Dispatches from the Edge

Anderson Cooper

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061743351
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Journalistische Biographien

From one of America's leading reporters comes a deeply personal, extraordinarily powerful look at the most volatile crises he has witnessed around the world, from New Orleans to Baghdad and beyond.

Dispatches from the Edge of the World is a book that gives us a rare up-close glimpse of what happens when the normal order of things is suddenly turned upside down, whether it's a natural disaster, a civil war, or a heated political battle. Over the last year, few people have witnessed more scenes of chaos and conflict than Anderson Cooper, whose groundbreaking coverage on CNN has become the touchstone of twenty-first century journalism. This book explores in a very personal way the most important - and most dangerous - crises of our time, and the surprising impact they have had on his life. From the devastating tsunami in South Asia to the suffering Niger, and ultimately Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Cooper shares his own experiences of traversing the globe, covering the world's most astonishing stories. As a television journalist, he has the gift of speaking with an emotional directness that cuts through the barriers of the medium. In his first book, that passion communicates itself through a rich fabric of memoir and reportage, reflection and first-person narrative. Unflinching and utterly engrossing, this is the story of an extraordinary year in a reporter's life.

Niger

NIGHT SWEATS

I CLOSE MY EYES, pretend to sleep. Maybe I am sleeping. In Africa it’s hard to tell. Coiled in a dirty sheet, sweat-soaked, my hair matted with the day’s dust and grains of sand in my mouth, I dream about work, storylines, plots; I edit pictures in my head. I wake gasping for breath, unsure where I am. Niger. Rwanda. Somalia.

In Africa there are too many pictures, too many contrasts. You can’t catch them all. It’s like sticking your head out of a fast-moving car—you suffocate; it’s too much to take in. Amputations. Executions. Empty beds. Shuttered stores. Crippled kids. Wild-eyed gunmen. Stripped-down corpses. Crashed cars. Mass graves. Handmade tombstones. Scattered ammo. Half-starved dogs. Sniper warnings posted like billboards. Buses and boxcars stacked at intersections. Old men in boxy suits walking to jobs that don’t exist in offices that aren’t there. It all blurs together. Desert. Mountain. Rice paddy. Field. Farmers bent over. Heads rise as you pass. Eyes follow eyes. Little kids run to the road, stand frozen, not sure if they should be happy or scared. They keep their weight on their heels so they can run back at the lurch of the car, the crack of a shot. Houses, whole towns, nothing but rubble—roofs blown off, walls burnt out, crumbled. Desiccated, eviscerated, gutted, and flayed.

At some point though, the disorientation fades. You put it behind you; go on. There is an adventure waiting. Life happening. It’s not your life, but it’s as close as you’ll get. You want to see it all.

One minute you’re there—in it, stuck, stewing in the sadness, the loss, your shirt plastered to your back, your neck burned from the sun—then you’re gone, seatbelt buckled, cool air cascading down, ice in the glass. You are gliding above the earth, laughing.

I’M IN MARADI, Niger. It’s late July 2005. A few days ago, I was in Rwanda with friends on vacation. I’d gone to see the mountain gorillas and to tour the new genocide museum. Not everyone’s idea of fun, perhaps, but I’ve never been very good at taking time off. I burn on beaches, and get bored really quickly. I had a couple of days left in Rwanda, and was watching TV in my hotel room, when a short report came on about starvation in Niger.

“According to a report by the United Nations, 3.5 million Nigeriens are at risk of starvation, many of them children,” the news anchor said, then moved on to something else.

I called CNN to see if I could go. My travel companions were pissed off, but not all that surprised. They were used to my bailing out on them at the last minute.

“Why would you want to go to Niger?” one of them asked when I told him of the change of plans.

“Why wouldn’t you want to go?” I responded.

“Um, because I’m normal,” he said, laughing.

I wished I knew how to explain it to them. It’s as if a window opens, and you realize the world has been re-formed. I wanted to see the starvation. I needed to remind myself of its reality. I worry that if I get too comfortable, too complacent, I’ll lose all feeling, all sensation.

The next day, I was on a plane, on my way. I’d been relieved of the burden of vacation. I was in motion once again, hurtling through space. Nothing was certain, but everything was clear.

BY ALL ESTIMATES, Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. Ninety percent of it is desert, and even in good years, most people here barely get by. The average Nigerien woman gives birth eight times in her life, and one out of every four children dies before he reaches the age of five. One in four. It’s a staggering statistic, but not hard to imagine when you see how poor Nigeriens’ diet is, and what little access they have to medical care.

Even for adults, the summer months between the planting of crops and harvest is a difficult time. Nigeriens call it the hungry season, when they rely on grain stored up from the previous year to get by. In 2004 there was a drought, followed by an invasion of locusts. Crops were decimated, devoured, so now it’s 2005, and there’s no grain stored up. People are foraging for food, eating leaves off trees.

