Megan Stack

"You can survive and not survive, both at the same time."

War on Terror! Manifest or farce? Megan Stack, a foreign correspondent for the LA Times, attempts to answer that question. Shortly after 9/11, Stack found herself thrust into the Middle East, spending the next six years, in various hot zones: Afghanistan, occupied Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia and a few others.
Stack’s first hand account of many atrocities is eye-opening and gut-wrenching. She befriends a variety of people show more in each of these dangerous locales, putting a human face on these tragedies. She is able to witness the myriad of lies and deceptions and experience the ugly hatreds, that fuel and drive these regions. Her prose is both tough and beautiful. She is a daring, unflinching journalist, looking directly into the horrible face of war.

"Only after covering it for years did I understand that the war on terror never really existed. It was not a real thing. Not that the war on terror was flawed, not that it was cynical or self-defeating, or likely to breed more resentment and violence. But that it was hollow, it was essentially nothing but a unifying myth for a complicated scramble of mixed impulses and social theories and night terrors and cruelty and business interests.” show less

I picked up this book in my local library on a whim -- a kind of "why not"? I admit, my expectations were low -- I've read a lot of books by journalists since 9/11 about Afghanistan and the Middle East, and many of them have been mediocre. And frankly, I didn't know what there could conceivably be to say that hadn't already been said. And then I started reading this book this morning. And I'm blown away.

To start with, Megan Stack is an astonishing writer. Interviewing a Yemeni judge who's show more chewing qat and being rather inarticulate, she says, "my pen chased his runaway thoughts over the page in long broken sentences.” Libyan drivers are insane; "they hurtle like mad fish chased by some unseen shark." In Jordan, a country where free political expression isn't exactly encouraged, on the eve of the Iraqi war Stack watches a crowd of mosque worshipers try to morph into antiwar protestors. But wait a minute: “Who would start the demonstration? They had so little practice." On the impact of adrenaline in a war zone: "the world smears around you in a carousel spin." Her descriptions are vivid, personal and always eloquent.

She also has an eye for the ugly truths of situations that too many others try to convey in simplistic terms. She doesn't let herself off lightly at all -- she deplores herself for walking away from victims of bombings in order to chase down more of "the story" (one of the nasty secrets of war zone journalism), and she resents being held to account as a representative of her country and government, even as she admits that is necessary or inevitable. Covering Egyptian elections, she scorns "teahouse diplomats that came to see but didn't bother to look"; she is equally hard on Western women journalists who take refuge and instead of speaking out about endless harassment and discrimination they experience, says bluntly that the banal answer "but we get to talk to local women, which the men can't" is a cop-out.

This is an extraordinary book, and one everyone -- regardless of their place on the political spectrum -- should read. No, it's not heartwarming or encouraging -- in fact, Stack's stint as a war correspondent leaves her profoundly disillusioned. Her final chapter puts her in the middle of an insane asylum in southern Lebanon, in the midst of the Israeli attack on Hezbollah. "Here I stand among the mad and maybe that’s all it’s ever been. The Middle East goes crazy and we go along with it." She has her own beliefs -- developed through experience and honed by witnessing the internecine conflicts of the region -- that it's hard to ignore, but even those who don't share them can't deny what it is that she has witnessed or reject at least some of the conclusions that she draws. show less

An eager 25-year-old journalist, Megan Stack learned about the bombing of the Trade Towers while on vacation in France. Since she was physically closest to Afghanistan, her editor at the Los Angeles Times sent her to Afghanistan to be on the ground for the invasion. Thus began a seven year stint, reporting from all over the Middle East, wherever the fighting was heaviest: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, the West Bank.



When her memoir begins, the world and its problems seem clear. Ms. Stack show more is naive and idealistic, absorbing all she experiences and writing the reports expected of her. But as time passes and the war drags on, she begins to see things that change the ways she thinks about the role of the West in the Middle East and specifically the policies of the United States. How can a nation promoting democracy turn a blind eye to some dictators and ruin a country in order to depose another? Who's side is just? Does it even matter given the amount of human suffering the conflicts inflict? Questions such as these begin to weigh on Megan, and her thoughts become grim as she reflects on the costs of the Middle East wars.



This is who gets left behind when war comes: poor people, old people, and handicapped people. This is who they are bombing now. In this moment I am numb and still, but I am aware that I deeply hate everybody for letting this happen. I hate the Lebanese families for leaving them here. I hate Hezbollah for not evacuating them, for ensuring civilian deaths that will bolster their cause. I hate Israel for wasting this place on the heads of the feeble. I hate all of us for participating in this great fiction of the war on terror, for pretending there is a framework, a purpose, for this torment. I sit in hatred and write everything down with filthy fingers.



Although the book is somewhat dated now, with Osama bin Laden dead and popular revolutions having brought down some of the despots about whom she writes, there is still an immediacy and potency to Ms. Stack's memoir that makes it compelling. Her writing is poetic, and her self-insights are honest and direct. The only difficulty for me is that as a journalist, she must remain apart and write of what she sees, instead of stopping to help the victims. She writes of how hard that is. I think I would have just stopped and done what I could. Regardless, the book is a heart-breaking tribute to those caught in a disaster not of their own making and to her own journey to greater self-awareness and understanding. show less

“The sun is shining like every mad morning in this garish war. I wake up to the crash of bombs and tell myself, just do it for one more day. Anyway you are trapped. If you try to get out of here they will kill you on the road. So do it for one more day. You know you wouldn’t leave, even if you could.” (Page 224)

I’ve always wondered what kept the foreign correspondents in the extremely dangerous regions they cover. In Megan Stack’s National Book Award nominee, we learn at least one show more of the reasons. They are totally unable to pull themselves away from the danger, the excitement, the adrenaline high that just being there allows to course through their veins. For five years, Stack covered events in the volatile Middle East, from just after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan through the 2006 Israeli bombing of Lebanon. Her time in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Libya are highlighted by roadside bombs, interviews of warlords, suicide bombers, death and violence. And more death and more violence.

The first thing that strikes you is the dichotomy between the absolutely stunning prose and the terror-filled violence. It doesn’t seem right that they should be lined up next to each other. Beauty glancing edges alongside carnage. But there it is, right before your eyes. Shimmering, beautiful prose/ferocious, violent bloodshed.

Along the way, Stack makes the case against violence and against the course that the U.S. has chosen in the past. Regarding the war on terror she writes:

“Somewhere between Afghanistan and Iraq, we lost our way. The carnage of it and the disorder, all to create a new Middle East because the old Middle East is still here, and where should it go? Only a country as quixotic, as history-free, as America could come up with this notion: that you can make the old one go away. Maybe you can debate until it makes sense from a distance, as an abstraction. But up close the war on terror isn’t anything but the sick and feeble cringing in an asylum, babies in shock, structure smashed. Baghdad broken, Afghanistan broken,. The line between heaven and earth, broken. Lebanon broken. Broken peace and broken roads and broken bridges. The broken faith and years of broken promises. Children inheriting their parents broken hearts, growing up with a taste for revenge. And all along, America dreaming it’s deep sweet dreams, there and not there. America chasing phantoms, running uphill to nowhere in pursuit of a receding mirage of absolute safety.” (Page 243)

This is a book that should be on every American’s shelf, available to peruse at any time to remind ourselves of what we can and can’t do to influence the lives of those in the Middle East. You won’t regret buying it and you’ll be rewarded with an eye-opening frankness that just so happens to come in the form of beautiful poetry. show less