LIFE IN THE WRONG LANE
Why Journalists Go In When Everyone Else Wants OutBy GREG DOBBSiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Greg Dobbs
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4401-5276-4Contents
PREFACE Why funny, funky, scary, stupid, dangerous, distasteful, unwise, and unbelievable things journalistsexperience just getting to the point of reporting a story make for a good story......................xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS...................................................................................................................................................................................................xvTHE NIGHT I SURRENDERED TO A COW Wounded Knee, South Dakota......................................................................................................................................................1THE LIGHT AND BRIGHT SIDE OF AN EXECUTION Utah, and Eagle Pass, Texas............................................................................................................................................18EXCUSE ME, DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH? Budapest, Hungary, and Moscow, USSR.............................................................................................................................................37TONIGHT THE SPHINX SAID, "SHUT UP" Cairo, Egypt, and the Libyan border...........................................................................................................................................50CHAMPAGNE FROM A STYROFOAM CUP Tehran, Iran......................................................................................................................................................................64HOW WOULD I LIKE TO WHAT? Kampala, Uganda, and across the border in Kenya........................................................................................................................................86"WELCOME TO MY COUNTRY," BUT NOT FOR LONG! Kabul, Afghanistan....................................................................................................................................................97IS IT QADHAFI? OR QADDAFI? KADDAFI? GADHAFI? DOESN'T MATTER, IT'S FOR TELEVISION Tripoli, Libya..................................................................................................................112THIS IS WESTERN CIVILIZATION? Belfast, Northern Ireland..........................................................................................................................................................125A FISTFUL OF ZLOTYS Warsaw, Poland, and the train tracks leading in.............................................................................................................................................135I WAS ONLY DRIVING AN AMBULANCE ON THE RUSSIAN FRONT Tripoli, Libya, and Beirut, Lebanon.........................................................................................................................149MINT CONDITION ... UNTIL TOMORROW Sana'a, Yemen, and the remote south of the north. And Italy before that........................................................................................................164THIS MAY NOT BE HELL, BUT WE CAN SEE IT FROM HERE Saudi Arabia, the Kuwait border, and Amman, Jordan.............................................................................................................175THINGS WE TAKE FOR GRANTED Budapest, Hungary; Khartoum, Sudan; Fez, Morocco......................................................................................................................................189INDEX.............................................................................................................................................................................................................207
Chapter One
THE NIGHT I SURRENDERED TO A COW
Wounded Knee, South Dakota
Wounded Knee once was known only as a creek in the state of South Dakota. That's all it was, a creek, where approximately 350 Sioux Indians, led by Chief Big Foot, were taken by the United States cavalry in December, 1890, ostensibly just to be disarmed. But after turning in their arms, an estimated three hundred of the Indians-men, women, and children, including Big Foot-were shot dead by the cavalry's smoky carbines and one-shell-a-second Hotchkiss guns. Wounded Knee became a symbol of the white man's systematic destruction of the proud and independent Indian nation. It was considered, in fact, the last fatal blow.
After that, the Indian nation was confined to Indian reservations. That doesn't mean Indians couldn't leave their reservations. It just means that if they wanted to live like Indians, and try to exploit whatever small rewards they were granted in the treaties they signed, they could do it only on the reservations.
Reservation life, however, was limited. For the most part, the tracts of land Washington designated for Indians were among America's worst. Most of them suffered harsh climates and contained few useful resources (until someone dreamed up the idea of building casinos!. Furthermore, the reservations were administered by Washington, which put the white hand of the U.S. government on almost every Indian affair, from the writing of local laws to the provision of children's education to the leasing of the best land to outside interests.
Those leases, for valuable assets on Indian lands like oil and natural gas, were overseen for more than a century by the Interior Department and known as "The Indian Trust." But there was little if any real trust at all. Underpaid for and rarely consulted about their property, Indians finally fought back but not on the plains. They fought back in court, leading in the late 1990s to a multi-billion-dollar class action lawsuit against the government, the biggest lawsuit in U.S. history.