When you land in Niger, by the time you reach the end of the runway, Niamey International Airport is nowhere to be seen. On either side of the tarmac, sand and scrub brush stretch to the horizon.

The gin-swilling British businessman sitting next to me on the plane stares out the window and bursts into tears. “They have nothing,” he mumbles to no one. “The children are dying.”

“What’s your problem?” the Air France flight attendant asks as he saunters by.

“People are dying,” the businessman repeats.

“I know,” the attendant says. “People are dying every day, all over the world.” He was tired of dealing with drunks.

It is hard to see the hunger at first. In Niamey, chauffeur-driven Mercedes glide down potholed streets. Businessmen and bureaucrats shuttle about, car windows firmly shut. A layer of dust seems to coat everything.

“This isn’t a famine, it’s a sham-ine,” I hear one European reporter mutter in the hotel, concerned that the images he’s gathered aren’t going to be what his bosses back in the newsroom are expecting. That’s how TV works: You know the pictures you want, the pictures you’re expected to find. Your bosses will be disappointed if you don’t get them, so you scan the hospital beds, looking for the worst, unable to settle for anything less. Merely hungry isn’t good enough. Merely sick won’t warrant more than a cutaway shot.

The hunger is there, of course—you just have to look close. On the drive from Niamey to Maradi are fields of corn, sorghum, and millet. Crops are planted, but harvest is a long way off, and there’s little food to get families through until then. Adults can live off leaves and grass; kids need nutrients, and there are none to be had.

“It’s not so bad,” I say to Charlie Moore, my producer, and as soon as the words come out of my mouth, I wish I could take them back.

“It’s bad enough,” he responds, and of course he’s right.

It’s bad enough.

“IT’S PRETTY BAD out there,” the air force officer said as I was gathering my things. “Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know!” I shouted, and it came out sounding scared.

“What do you mean you don’t know? You can’t just go to Somalia. Who do you work for?” I was worried he’d take my phony press pass, so I told him I was staying with an aid agency; I just wasn’t sure of their exact location. The truth was, I didn’t have anyplace to stay, and I didn’t really work for anyone.

It was early September 1992, and I’d just landed in Baidoa, Somalia. I hadn’t been to Sarajevo yet. Burma was the only fighting I’d ever seen. After Channel One bought my Burma footage, I lived in Vietnam for six months, taking language classes in Hanoi and trying to shoot more stories. When my visa expired, Channel One still hadn’t offered me a full-time job, so I had to come up with another plan.

I was twenty-five, two years older than my brother would ever be. A day might go by when I didn’t think about his suicide, but then I’d be walking on the street, and a stain on the concrete would remind me of blood, and I’d run into a nearby restaurant and throw up in the bathroom.

I used to see my brother in Vietnam. Someone would round a corner or catch my attention in a crowd, and for a few seconds I would think it was Carter.

One evening in Hanoi, a crippled beggar stopped in front of me while I was in a café. He stretched out a twisted limb, asking for money. I glanced up and saw Carter’s face. Something about the gentle look in his eyes, the cut of his hair, the looseness with which it fell from the side of his head. The thought stunned me.

The beggar left, and I wanted to run after him, talk with him in case it was Carter trying to reach out to me. I didn’t move from my seat, however. It was a crazy thought, and I never told anyone about it. I was embarrassed, worried that even thinking it was a sign of delusion.

It wasn’t just people who reminded me of Carter. Once, I was eating at a food stall near my apartment in Hanoi and I noticed that the ceiling was made of pressed leaves. It looked just like a box covered with tobacco leaves that Carter once gave me for Christmas. The texture and color were the same. For a moment, I remembered him so clearly: the shape of his body, the color of his hair, the delicate thinness of his fingers. It had been four years since his death, and still nothing about it made any sense. Vietnam hadn’t filled in the shadows I saw when I looked in the mirror, or eased the sadness that seemed to flow through my veins. I was hurting, and needed to be around others who were hurting as well. I wanted to dangle over the edge and remember what it was like to feel. I also needed a job. Somalia had seemed like a logical choice.

Famine was sweeping the Horn of Africa. Tens of thousands of people had already died of starvation, and millions more were threatened. Somalia had no central government to deal with the drought, just competing warlords with private armies and countless guns.

The famine hadn’t yet become a major story. In some three months, the U.S. military would send troops, the American public millions of dollars in aid, and the broadcast networks their anchors. Hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved, but after that, things would get out of control. They often do. It started off being one thing, and ended up as something else. Peacekeepers became peacemakers. A humanitarian mission became a hunt for a Somali warlord. A Black Hawk went down. U.S. troops got killed. The whole thing turned to shit.

It started, though, with the starving. Thousands dying every day: mostly kids and old people, the ones without weapons or money, or families to fall back on. Roving bands of teens armed with guns and grenade launchers rode around in tricked-out “technicals,” pickups with machine guns mounted on the back.

