Why does a reporter go to a war zone? Is it careerism? Vanity? Thrill-seeking? Or is it to push personal boundaries, to manufacture some sort of rite of passage that has been mostly lost in contemporary society? Probably, it’s a combustible mixture of all of these.
There have been a number of memoirs published in the last few years by reporters who have been to Iraq, but few have gone as far in trying to understand their own motivations as freelance journalist David Axe does his new book, War Fix. The culmination of six trips he took to Iraq in the span of one brutal, intense year, from January 2005 to February 2006, War Fix takes the form of a graphic novel, allowing Axe to express in two media at once the physical and emotional toll war takes on an individual’s life. And it succeeds brilliantly.
When the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, Axe was covering county government for his local paper in Columbia, South Carolina, a gig for which he says he had little talent and even less enthusiasm. Iraq was his ticket out. He says that he begged his editors for months to send him to Iraq, “And they were like, ‘You want to go to Iraq? Are you nuts?'” Finally, he convinced them to send him for the January 2005 elections, and, knowing they didn’t want or need a full-time correspondent in Iraq, tendered his resignation with the promise of delivering the stories for which they were sending him. He’s been working as a freelancer ever since.
The reasons reporters choose to cover war zones are varied and complicated. Some go to run away from something, others go to find something, still others go to prove themselves or take part, even at one remove, in the struggle. Axe’s motivations seem to include all of these. Or more simply, as he says in the book, “I just want to watch.” The book never attempts to answer definitively why Axe wanted so badly to go to war, but captures the fear and excitement he felt being able to participate in an event that is infinitely larger than the sum of its parts.
The book begins in 1991 with Axe as a child glued to televised images of bombs falling on Baghdad during the first Gulf War, even as his mother tells him, “It’s bedtime, David, you can watch the war tomorrow.” Cut to March 2003, and Axe is again sitting transfixed in front of the television, on the corner of the bed he shares with his girlfriend, who wakes up in the middle of the night, telling him, “David? Turn off the stupid war and come to bed.”
I brought these images up with him when we met last month for lunch as he was passing through New York, and asked him where the fascination with war had come from. “I always wanted to go to war, either as a journalist or some other capacity. I had this attitude of, when am I gonna get another chance to cover a war? I also had a lot of buddies who were in the Army, so I saw the thing from that side, and I was jealous.”
He said the idea to do a graphic novel about his experiences in Iraq came before he left on his first trip, and he met with the book’s illustrator Steve Olexa to plan the project. “We didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, obviously, since I didn’t have an itinerary, I didn’t have intentions, so in the vaguest possible sense we could shape the story in advance,” he says. “There’s a number of different tacks you can take in doing this sort of memoir, and we decided to explore why I was so bent on doing this. I still don’t really know, but let’s explore why I’m so driven to get to this miserable place at the risk of my own life.”
In one scene before he leaves the States, which depicts him unable to sleep after telling his girlfriend that he is going, he says, “I don’t care about politics. I don’t take sides … I could stay here. Covering county government for the rest of my life. No one would think less of me … Now I’m trotting off to war like it’s fucking Disneyland.” The scene ends with him asking, “Am I making the biggest mistake of my life?” A little later, we find Axe sitting in a church, and although he says he’s not religious, he asks, “Dear God, please protect my sorry ass … and one more thing … Can you get me into a couple firefights?”
He gets all that and then some. But in order to fund his constant shuttling back and forth — he would go for a month, come home for a month, then head back — he had to line up enough work to pay for all the travel. He says that at each forward operating base he got to, he would sit down and send out emails to “every single news organization I could think of, and say ‘Hey, I’m in Iraq — would you like a story?'”
“On the first trip I lost money,” he said, “and finally started making money on the second trip, but the sheer volume of work I had to take, to make any money at all, it’s mind-boggling.” On the first few trips, he wrote mostly for small papers, and eventually started to take on fewer, bigger gigs as the bylines piled up. “I did two back-to-back trips to Basra, pretty much working for the Village Voice and the Washington Times. But that whole thing started to fall apart on the last trip, after the Voice got bought, and they dropped international coverage entirely, so obviously I got lost in that shuffle.”
The last trip was notable for another reason: It ended with him being kicked out of the country by the U.S. military. “The way I got disembeded,” he explains, still obviously smarting from the experience, “was in the middle of an interview with a [U.S. Army] officer. A Humvee pulls up, a sergeant gets out, says, ‘You’re in trouble, get in. Turn off the camera.’ It was a whirlwind. Forty-eight hours later I was in my hotel room in Kuwait City, I had no idea what had just happened, I was confused, I was hurt. I had risked my life with these people. I was on their team, what were they doing to me? They had me under armed guard, it was like I was detained, so I got back from that trip convinced that my reputation was ruined and my career was over, but I didn’t even care. I was like, ‘Fuck this. Fuck the Army. Fuck Iraq. I’m gonna go write about interior design or something.'”
But that didn’t happen. The war remains the big story, and the story he most wants to cover. Now that he’s not shuffling off to Iraq every other month, he has been working on a series of books recounting the professional gains, and the personal losses, his year running off to war brought about.
With the first book just published, he’s working on three more: one is called Army 101, which looks at the Army’s ROTC program, another is a memoir recounting his time in Iraq called War is Boring, because, as anyone who has been with the military in a war zone can attest, “War is boring. It’s tedious. There’s a lot of sitting around, waiting in line, so we chose not to focus on that aspect [in the graphic novel]. It’s such a rich experience that you can come at it from a million different tangles, and we picked the addiction angle for War Fix.”
The third book is another graphic novel, called Love and Terror. Like War Fix, Love and Terror grew out of the psychological toll wrought by the loneliness and fear of being in a war zone far from home. Love and Terror has its beginnings in the summer of 2005, after Axe’s girlfriend left him over his obsession with going to Iraq, when he was headed to Basra to report on the murder of American reporter Stephen Vincent. “To get to Basra I had to go through London, and I barely missed the Tube bombing and I knew someone who was caught up in that, a woman I had a relationship with, and that was on my mind when I was in Basra, and it was something I was grappling with, while at the same time I was covering Vincent’s murder, and his murder is caught up in the sexual mores in Basra, so this stuff emerged from my experiences that summer — sex and war and loss and terrorism, all mixed up together.”
I asked if, even given everything that has happened over the past year and a half, he’s itching to get back to Iraq, and if the personal losses have been worth it. He thought about it for a bit. “You gotta be in a particular place, emotionally, to be able to make that transition as frequently as I did. Soldiers do it once, they go to Iraq, they’re there for a year. They have time to sort of settle in and this becomes their reality, then they transition back. It’s a slow process. I compressed six of those cycles in a year.” And of course, I pointed out, soldiers do this as part of a unit. A reporter goes alone. “Exactly,” he shot back. “I went by myself and I felt alone despite being surrounded by soldiers at all times. Looking back on it, I don’t know how the hell I pulled it off. I don’t have it in me any more. Not like that. The fallout was considerable, lost relationships, friendships that will never be the same.”
But, he says, “For better or for worse, this is what I do now, so I’m just on the military beat for different papers and magazines. It’s still military reporting.” While back home for the foreseeable future, Axe is looking forward to trying to get the life he left behind in order. “Things are gonna calm down and stabilize now that I’m not traveling back and forth to Iraq all the time,” he says. “And maybe I’ll even be happier.”
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.