The historic sense of abuse was what stimulated the creation of the American Indian Movement, better known simply as AIM. AIM sought to take control of Indian country from the hands of bureaucrats in Washington and put it into the hands of Indians on reservations. Its militant members wanted more Indian culture reflected in the laws that govern them, the schools that teach them, and the use of the land that supports them.
By 1973, Wounded Knee itself was a tourist trading post. An old wooden church, a general store, and a post office. Tourists traveling across South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation could drive through the rolling hills where the last major Indian massacre took place, and stop for a postcard and a Coke. That's about all there was. But because there was anything there at all, the American Indian Movement chose Wounded Knee as the site of its biggest public protest. In February that year, several hundred militants took over the few trailers and buildings that constituted the trading post and began a seventy-one-day standoff against the United States government. At the end, both sides claimed victory. Practically speaking, neither side won a thing.
* * *
The embarrassing thing was, we probably should have seen it coming.
Our five-man news team had just spent four days on the Pine Ridge Reservation recording the Indians' complaints. We were shown the signs of corruption. We saw the extent of poverty. We interviewed Russell Means and Dennis Banks, the angry and outspoken leaders of the American Indian Movement. "We're going to change things around here, we're going to do it soon, and we're not going to give up until we've gotten rid of Uncle Sam," Banks told us.
We probably should have seen it coming. But we didn't.
Instead, after wrapping up our coverage at Pine Ridge, we put our rolls of 16 mm film into a canvas bag and headed for the airport. Rapid City to Denver, and then change planes and fly back to Chicago. Home before midnight.
My first act after deplaning at O'Hare Airport was to call the assignment desk in New York. It was required: report in, say you'll be in the bureau first thing in the morning to screen and produce the piece you've just shot, retrieve your luggage, and head for the hills. Or in the case of universally flat Chicago, the lakefront.
The assignment desk had different plans. "Why did you fly home?" was how the conversation started.
Why did we fly home? "Because we did the story, we couldn't stand another winter day in South Dakota, and we didn't figure you'd let us fly to Honolulu instead." Why did we fly home, indeed!
"What do you mean you `did the story'? The story happened while you were in the air."
"What are you talking about?"
"A couple of hours ago, they occupied Wounded Knee. Now the feds are moving in to surround the place. Isn't that where you were?"
Yep. And it's where we were headed again. Like I said, we probably should have seen it coming.
This time, too late for a commercial connection, we chartered. It would be far more expensive, but by the time our Chicago bureau chief made it to the airport to join us, we couldn't even have caught the last commercial flight back to Denver, let alone to Rapid City. Anyway, even if we could have made it to Rapid City, the Pine Ridge Reservation was a several-hour drive. From Chadron, Nebraska, to which our chartered plane would fly, Pine Ridge was just across the border.
As we approached Chadron, the airstrip was dark. We figured it was because no one knew we were coming. Chadron isn't real high on the list of twenty-four-hour airports. When our pilot finally reached someone by radio on the ground, he was told, "Circle for a few minutes; I'll head out there and light it up."
And that he did. With his automobile headlights. Chadron's airstrip was dark because it didn't have any lights of its own. Not a whole lot of people ever try to land at night in Chadron, I guess.
Luckily, ABC in New York came through with its part of the logistics. Three Avis rent-a-car employees from Rapid City had driven all the way down in three separate vehicles to meet us when we landed. They explained that their trip would cost extra, and that if we didn't drive the cars back to Rapid City ourselves, they'd also have to add a drop charge to the bill when we were ready to give them their cars back. We took two four-door Plymouths off their hands; they drove home together in the third.
The first news reports of the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee had said only that several hundred militants had taken over the trading post. The second reports had added a new factor: U.S. marshals and police from the BIA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, were rushing to cordon off the area so that no more militants could get in. It was about 2 am. By the time we loaded the cars and headed north into South Dakota, that's all we knew.
