Before September 11 Megan Stack never imagined herself as a war correspondent in the Middle East. But before 9/11, Americans never imagined they’d be attacked on their own soil and engaged in several wars either.
Stack was 25 years old when she was sent to cover Afghanistan for the Los Angeles Times. Before that she was a national correspondent in Houston for the paper, and had no foreign or war reporting experience. She doesn’t clearly explain her quick promotion. She just says that she was in the right place at the right time—vacationing in Paris on 9/11.
In “Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War,” Stack shares her experiences reporting in the Middle East from 2001 to 2006. She begins in Afghanistan at the start of the U.S. invasion and concludes just after the end of Lebanon’s 2006 conflict with Israel. In between she covers war, terrorism and political Islam from places such as Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Egypt.
In the process, she received an education in war that affected her more deeply than she ever expected.
She learns that the war on terror is disjointed, that it’s taking place in a region with a complex history and culture. She also feels that change in the Middle East will come, but she isn’t surprised by the realization that it’s still very much the place she first met years ago.
As a journalist she finds herself at times stoic and at others, emotional. She expects the numbness, such as when she is interviewing bombing victims in Lebanon. After she finishes gathering quotes, she notices that she’s been walking with a shard of glass in her foot. But her emotion surprises her when she faints interviewing a wounded Iraqi policeman in the hospital.
One of the most important lessons Stack learns from her reporting experience, however, is the first thing she discovers about war: “You can survive and not survive, both at the same time.” In other words, even though you’ve made it through the war, you’ve left a part of yourself there.
“Every Man in This Village is a Liar” is about what she feels is the truth in the post 9/11 Middle East.
In Afghanistan, Stack writes a story about a tiny village, Kama Ado that had just been bombed. But the reality she sees isn’t what she reads in the paper the next day.
“By morning, my story wasn’t the same. Instead of leading with the news of the crushed village, the top of the story had Pentagon officials denying reports of the bombing. The first voice in the article was no longer that of an Afghan victim… I read it once. I read it twice. Were we to believe the village had spontaneously collapsed while U.S. warplanes circled overhead? Every man in this village is a liar.”
But Stack isn’t preachy when she speaks of these realities. Instead her accounts are honest, personal reflections that come alive with her poetic-like prose.
Stack also isn’t preachy about being a female Western journalist in the Middle East. She can’t, however, avoid the issue when writing about her time in Saudi Arabia.
She first sees the country’s strict separation of women and men as a mere annoyance.
But later she verbally attacks two men who yell at her for violating that separation. Stack is waiting outside a bank for a male friend. Two guards tell her she can’t stand in front of the bank window, which the men inside can see her through.
“‘I’m just standing here!’ I growled. ‘Leave me alone!’ This was a slip. In a land ruled by male ego, yelling at a man only deepens a crisis,” she writes.
She expects her male friend, a liberal, U.S.-educated Saudi professor, to “share her outrage,” but all he says is “yes’ and “oh” when she tells him what happened.
Though brave and hardened, Stack can only cover conflict for so long. Soon after witnessing the Israeli bombings of south Lebanon, she asks for a transfer to Russia, where she is currently the Los Angeles Times’s Moscow bureau chief.
She writes of her decision: “I was going to Moscow, in large measure because I didn’t expect to find any war there.”
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