{"id":1920,"date":"2019-12-04T22:37:46","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T22:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/12\/04\/coming-home-from-stories-of-war\/"},"modified":"2024-03-05T16:21:22","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T16:21:22","slug":"coming-home-from-stories-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/12\/04\/coming-home-from-stories-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Coming home from stories of war"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
\n
\n \u00a0<\/em>L<\/span>ast month, journalist, filmmaker and military veteran Zack Baddorf made a plea, in an essay for Nieman Reports, that more veterans consider careers in journalism and more newsrooms hire veterans<\/a>. Besides more accurate subject expertise, he wrote, \u201cvets bring with them objectivity, neutrality, and ability to work in crisis \u2014 all valuable attributes for newsrooms.\u201d

\"\"<\/a>
Pam Constable<\/figcaption><\/figure>

While Pam Constable<\/a> is not a military veteran, she is a veteran of more than 30 years of reporting from conflict zones. In that time, she has done work that embodies every one of the characteristics Baddorf notes.

Now Constable is trying on a different pace and view. She recently returned to the U.S. after a tour as bureau chief in Afghanistan\/Pakistan for the Washington Post, and has moved to a part-time contract position with the Post as she works on another book. (Read her sobering essay on the U.S. she found<\/a> upon her return.)

\u201cI\u2019m looking out my window now, at a green field (in Virginia), with a white fence around it,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are birds in the trees, and a dog outside on my porch. When I looked outside my window in Kabul, I saw two story-high concrete walls with razor wire on top.\u201d

Constable reported from Iraq, South Asia and other conflict zones for the Post. Her writing style is riveting, humane, and deeply narrative, getting to the heart of every broken dream with such rapid-fire clarity and compassion that it\u2019s hard to fathom the personal cost of that work.

A passage by Constable from her memoir, “Fragments of Grace:”<\/a>
How strange it feels and yet how familiar. Once more I am alone, wedged into a window seat, sleepless at dawn, floating between continents and commitments. Far below, civilizations rise and fall, forest fires\u00a0<\/strong>rage and die out. A child cries and no one picks her up, a spindly burro totters along a road under a mountain of bricks, a man watches a shadow creep across a cell wall. These images touch me, but they cannot hold me. I jet in and out of other people\u2019s sealed fates, I devour their pain and transform it into prose and move on, clutching a passport from the most powerful nation on Earth.<\/em><\/blockquote>
Since 1982 Constable has largely lived out of a suitcase \u2014 a very compact one, minus the luxuries ordinarily found in American flight bags. She\u2019s reported from Latin America, Central America, the Caribbean, and South Asia during political, military, economic and civil strife. She lived and worked in Chile under the Pinochet regime, and in Afghanistan during and after Taliban rule.

Besides packing needed field gear, including modest clothing for the Muslim countries where she\u2019s worked, she also carries another kind of suitcase \u2014 a mental carry-on with tools of the foreign correspondent trade, mastered during years in the field: self-reliance, flexibility, and hyper-awareness.

I\u2019<\/span>ve been following Constable\u2019s work for a decade, since shape-shifting my 35-year career as a professional singer\/songwriter to newspaper reporter to freelancer. My acquaintance with her, however, started 53 years ago. We were classmates at a private boarding school in Connecticut. We took similar classes, read the same books, and wrote different but equally impassioned term papers. But all likeness stops there. I took to the stage, while she took to regions under siege from combat and poverty.

Constable studied American civilization at Brown University, then built a solid career as a newspaper reporter and foreign correspondent, from the Baltimore Sun to the Boston Globe and finally to the Post in 1994. During that time, she also published three books<\/a>, one each about conflicts in Chile, South Asia and Pakistan.

With conflict leading the headlines and at home in the U.S., I felt compelled to reach out to Constable for guidance, both in story craft and mentorship. How does she maintain her cool while bombs explode around her? How does she keep her language fresh when writing stories that, dramatic as they are, have an inevitable sameness? How does she maintain a sense of compassion and hope after repeated exposure to violence and suffering?

