handrasekaran wrote hundreds of stories for the newspaper, including nearly 140 front-page reports in 2003 alone."There were a lot of close calls," Chandrasekaran, 33, says. "Several Iraqi and American colleagues had brushes with death.
There were a lot of brave Americans fighting over there. And a lot of brave journalists. "There was always this base level of threat," he continues. "Every time you left the house, you knew you could get kidnapped or killed with a roadside bomb, or a mortar could land in your house.
But I thought my role was to convey what was going on. And if I had to take some risks, well, that was the price I was wiling to pay."
Chandrasekaran is the author of a new and an important book -- Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Knopf). It is a shocking, sometimes hilarious, and often surrealist account of what went wrong with President George W Bush's war in Iraq.
In the book, Chandrasekaran describes the Green Zone -- the walled city the Americans built around deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace -- along the Tigris river. It was a self-contained world, a little America built for the comfort of diehard believers in the war against terrorism and America's mission to convert Iraq into a democracy and a free market. A shining city on a hill.
The Green Zone had everything. American food with a southern flavour, milk, bread and canned food from Kuwait, cereals from the United States, Pakistani and Indian waiters, trailer parks for Americans serving what was then L Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, two Chinese restaurants, laundry service, American-style bars with Foosball tables, a military commissary which sold everything from Cheetos to Dr Pepper and Operation Iraqi Freedom T-shirts. Even 24/7 electricity -- something Iraqis do not get till date.
Image: Iraqi men carry the coffin of a police recruit killed October 22, 2006 after his convoy was ambushed on the road to Baghdad. The death toll from the ambush on the convoy of unarmed police recruits rose to 17, medics said, with more than 20 wounded after insurgents raked their buses with automatic fire.
Photograph: Wissam Al-Okaili/AFP/Getty Images
Also See: The Troubles of Freedom
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