an overland journey of several weeks from Istanbul to Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. When I arrived tired and filthy in the nice lobby of an Ashgabat hotel, looking forward to a comfortable respite, there was a fax waiting, informing me that I had just been attacked in a major magazine in the United States. Instantly, the living-in-the-moment high of travel dissolved and I was back to normal, sedentary existence, with all of its petty worries. Physical safety and creature comforts exact a terrible price in that regard. Thus, there is nothing more therapeutic than being in a remote place out of phone and e-mail contact. Being in a war zone also helps. When mortars are raining down, you don't worry about mortgage payments.

In fact, that sour memory of Ashgabat was nothing more than a compressed version of what happens every time I return from a particularly intense bout of reporting or travel. At first there is an adrenaline-charged feeling of inviolability - after what I've been through, I'm a new person, I see this sheltered little world where I live from afar. I'll never be vulnerable again. But even if there is no bad news awaiting you at the hotel reception desk, that feeling lasts only hours, a day or two at the most. It dribbles away in secret, until you realize that you are not a new person after all, and never will be.Yet the experience you've just lived through remains vivid. That leads to a second depressing realization: you now know something vital about the world that no one else does, but it doesn't help you in your daily life. Your experience has only made you lonelier.

Foreign correspondents are particularly oppressed by this sensation. For them, places like Saigon, Beirut, Sarajevo, Kabul, and lately Baghdad are not the places everyone else thinks they know through the headlines and history books, but different, far richer realities. As with Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, it is the very complexity of the truths that they know firsthand that cuts them off from their families and the rest of the world. Henry Tanner, a New York Times correspondent of two generations ago, caught the flavor of this in a dispatch he sent from the Congo in 1961 :

The Congo is a reporter's nightmare - mostly because the English language is woefully inadequate for describing Congolese affairs.

Words like "strongman," "general," "minister," "offensive," "Communist," or "civil war" all have a generally accepted meaning and presumably evoke a fairly precise image in the reader's mind. Well, let the reader be disabused. Any resemblance between the things he visualizes when reading such words in a dispatch from the Congo, and the things the reporter has seen is strictly coincidental.

The accumulation of such fantastic knowledge that simply cannot be expressed makes dealing with ordinary life difficult. How can you negotiate the mundane yet perilous entanglements of work and family if you are obsessed with faraway places? The solution is constant motion. Never settle down.When reporting or traveling you feel so young; the moment you stop you feel old.

I remember having lunch with a foreign correspondent for a major newspaper in the early 1990s. The fighting in Vukovar in the former Yugoslavia was particularly fierce at the time, and he had just returned to be with his family for a short respite before going back there. It was a typical domestic scene at a lakeside restaurant in Italy. The kids were screaming at the table and his wife was briefly angry with him for not helping her sort things out. he looked at me with a wise smile. His eyebrows raised, he whispered,"Get me to Vukovar!"

AUTHOR_AFFILIATION

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.