I have long admired Arwa Damon, CNN’s senior correspondent from wherever bombs are falling, bullets are flying and people are suffering and dying. “News” organizations don’t have many correspondents like her around anymore, men and women who are willing to go over and over again into zones of extreme danger to find and broadcast some ground truth.
Yesterday, that effort to get the ground truth at the point of the spear nearly got her killed, as she was embedded with an Iraqi Special Forces Unit that found itself surrounded and under serious attack in Mosul. See the report here.
Damon’s got an exceptional international background. From Wikipedia:
Her father, Dr. George H. Damon, Jr, is an American and her mother, Joumana, is Syrian and grew up in Damascus. Damon is the granddaughter of Muhsin al-Barazi, the former Syrian Kurd prime minister of Syria, who was executed in the August 1949 Syrian coup d’état.
She was an equestrienne in her teens and “is fluent in Arabic, French, Turkish, and English, having grown up speaking all four languages.”
She’s covered war in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. She was early on the scene in Benghazi and recovered slain ambassador Christopher Stevens’ personal journal. She’s seen an untold level of death and destruction over a decade. It may be that she’s a war junkie. She’s deeply invested in the fate of civilian and refugee populations, and she seemingly can’t stop going into the shit, despite the extreme risk.
Damon got into a sticky wicket in July 2014 when she got lit up at an embassy party in Baghdad and was disorderly and abusive. She reportedly bit EMTs that were called in to get her calmed down. CNN stuck with her, to their credit, but there was more than a little schadenfreude detectible in some of the reporting on the incident — from people that manifestly don’t have the guts or the resilience to do what she has done or see the things she’s seen over the past decade and more of conflict. Yeah, and she’s the first war correspondent to get drunk and behave badly at an embassy party….
Anyway, that business should scarcely register on a record that is a remarkable compendium of courage and truth-seeking. Hats off to you, Arwa Damon.
Matthew says
I don’t know much about her. I think she might be as you say a war junkie. People adapt to war and horrible conditions and have a hard time adapting back. I think this overlaps a lot with PTSD.
I remember reading a report by a war correspondent who was embedded with the troops in Iraq. He remembers talking to one old veteran before returning to the states. The veteran asks if he’s glad to be going back. The correspondent says and begins talking about how horrible war is. The veteran nods and says “Your not going to believe me, but in a month you are going to miss it.”
The correspondent thinks he’s nuts, but sure enough in a month he wants to go back.
JimC says
Sebastian Junger?
Matthew says
I don’t believe so, but I could be wrong. I don’t remember who it was.
JimC says
Could be a variety of folks — like you say, it’s not an uncommon phenomenon.
Craig Rullman says
I saw that report yesterday as well and was impressed by her composure. Excellent work by the cameraman too, who took some steel in the face. And nice work by the Iraqi unit they were with, to finally extract from their little Alamo.
Thom Eley says
Also check out Dickey Chappell sometime. She was a correspondent with the Marines in WWII, Korean and Vietnam, where she was killed stepping on a landmine.
JimC says
Will do.
Thom Eley says
I didn’t think that they were supposed to serve alcohol at Middle Eastern Embassies? Maybe the times have changed.
Thom Eley says
I wanted to be a combat correspondent and I did have a chance when I knew Kate Webb. But things just didn’t work out. Kate Webb, David Dye, Christiane Amanpour, Gloria Emerson, Marguerite Higgins, to name a few were great. There is a book on female war correspondents in Vietnam, but I don’t recall the name. Also, Of Fortunes and War: Clare Hollingworth, first of the female war correspondents is a good read. Dickey Chapelle Under Fire: Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action. What S A Woman Doing Here A Reporter S Report On Herself by Dickey Chapelle is good. I had the good fortune to know Dickey Chapelle and she was quite the character. During Spring Break, 1965, I drove down the Baja Peninsula with her so she could interview Gustavo Díaz Ordaz Bolaños the President of Mexico from 1964 to 1970. It was an amazing trip. She was killed in November 1965.