Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival in Iraq

When she arrived in Iraq in May 2004 as the most junior member of the Washington Post bureau staff, Jackie Spinner entered a war zone where traditional reporting had become impossible. Bombs were a daily occurrence and kidnapping an ever-present threat for American journalists. Yet "the longer I stayed, the more Iraq felt like my home," she writes.

Tell Them I Didn't Cry is Jackie's vivid and intensely personal story of being a journalist in Iraq — where for nine months she covered the war from its center in Baghdad, Fallujah, Kurdistan, and Abu Ghraib — and of being transformed, eventually, from a rookie correspondent into a seasoned foreign reporter.

As she grew accustomed to the realities of living and reporting in Iraq, Jackie found that there was as much to love as there was to fear. The frenetic and grueling pace was an exhilarating challenge, and she discovered a powerful sense of purpose in delivering the story of Iraq. Soon, the Iraqi translators, drivers, and bodyguards that the Post staff relied on to be their eyes and ears, and, more important, to keep them safe, became not only her colleagues, but also her close friends and tightly knit family. Still, security rapidly deteriorated and Jackie describes with chilling simplicity narrowly surviving a kidnapping attempt and writing her name and blood type on her flak jacket before covering the battle in Fallujah.

By turns lighthearted, grave, vulnerable, and fiery, Jackie recounts the difficulties of being a woman in a country where women are marginalized and a journalist where the press are no longer safe. She eloquently chronicles what occurred behind her headlines as she struggled to preserve her sanity, and sometimes her life, while also doing the one job in which she had found true meaning.

Jackie's account is punctuated by brief vignettes written by her identical twin sister, Jenny, who watched as Jackie was drawn further and further into a world increasingly fraught with danger. Every morning she looked for Jackie's byline in the Post, knowing only then that her sister had survived another day.

Through it all — the violence and fear as well as the moments of humor, camaraderie, and warmth — Jackie Spinner brings home with brilliant intensity and candor what it is like to report on a war under exceptional circumstances.

"After I returned home from a recent reporting stint in Baghdad, a friend invited his 10-year-old son to ask me anything he wanted about Iraq. Immediately, the boy replied, 'Why would you risk your life for a story?'

Sometimes it takes a child to ask the sensible questions that adults won't. In her poignant 'Tell Them I Didn't Cry,' Jackie Spinner, a Washington Post reporter first sent to... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Iraq in 2004, helps explain why we journalists get lured to the front — and then have trouble going home.

Spinner's fresh eyes, unlike those of more war-weathered correspondents, provide an honest look at what it means to cover a country that often appears to be coming apart at the seams. Without pretending to be a Middle East expert, Spinner focuses on her relationships with the Post's Iraqi staff, who become her family in Baghdad, and gauges how living under the constant threat of bombings and kidnappings is straining her ties with her real family back home. It is a tale she weaves well, bolstered by the moral, spiritual and literary support she gets from her twin sister, Jenny, an English professor at St. Joseph's University. Together they chart the strange inverse relationship that so often develops when covering a page-one war: As Spinner's career skyrockets, her health deteriorates. Even though she recognizes the toll it is taking, Spinner becomes unable to pull herself away: She's got Iraq and its people under her skin. This is the same kind of unbridled dedication to the story that kept my colleague Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor freelance reporter kidnapped in Baghdad last month, working in Iraq nearly year-round since 2003. Spinner's willingness to lay bare her posting's side effects, from the droll to the devastating, sets her book apart.

She also helps explain a breed that is no longer the rare bird it was in, say, Vietnam: the female war correspondent. Spinner captures our simultaneous urge to prove how unflappable we are — she took the title 'Tell Them I Didn't Cry' from her own shell-shocked but defiant words after escaping a terrifying kidnapping attempt — and balances it against her unmistakably feminine impulses. She bakes cookies to win over suspicious policemen, forges intense friendships with her translators and just happens to be the person in the bureau who whips up fabulous Friday night dinners.

None of which, of course, answers the 10-year-old's question. Why put ourselves in harm's way, only to have readers complain (as many of Spinner's did) that press coverage of Iraq is negative and unpatriotic? 'I didn't become a journalist to serve my country,' Spinner explains. 'I became a journalist to serve the story.' That means documenting the anguish of a country for which Americans now bear enormous responsibility. It means telling the truth and hoping that our Iraqi colleagues, many of them as fearful of insurgents today as they were of Saddam Hussein, will do the same. It means showing readers that the lives of Iraqis are just as important as ours. Spinner reminds us of all of these essentials, and then some. 'If you're there, risking your life,' she writes, 'you want someone, anyone, to understand why you are there.' Her fine book widens the circle of people who will.

Ilene R. Prusher, Jerusalem bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, began covering Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

" Reviewed by Ilene R. Prusher., Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Washington Post" reporter Jackie Spinner covered the war in Iraq from May 2004 to March 2005 and rose from the most junior reporter to the "Post's" Baghdad Bureau Chief. Here, she chronicles the nine months she spent living and reporting in Iraq.

When she arrived in Iraq in May 2004 as the most junior member of the Washington Post bureau staff, Spinner entered a war zone where traditional reporting had become impossible. Bombs were a daily occurrence and kidnapping an ever-present threat for journalists. Yet "the longer I stayed, the more Iraq felt like my home," she writes. The frenetic and grueling pace was an exhilarating challenge, and she discovered a powerful sense of purpose in delivering the story. Soon, the Iraqi translators, drivers, and bodyguards that the Post staff relied on to be their eyes and ears, and, more important, to keep them safe, became not only her colleagues, but also her close friends and tightly knit family. By turns lighthearted, grave, vulnerable, and fiery, Jackie recounts the difficulties of being a woman in a country where women are marginalized and a journalist where the press are no longer safe.--From