Just inside the reservation, we learned more. Each road into Wounded Knee was blocked. It was one of the first moves the BIA police had made. Non-Indian journalists were no more welcome than Indian militants.
So we went to a ranch house four or five miles away. It was the same house where earlier that day, or I guess by now it had become the day before, we had interviewed a white rancher whose house and cattle were on reservation land he leased through the U.S. government. That was one of the very issues AIM was protesting.
He hadn't been wild about having a network news team knock on his door to do the interview, so we figured he'd be even less wild about having the same team knock again in the middle of the night. But we had to start somewhere.
Thankfully, the rancher was sympathetic. Not to the Indians. He was hoping they'd all get thrown in jail for a good long time. But he was sympathetic to us. After all, at least he'd gotten a few hours' sleep. We'd had none, and wouldn't get any for a while.
He gave us doughnuts. He gave us use of his bathroom. And he gave us a map that he himself drew, guiding us over hill and dale to reach the occupied trading post on foot.
The rancher had just two requests. First, don't tell anybody he helped us. Second, get our cars off his property. Park them by the road, hide them in the woods, ditch them in the creek, but don't leave them here.
I think he had a better idea of how long we'd be stuck in Wounded Knee than we did. And that's when it struck me: "We're not going to give up until we've gotten rid of Uncle Sam," Dennis Banks had warned us. That could be a long time!
Of course, if we were destined to spend a few days or longer with hundreds of militant Indians in Wounded Knee, there wasn't much at this point that I could do about it. Except head back to the rancher's bathroom and start winding as much toilet paper around my fist as I could fit in my hip pockets. Which I did. You never know.
We came up with a plan. Since it looked like we wouldn't be able to freely move in and out of Wounded Knee, our bureau chief, Bill, would keep one of the cars and stay on the outside to coordinate our coverage if need be. Just how we would provide that coverage under those circumstances, we didn't know. And for that matter, we didn't know whether there'd be any way to coordinate it either.
But aside from Bill, the rest of us, after stowing the other car, would hike in and try. That meant the camera crew, which in those days had three men (John, Jack, and another Bill), the correspondent, which on this trip was Ron, and the producer, which in those early days of my career with ABC News, was me.
By the time we had our act together, it was almost dawn, which meant we might be seen by someone who wanted to stop us. But we figured federal authorities would have needed at least as much time as we did to get their act together. In short, maybe they had already shut down the roads into Wounded Knee, but they probably hadn't yet sealed it off from anyone going in on foot.
At least we hoped not.
It turned out we were right. Within a couple of days, they did put hundreds of U.S. marshals, BIA police, and FBI agents around the perimeter of Wounded Knee. But for the moment, not twelve hours into the occupation, this rugged South Dakota rangeland was still wide open.
The only thing in our way was barbed wire. Most of the rolling grassland in this part of the country was subdivided into quarter sections, and each quarter section was defined by a barbed wire fence. If the Indians could have made a penny for every foot of barbed wire strung across their reservations, they wouldn't need any financial help from the government.
It only took a couple of hours to get in, because the rancher's map was right on the money. Every fence, every hill, every hollow showed up right where he said it would. At first, I was grateful that he got us where we wanted to go. By a few days into the occupation, I thought of it more as his revenge on us.
Thank goodness for the rancher's doughnuts, though. Just half a day into the seventy-one-day occupation, all the fresh and packaged food in the white-owned trading post was already gone. Three hundred to four hundred Indians, and a handful of journalists, can go through one small store pretty fast.
All that was left was flour. Shortly before the occupation, the trading post had gotten in a huge shipment of big bags of flour. Indian women, part of the occupation force, were now baking it into biscuits.
At first, they were sweet and tasty. Within a few days, they became just adequate. By the time we finally pulled out of Wounded Knee, I'd have preferred corned beef and cabbage, and I hate corned beef and cabbage. But biscuits were all we ever had to eat. For the duration of our unexpectedly long stay, with only one exception, biscuits were the sum total of our meals inside Wounded Knee.
