Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [16]
MY FINAL YEAR of college was a blur. I spent most of my time trying to understand what had happened, worried that whatever dark impulse had driven my brother to his death might still be lurking somewhere out there, waiting for me.
Many times that year, I wished I had a mark, a scar, a missing limb, something children could have pointed at, at which adults could tell them not to stare. At least then they would have seen, would have known. I wouldn’t have been expected to smile and mingle, meet and greet. Everyone could have seen that, like a broken locket, I had only half a heart.
Senior year became a series of holidays and celebrations to avoid. My mother and I ordered Chinese takeout on Thanksgiving, watched movies on Christmas. We stopped giving gifts, ignored each other’s birthdays. Each event was a reminder of what we’d lost. On weekends I’d take the train back to New York. We’d eat dinner at home, mostly stay indoors. For the first few months, I slept in the guest room downstairs, unable to set foot in my own room or look at the balcony outside it. My mother talked about Carter, went over theories in her head. I listened but couldn’t add much. It was like staring into a bottomless chasm. I worried that there was nothing to stop me from falling if I took the next step. I was there, I listened, we were together. It was all I was capable of.
I graduated college nearly a year after my brother died. My mom came up to New Haven, we took some pictures, and that was it. She returned to New York to pack up the apartment and move to a townhouse on the other side of the city. She no longer wanted to live in a penthouse. After my brother’s death, both of us developed a fear of heights. I asked her what she thought I should do for work, now that I’d graduated.
“Follow your bliss,” she said, quoting Joseph Campbell. I was hoping for something more specific—“Plastics,” for instance. I worried I couldn’t “follow my bliss” because I couldn’t feel my bliss; I couldn’t feel anything at all. I wanted to be someplace where emotions were palpable, where the pain outside matched the pain I was feeling inside. I needed balance, equilibrium, or as close to it as I could get. I also wanted to survive, and I thought I could learn from others who had. War seemed like my only option.
Iraq
INKBLOTS OF BLOOD
IN COLLEGE I’D read a lot about the Vietnam War and the foreign correspondents who covered it. Their tales of night patrols and hot LZs made reporting sound like an adventure, one that was also worthwhile. News, however, is a hard business to break into. After college, I applied for an entry-level job at ABC News—photocopying, answering phones—but after months of waiting, I couldn’t even get an interview. Such is the value of a Yale education.
I finally got a job as a fact-checker at Channel One, a twelve-minute daily news program broadcast to thousands of high schools throughout the United States. I knew that fact-checking wasn’t going to get me anywhere close to a front line, but I needed to get my foot in the door somehow. After several months of working there, I came up with a plan to become a foreign correspondent. It was very simple, and monumentally stupid.
I figured if I went places that were dangerous or exotic, I wouldn’t have much competition, and if my stories were interesting and inexpensive, Channel One might broadcast them. A colleague of mine agreed to make a fake press pass for me on a Macintosh computer, and loan me one of his Hi-8 cameras. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I’d watched a lot of TV news growing up, and had some idea how stories were put together. The rest I figured I’d learn along the way.
I quit my job as a fact-checker, but didn’t inform the producers who ran Channel One of my plan. I figured they’d tell me not to go, or