Brave Lynsey Addario: It's What I Do

Lynsey Addario is a photojournalist. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and was a recipient, in 2009, of a MacArthur fellowship. This article is adapted from “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War,” to be published this week by Penguin Press.
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What Can a Pregnant Photojournalist Cover? Everything

By LYNSEY ADDARIO JAN. 28, 2015

You have two options when you approach a hostile checkpoint in a war zone, and each is a gamble. The first is to stop and identify yourself as a journalist and hope that you are respected as a neutral observer. The second is to blow past the checkpoint and hope the soldiers guarding it don’t open fire on you.

In 2011, three weeks into the Libyan uprising, I was in a car with three of my colleagues from The New York Times when we approached a checkpoint near Ajdabiya, a small city near Libya’s northern coast, more than 500 miles east of Tripoli. By then, as a photojournalist documenting conflict zones in the post-9/11 wars, I had been in dozens of risky situations. I was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents near Fallujah, in Iraq, ambushed by the Taliban in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan and injured in a car accident that killed my driver while covering the Taliban occupation of the Swat Valley in Pakistan.

As we approached the checkpoint, I sensed that something wasn’t right. My colleagues — Tyler Hicks, Anthony Shadid and Stephen Farrell — and I had been covering the revolt by ordinary Libyan men against the brutal regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi, who saw journalists as the enemy. We were about to run directly into a military checkpoint maintained by his troops.
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They ordered us facedown into the dirt. ... We all assumed this would be the moment of our execution.

“Don’t stop!” Tyler was yelling. “Don’t stop!”

But our driver, Mohammed, a quiet, 22-year-old engineering student, was slowing down, sticking his head out the window.

“Sahafi!” he yelled to the soldiers. “Media!” He opened the car door to get out, and Qaddafi’s soldiers swarmed him. “Sahafi!”

The doors flew open, and Tyler, Steve and Anthony were ripped from the car. I immediately locked my door and buried my head in my lap. Gunshots shattered the air. When I looked up, I was alone. I spoke to myself out loud, a tactic I use when my inner voice isn’t convincing enough: “Get out of the car. Get out. Run.” I crawled across the back seat with my head down and out the open car door, scrambled to my feet and immediately felt the hands of a soldier yanking at my arms and tugging at my two cameras. The harder he pulled, the harder I pulled back. Bullets whipped by us. Rebel fighters, some of whom we had just been talking to a few miles down the road, were barraging the army’s checkpoint. The soldier pulled at my camera with one hand and pointed his gun at me with the other.

After a standoff of several seconds. I surrendered my waist pack and one camera and clutched the other, finally managing to escape the soldier’s grasp. I chased after my colleagues while bullets flew around me and pulled out the memory cards as I ran. Somehow the four of us reunited at a cinder-block building set back from the road, sheltered from the gun battle that continued behind us.

“I’m thinking about making a run for it,” Tyler said.

We looked into the distance. The open desert stretched out in every direction.

Within seconds, government soldiers were upon us, pointing their guns and yelling in Arabic, their voices shot through with adrenaline. They ordered us facedown into the dirt, motioning with their hands. We all assumed this would be the moment of our execution. And then we all slowly crouched down and begged for our lives.
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I pressed my face into the soil, sucking in a mouthful of fine sand as a soldier pulled my hands behind my back and kicked open my legs. I raised my eyes from the ground and looked directly into the soldier’s eyes. The only thing I could think to do was plead, but my mouth was so dry, as if my saliva had been replaced with dirt. I could barely utter a word.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please.”

Will I see my parents again? Will I see my husband again? How could I do this to them? Will I get my cameras back? How did I get to this place?

The soldiers picked me up by my hands and feet and carried me, bound and defenseless, to a vehicle parked in the road, directly in the crossfire between the rebels and Qaddafi’s troops. I looked over to our car. On the ground beside the driver’s door lay a young man, wearing a striped shirt, one arm outstretched. He appeared to be dead. I was sure it was Mohammed and felt sick with guilt. No matter how he died — either in the barrage of bullets or executed by one of Qaddafi’s men — we had killed him with our relentless pursuit of the story. I began to cry.

Over the next six days, we were bound, beaten and dragged from place to place while blindfolded. Men I couldn’t see touched me all over my body, muffling my cries with their salty fingers. Luckily, it never went further than that. We had no idea if we would live or die; no sense of whether negotiations were taking place to free us. It was afternoon when we arrived in Sirte, Colonel Qaddafi’s stronghold, which lies halfway between Benghazi and Tripoli. We were still blindfolded when they led us downstairs into a damp, cavernous and musty space that rang out with the cries and whimpers of prisoners. Eventually they untied our hands and blindfolds and brought us a dinner of orange rice and plain white bread rolls. We hadn’t eaten anything but a few dates and juice boxes in 36 hours. Our cell was about 12 by 10 feet. There was a small sliding window in the upper left corner, four filthy foam mattresses on the floor, a box of dates, a giant bottle of drinking water with some plastic cups and, in the corner by the door, a bottle to urinate in. There was nothing to do but sleep and talk, mostly about the pain we were causing our spouses.

“This is it for me,” Steve said. “No more war. I can’t do this to Reem anymore.”