WHEN WE REACHED A ROUNDABOUT, Tyler and Anthony got out and walked off to interview some rebels. Some were watching the approaching action with nonchalance; others were scurrying around, shooting their weapons into the air. I was directionless. I didn’t want to be here or there, and could barely lift my camera to my eyes. Even the most experienced photographers have days like this: You can’t frame a shot, catch the moment. My fear was debilitating, like a physical handicap. Tyler, meanwhile, was in his element, focused and relentless. I imagined the images he was capturing while I was clumsy, scared, missing the scenes, clicking the shutter too late.
As I ran forward to follow him, I heard the familiar whoosh of a bullet. I looked up at the rooftops: Qaddafi snipers were in the city. I assumed that everyone realized the gravity of the situation, but back near the car Anthony was drinking tea with a handful of men beside an ammunition truck, chatting happily in Arabic. He looked older than his forty-something years, with his gray beard and soft stomach. His eyes sparkled, warm and friendly, as he listened to the Libyans, calmly smoking his cigarette and throwing his hands around as he spoke, as if hanging out with friends by a pool.
But Steve, who had been kidnapped twice—once in Iraq, once in Afghanistan—looked spooked. He stood by our car with Mohammed, as if this might inspire the others to finish their work. The locals around us were screaming, “Qanas! Qanas!” (Sniper! Sniper!)
Mohammed was getting frantic. “We have to go to Benghazi,” he pleaded. His brother had been calling, warning that Qaddafi’s men had entered the city from the west. He called us all back to the car, and we took off for the eastern gate of town.
On the road toward the exit Tyler asked Mohammed to stop the car one last time to check out a team of rebel fighters setting up rocket-propelled grenades. He reluctantly pulled off to the side of the road, and Tyler leapt out to shoot, buoyed by a rush of adrenaline I knew well—that feeling of satisfaction when doing reporting that few others would dare do. Mohammed immediately called his brother again to check in. I knew we were pushing the boundaries, lingering after we had been warned to leave, but my desire to pull back to safety felt like a terrible weakness. My colleagues would never have accused me of being wimpy or unprofessional; I was the one who was all too aware of being the only woman in the car.
A car pulled up alongside us: “They’re in the city! They’re in the city!”
“Tyler!” Mohammed shouted, his face wrecked with fear.
“Let’s go!” Steve screamed. Tyler clambered into the car and we took off.
The night before, my editor, David, and I agreed that I would call him at 9 a.m. in New York. I checked my watch and dialed his number. I couldn’t get a line out. I dialed again. Nothing. I kept redialing his extension, over and over and over, punching at the phone. When I looked up and squinted into the distance, I saw something I hadn’t seen in weeks: traffic.
“I think it’s Qaddafi’s men,” I said.
Tyler and Anthony shook their heads. “No way,” Tyler said.
Within seconds, the fuzzy horizon distilled into little olive figurines. I had been right.
Tyler realized it, too. “Don’t stop!” he screamed.
You have two options when you approach a hostile checkpoint, and both are a gamble. The first option is to stop and identify yourselves as journalists and hope that you are respected as neutral professionals. The second option is to blow past them and hope they don’t open fire on you.
“Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” Tyler was yelling.
But Mohammed was slowing down, sticking his head out of the window.
“Sahafi! Media!” he yelled to the soldiers. He opened the car door to get out, and Qaddafi’s soldiers swarmed around him. “Sahafi!”
In one fluid movement the doors flew open and Tyler, Steve, and Anthony were ripped out of the car. I immediately locked my door and buried my head in my lap. Gunshots shattered the air. When I looked up, I was alone. I knew I had to get out of the car to run for cover, but I couldn’t move. I spoke to myself out loud, a tactic I used when my inner voice wasn’t convincing enough: “Get out of the car. Get out. Run.” I crawled across the backseat with my head down and out the open car door, scrambled to my feet, and immediately felt the hands of a soldier pulling at my arms and tugging at my two cameras. The harder he pulled, the harder I pulled back. Bullets whipped by us. Dirt kicked up all around my feet. The rebels were barraging the army’s checkpoint from behind us, from the place we had just fled. The soldier pulled at my camera with one hand and pointed his gun at me with the other.
We stood like that for ten interminable seconds. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tyler running toward a one-story cement building up ahead. I trusted his instincts. We needed to get out of the line of fire before we could negotiate our fate with these soldiers.
I surrendered my waist pack and one camera and clutched the other, pulling the memory cards out as I ran after my colleagues, who, in the chaos of bullets, had also escaped their captors. My legs felt slow as my eyes stayed trained on Anthony ahead of me. “Anthony! . . . Anthony, help me!”