But it was one hell of an exceptional exception!
One of the Indians' protests, as I said before, was that white ranchers could go to Washington and lease the best of a bad lot of land to graze their cattle. What that meant was, there were some fine, fat cattle grazing not too far away. But the Indians couldn't just walk out and grab one. Remember the security cordon of federal officials? It was getting tighter and tighter.
Well, about two weeks into the occupation, Indians and journalists alike were fed up with biscuits. Some were even getting sick. Pity, with those tasty, fat cattle so close.
Then one night in early March, we were buried by a cold and blinding blizzard. Actually, I wasn't nearly as cold as everyone else. The Indian leaders, who had taken over one of the two trailers that belonged to the white owners of the trading post, had assigned the twenty or so journalists who were covering them to the other trailer. Early on, I had secured the top of Wounded Knee's one working TV as my sleeping place in that second trailer. It was one of those big old console models, and if I curled up tight in a fetal position, none of my limbs hung over the side.
More important though, it was up against a wall of the trailer, and it was the wall that was heated, which meant I didn't get really cold until almost everyone else already was-especially most of the Indian occupiers, who were sleeping in the poorly heated trading post, or on the floor of the church.
Anyway, about two weeks into the occupation, at two or three in the morning, someone started ringing a bell. A great big bell to summon all within earshot to the road outside the trading post.
I kind of hated to leave my tiny, hard perch. You can get used to anything. But I left, along with everybody else.
The snow was thick. And blowing almost horizontally. No place gets blizzards like South Dakota's.
Standing in the middle of the road was a bull. Or a steer. To tell the difference, you've got to get down and look. But I didn't. I wasn't curious. Just hungry.
The animal had a rope leash around its neck and was covered in snow. But it sure looked tasty.
Three Indian braves had snuck out of Wounded Knee in the blizzard and rustled this animal. They led it back and proposed to slaughter and cook it right there on the spot. There was only one problem: no one knew how.
The whole point of this increasingly difficult occupation was to enable the inhabitants of Indian reservations to return to Indian ways. But out of several hundred Indians gathered in a circle around this potentially delicious meal, no one knew how to kill it and cook it.
Except Aaron. Aaron was there for NBC. He was NBC's soundman. Aaron was a black man, not an Indian. But in an earlier life, he had been a chef at a Chicago restaurant. In training for that job, he had learned how to do what we needed done that cold night in Wounded Knee. He stepped into the middle of the shivering circle. "Let me show you."
Under flashlight illumination, Aaron opened his pocketknife and slit the animal's throat. Then with the help of the braves who had stolen it, he hung the animal from a rafter in the trading post's overhanging roof to bleed. Aaron told everyone we should let it age. At least a few days anyway.
But no one really wanted to. Everyone was savoring the idea of meat, now.
So Aaron struck a deal. "Tell you what," he told Russell Means and Dennis Banks, who had assumed control of the animal now that leadership really counted, "I'll butcher it so there are enough small portions of meat for every Indian, and we'll just take the liver." "We," in this case, meant the journalists.
Well, "we" were none too happy with Aaron's deal. We were just as hungry for a good piece of steak as the Indians were. On the other hand, they were the warriors. We were just the journalists. Moreover, it was too late to renegotiate.
But Aaron knew what he was doing. He explained to us over the campfire he built that we had the better half of the bargain. The meat of a four-legged animal that had been walking around just an hour earlier is way too tough to chew. Fresh liver, on the other hand, can be cut with a spoon. Of course most of us didn't have a spoon, or anything else. But the slice of fresh liver that I held in my bare hands, roasted over a campfire on a freezing field during a blizzard in South Dakota, was about the best food I had ever eaten.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LIFE IN THE WRONG LANEby GREG DOBBS Copyright © 2009 by Greg Dobbs. Excerpted by permission.
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