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reporter, J-School grad shares stories of Iraq war
by Jill Stephens, Carolina Reporter
As the convoy rushed along Iraq’s dusty roads, freelance
journalist and USC graduate Kimberly Johnson dreaded reaching
the last military checkpoint before the airport.
At that stop, Johnson would leave behind the security guards
who had kept her safe during the six months she reported
from the war-torn country in 2006. “They were paid
to protect any reporter, but I had come to see them as family,” she
recalled. And she had no idea if she would ever see them
again.
But outer checkpoints are especially dangerous in Iraq because
they are easy targets for snipers or car bombs, so everything
must be done quickly and efficiently.
“How do you say goodbye efficiently?” she
said.
Johnson, a blogger for USA Today and a 1998 J-School graduate,
shared her experiences as an embedded journalist in Iraq
with USC’s
Society of Professional Journalists on Oct. 16.
Her first trip to Iraq was a two-week assignment for an
aviation newsletter, covering the opening of commercial air
travel in the country in 2003. But Johnson knew she had to
come back, despite the dangers.
“It felt wrong to not be there and write about what’s
really going on,” she said. “It’s such
a small sliver.”
She quit her staff job, completed a “surviving hostile
regions” class, and returned in 2005. This time she
went for about two months as a freelance journalist embedded
with a Marine unit in Anbar province.
In addition to the stories she sent to newspapers and other
publications, Johnson started writing a blog to keep friends
and family up to date on all she was seeing and doing.
Johnson said she made a concerted effort in the posts to
avoid offending acquaintances on different sides of the political
spectrum.
“I wasn’t there to make a point politically,” she
said. Her main goal in these posts was to describe and explain
the smaller experiences that didn’t fit into her professional
stories — the heat, the food, the long hours of downtime.
“Their life there stretches well beyond the body counts,” she
said.
Johnson said that her “letter home to Mama” approach
appealed to military families as well as her own. Soon, USA
Today asked her to blog for the national newspaper’s
Web site during a six-month stay in the country beginning
in January 2006.
Like many soldiers, she suffered from periods of exhaustion
and homesickness.
“You just get tired,” she said. “It was
just a very long, hard slog.”
But Johnson said she recognized that she was there by choice
and that she understood the risks.
When she needed to go outside military camps and into Iraqi
cities, she took a security detail and wore the traditional
clothing, like an abaya and hijab, to attract less attention.
Johnson said those experiences were always “stressful” and “nerve-wracking.”
Since March 2003, 119 journalists have been killed in Iraq,
according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Washington
Post reporter Salih Saif Aldin was killed in Baghdad on Oct.
14.
But Johnson said that being a female in a war zone did not
make her feel any more vulnerable.
“I never felt threatened because of my sex. It was
always because of my profession,” she said.
Now that she is back in the United States, Johnson is working
on a book about her reporting experiences in Iraq.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/iraq/
Read Johnson’s USA Today blog, Dispatches From Iraq
http://www.kimberlyjohnson.net
See articles by Kimberly Johnson printed in USA Today, the
Marine Corps Times and National Geographic News.
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A Spartanburg native, Jill Stephens is a senior print
journalism student at the University of South Carolina. |
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