My summary of her responses: Soldier on. Meet your breaking news deadlines but dig in deeper with follow-up stories, maybe even a book. Keep the pen\/the computer keys moving while maintaining hyper-alertness to every nuance, every shadow. Seek out the humanity behind every bullet \u2014 which are the true stories behind the story.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

\"\"<\/a>
Street in Kabul<\/figcaption><\/figure>

W<\/span>ere there special challenges that came with being a woman working in warzones, and in Muslim countries?<\/strong>

In almost every country I\u2019ve worked in, there were other women doing similar jobs, both local and foreign. So I wasn\u2019t such an anomaly. I would say though, there were plenty of times when it was physically difficult to keep up, especially when I was working alongside the U.S. military or sometimes the international military.

There were only a few times that I felt truly uncomfortable as a woman. For example, there was a short window of time when the Taliban regime was in power in Kabul and women had very strict limitations on what they could do and where they could go. Of course, we had to cover up and wear modest, loose clothing. But we didn\u2019t have to cover our faces.

People would often wonder what I was doing in a foreign country all by myself, but rarely did I get questions that I thought were really insulting. It was more, I would say, curiosity\u2026The way they responded to me had much more to do with whether or not they had any opinion or prejudices about Americans, about the West, about journalists, and last but not least, about how they felt dealing with a woman as a professional, especially if she was a foreigner.

What advice would you give women (or men) who want to pursue this kind of work?
<\/strong>Young people today tend to think of journalism as being on camera, or online, or something that\u2019s relatively technical and safe. When you report from poor and conflicted countries, you\u2019re often in conditions of real hardship and uncertainty. You don\u2019t necessarily even know what you\u2019re going to do the next day, or the next moment. You have to be self-reliant, flexible, and aware of your surroundings… You wake up in the morning and you need to figure out, OK, has something important happened today? If so, what do I do about it? Where should I go? Who should I talk to? You\u2019re really on your own. You can\u2019t just call the office.

Language is another issue. You need to know the language or have somebody with you who does, because there is no point in going somewhere abroad if you\u2019re not going to be able to have a really meaningful conversation. I\u2019m fluent in French and Spanish, which I used for many years reporting in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the years I\u2019ve been reporting in the Middle East and South Asia, I\u2019ve learned bits and pieces of Hindi, Urdu, Persian and Arabic. But because there are so many different countries with so many different languages, I really never learned any of them in particular. By absolute necessity, I\u2019ve always had one or more translators working with me.

What special writing techniques have you developed under intense deadline?
<\/strong>In the first draft of a breaking news story you\u2019re not going to think so much about finding the best adjective and adverb. You want to just get something out as soon as you can, whatever time of day or night it is. Then once you\u2019ve done that, you have a little more time. You can go back and think about it and talk to more people. Then you usually have a chance to rewrite your story, sometimes even three or four times, in a slower fashion that has more depth, that has more creativity. But when you\u2019re just dealing with the facts of an incident or crisis, you just have to get it out.

Can you give me an example of how you\u2019ve written multiple stories about the same incident?
<\/strong>

\"\"<\/a>
\u201cCat looking out my window in Kabul: Before the bomb that shattered the glass.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>

There was a very bad suicide bombing one morning in Afghanistan two years ago, probably the worst they\u2019ve ever had in the capital. It was about a half-a-mile from my office. I went out to report and was on the cellphone calling into my assistant, writing everything down quickly, and he would send the basic information back to the editors in Washington. I spent many hours interviewing people at hospitals, at the scene of the bomb itself, and went back to the office at 4 or 5 p.m. I wrote the entire story of what had happened during the day, but I wrote it in a better, more descriptive way. I put in context, and when that was done, later that night I sat down and wrote yet another story, which was a personal feature, how it affected me, and how I felt about the tragedy of that day.

How do you keep your language fresh?
<\/strong>After all these years, all these emergency kinds of reporting, you become creatively exhausted. It\u2019s hard to find new ways to write about the same thing. It\u2019s hard to find new words, new expressions, or new descriptions. And it\u2019s easy to fall back on the same language you\u2019ve used in the past, especially if you\u2019re on deadline. So you have to try even harder to find unusual aspects of things to single out or focus on. If you just stick to the main story it\u2019s going to sound like all the others. But if you have a little extra time, you can talk to a few people who had unusual experiences, or tales to tell, that can keep it fresh and give you a new linguistic perch.

