Free Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper Page A

Eldina’s grandmother was crying silently. I didn’t see the tears at first—they blended with her pale white, wrinkled flesh—but I saw them glisten on the back of her hand as she wiped them from her face. She reminded me of my childhood nanny, May, crying as she said goodbye. May had helped raise me from the time I was born, but when I started high school, she had to find another job. I didn’t want her to go, but there was nothing I could do. After she left, I couldn’t speak for days.
    I said goodbye to Eldina and her father, squeezed her grandmother’s hand and wished her well. I left behind some deutsche marks on the tray and walked quickly down the steps, glass crunching in the grooves of my boots, hot tears burning my throat.
    BAGHDAD’S YARMOUK HOSPITAL is gearing up for the January interim elections. Extra plasma, extra beds. In the back I find the staff washing blood off stretchers. I’m told I can stay at Yarmouk for no more than half an hour. A CNN security guard stands near me at all times, and out on the street, other armed guards watch the road. A suicide bomber targeted the hospital in September, killing six people and wounding twenty-two others. My guards aren’t taking any chances.
    Yarmouk has the busiest ER in Iraq, and by midday it’s already packed.
    “There was a car bomb this morning, an explosion at a police station. Some of them arrived here,” Dr. Rana Abdul Kareem tells me as she checks the chart of a man screaming on a nearby gurney. He is taken out, and another patient is brought in. The wheels of his gurney cut a path through a pool of blood on the floor.
    “This man here has multiple bullet injuries,” Dr. Kareem says. “Another one is in the operating room, and there is another one lying there, and there were some people with superficial injuries we treated and discharged.”
    The man they’ve just brought in has been placed in the center of the room. Several nurses dab at a gaping hole in his leg. He was driving his car and got caught in a firefight. His blood drips in a Jackson Pollock pattern next to a bloody sandal lying on the floor.
    I’m at the hospital to do a story about reactions to the upcoming elections, and to ask Dr. Kareem about the prospects for peace. I know what she is going to say, but still I have to ask.
    “For god’s sake, don’t speak about peace here. Just don’t speak about peace,” she says, spitting the word out as if sickened by the aftertaste. “Maybe after ten years we will have some peace, but now we have forgotten about something called peace in Iraq.”
    Dr. Kareem is weary of cameras, sick of reporters asking questions, hinting at changes that never come. I start to ask her something else, and she stares at me, tired and angry. I realize I’ve seen that look before.
    IT WAS MY first trip to Sarajevo. 1993. The first year of the war. A woman was shot crossing the street, near Sniper Alley. Strangers hailed a passing car and loaded the woman into its backseat. I followed them to the hospital and into the ER. The doctors allowed me to shoot footage for a while. They were well versed in the kabuki of cameras, but no longer believed that anything about the situation in Bosnia would change.
    “What picture has not already been taken?” a man in the ER asked me. “What haven’t you seen? What don’t you know? What remains to be said?”
    I apologized, and put my camera down.
    “Thank you,” he said. “I think it’s better if we die in silence.”
    Initially, people wanted you to take their pictures, tell their stories. They thought it would make a difference, force America or Europe to act to end the bloodshed. “Sarajevo was a cosmopolitan city,” everyone said. “It didn’t matter if you were Muslim, Serb, or Croat.” As the war continued, however, the divisions were clearer. No one seemed to talk about living together again. No one wanted to talk at all.
    At the Kino Café, about twenty young men and women sat in a