I hitched a ride on a relief flight that the U.S. military had just begun operating out of Mombasa, Kenya. In Baidoa as many as a hundred people were dying a day. The United States was shipping in sacks of sorghum on lumbering C-130 Hercules transport planes. The bags of grain were stacked on wooden pallets, kept in place by mesh netting attached to the plane’s floor by cables. On my flight, a half-dozen young men with high-and-tight crew cuts lay sleeping on top of the sacks of grain.

“Who are those guys?” I asked the air force officer on board the flight.

“We call those guys the snake eaters,” he said, whispering as though he were divulging classified information. “They set up on the ground and monitor the security of the runway.”

A month earlier, stuck in Nairobi, waiting for my visa to clear, I’d gone to see a low-budget action movie, Snake Eater II, with Lorenzo Lamas. These guys looked far more businesslike than the muscle-bound star in that film. When we landed, the snake eaters were the first ones out the cargo door. They ran to the side of the airstrip and disappeared into the bushes.

The C-130 wasn’t on the ground more than twenty minutes when it shut its cargo door and took off, leaving behind a few sacks of sorghum, the icy smell of airplane fuel, and me.

On the other end of the runway, a handful of aid agencies had parked their pickup trucks. On top of one of the trucks, a young Somali sat straddling a heavy machine gun. In the back, gnarled men in soiled T-shirts stood around grinning, gnawing on small green twigs that I’d soon learn was khat, the favorite pastime of Somali men—besides arguing and shooting one another. Khat is like an amphetamine. Chew it all day, as many do in Somalia, and you’ll end up edgy, strung out—just the kind of qualities you want in a Somali gunman. Only a few flights of relief food were getting into the country, but dozens of planes packed with the bitter stimulant were able to land at airstrips every day throughout the starving nation.

That day I arrived a couple of Western aid workers waited for the food sacks to be loaded up. They all ignored me, and I was too shy to approach them. Journalists, I’d later learn, were considered a pain in the ass. They arrived at a story demanding transportation and food, not to mention information. Relief workers put up with them if they were from a major network, and had big audiences who’d make donations, but if you were just some kid with a home video camera, then nobody really wanted to make the effort.

When the bags of sorghum were loaded onto the trucks, everyone took off, leaving me standing on the side of the runway alone. There are times when the reality of what you’ve gotten yourself into hits you like a brick dropped from a tall building. Standing by the airstrip in Baidoa was one of those times. I was in way over my head, and had just realized it.

I had a couple of thousand dollars in cash, a camera, some blank videocassettes, and a backpack filled with cashews, the only food I’d had time to buy before boarding the flight. I had no idea what I was doing or what I should do next.

IT’S LATE JULY 2005. In a makeshift hospital in Maradi, Niger, dozens of mothers sit with their children, waiting to see if they are malnourished enough to be saved. The hospital is run by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), a French relief group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. They are one of my favorite relief organizations because they fearlessly go to the worst places, and they seem far more efficient than the lumbering UN.

The hospital is a few blocks off Maradi’s main drag. This is the third largest city in Niger, but that’s not saying much. Even the capital, Niamey, is a backwater, and it’s a ten-hour drive away.

To get into the hospital the mothers pass through a small metal gate guarded by two unarmed men. By dawn there’s already a long line to enter. The women are wrapped in impossibly bright fabrics, a collage of color shocking against their desert black skin.

Weeks later, when I return to New York, an elegant lady stops me on the street and puts her hand on my arm. “Oh, Anderson, those women in Niger.” She sighs, pausing to gather her emotions. “I mean, the fabrics. Where do they find them? Those colors. They must put so much thought into it.”

The morning I arrive at the hospital, there are about a dozen mothers waiting with their kids outside the gate. A naked little boy with skin like an elephant’s squats in front of his mother and shits. She wipes his wrinkled butt with a piece of cardboard from a box of medicine.

The mothers watch you enter, watch you come and go as you please, the color of your skin, the camera on your shoulder, the only entry pass you need. In the twitch of an eye, they’ve scanned your clothes, your eyes, read your intentions, your ability to help them. They don’t beg; they know you’re not here for that. They see the camera, the notepad; you can do nothing for them right away. Maybe in the long term you can help, they think, so they’ll let you take pictures; but, really, they don’t care. Their needs are immediate. Liquid. Food. Nutrients. Now.

Inside the compound, just beyond the gates, in the admissions tent, Dr. Milton Tectonidis examines a two-year-old boy clinging to his mother’s breast.

“He’s quite dehydrated,” he says about the boy, gently pinching the skin of the child’s left arm. The boy’s name is Rashidu. His eyes are wide, and he looks right at Dr. Tectonidis.

“Usually in a kid you look for sunken eyes, and skin that doesn’t come back, skin that stays folded,” he says, barely pausing long enough to glance up. “In a malnourished ki...