\"\"<\/a>
Cobbler in Kabul<\/figcaption><\/figure>

I\u2019ll give you a really good example\u2026 There was a quiet neighborhood near me in Kabul, and there was a little old guy who repaired shoes in a little old cobbler shop. Quite a few times I talked to him while I had him fix my shoes, and thought, this would be an interesting neighborhood profile. So I went back four or five times and talked to all the little local shops that had all been there a very long time, and discovered every single person in every one of those shops had had some personal tragedy in the previous war, either the Soviet war or the civil war or with the Taliban. They\u2019d lost relatives; they\u2019d been bombed; they\u2019d been injured. There was not a single shop in this whole neighborhood that hadn\u2019t been physically and personally affected by these wars. It made a great little story.

What kinds of activities did you engage in to counter the effects of repeated exposure to traumatic events?
<\/strong>I would come home on brief leaves every few months. That helped a lot. I\u2019ve also always been involved in rescuing animals in every country I\u2019ve ever worked in overseas. Animals gravitate toward me. That\u2019s the main thing that keeps me sort of happy and feeling like I\u2019ve done something useful and important in situations where it\u2019s hard to find good or happy news.

How did you find time to write books? And how does this style of writing differ from your news writing?
<\/strong>It\u2019s very difficult to write a book if you\u2019re still working full time in the news because you\u2019re constantly distracted. When you\u2019re working on a book you think about it all the time. You wake up in the middle of the night and remember something you wanted to say, or a phrase you wanted to change. It really consumes you. Most writers I know have tried to get fellowships, or take off at least six to nine months so they can really get the bulk of their book done in peace and quiet. You can always do the final version and the editing later on.

I co-authored my first book with another writer, when I was working for the Boston Globe. It\u2019s about military dictatorship in Chile<\/a>. I\u2019d lived in Chile off and on for a number of years during the second half of the dictatorship, so I\u2019d lived through it very intensely. When I was reporting for the newspaper, I was doing daily news or features. But then I had an intermediary format where I won a fellowship to do more in-depth magazine-like stories. For that project, which lasted a year, I published four or six long features about different aspects of life under military rule. Those features became the basis for various chapters in the book. Again, it was a gradual progression from covering demonstrations and all sorts of things that were happening under the dictatorship, then doing longer forms sit-back pieces and really doing some in-depth interviews.

What\u2019s been your biggest adjustment returning to the U.S.?
<\/strong>I\u2019ve lived overseas for various periods of time, in various countries for many, many years, but I\u2019m used to coming back, for just two weeks at a time, sometimes for months, and a couple of stints for a few years. Still, it\u2019s really the modern nature of this country and how people live that\u2019s always a bit shocking when you\u2019ve been in a poor and conflicted country. There\u2019s so much freedom here, so much choice, and so many distractions.

I\u2019m very allergic to a lot of modern technology. I don\u2019t have a television set, for example. And I don\u2019t go on Facebook or anything. I try to minimize technological distraction so that I can spend more time reading, writing and thinking. I do listen to a lot of music, and I communicate mostly by email and What\u2019sApp, because those are individual messages, which I\u2019m fine with. I\u2019m very wary of the Internet and social media. There\u2019s a way to be balanced, a way to not let it take over your life. I think that\u2019s really important for everyone, not just writers.

What\u2019s next?
<\/strong>I\u2019ve been doing a number of events speaking and some lecturing, also trying to catch up with friends and family. And I\u2019m working on some writing projects. I\u2019m also doing some part-time writing for the paper. I\u2019m now just a consultant for the paper, not staff any more. But I\u2019ll be travelling back to Afghanistan for the holidays and doing some reporting from time-to-time, as well as writing personal essays on foreign topics, also trying to start work on a book, which I put aside several years ago because I was just working too much. It\u2019s another memoir. It has a lot to do with various aspects of life, including nature and animals. It\u2019s a project I really care about and I\u2019m anxious to pick it up again.

\"\"<\/a>

 

 

\u00a0<\/strong>

\u00a0<\/strong>

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\u00a0ast month, journalist, filmmaker and military veteran Zack Baddorf made a plea, in an essay for Nieman Reports, that more veterans consider careers in journalism and more newsrooms hire veterans. 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