But Anthony had tripped and fallen to his knees. When he looked up, his normally peaceful face was wrenched with panic, oblivious to my screams. His face looked so unnatural that it terrified me more than anything else. We had to reach Tyler, who had sprinted ahead and seemed likeliest to escape.
Somehow the four of us reunited at the cinder-block building set back from the road, sheltered from the gun battle that continued to rage behind us. A Libyan woman holding an infant stood nearby, crying, while a soldier tried to console them. He didn’t bother with us, because he knew we had nowhere to go.
“I’m thinking about making a run for it,” Tyler said.
We looked into the distance. The open desert stretched out in every direction.
Within seconds, five government soldiers were upon us, pointing their guns and yelling in Arabic, their voices full of hate and adrenaline, their faces contorted into masks of rage. They ordered us facedown into the dirt, motioning to us with their hands. We all paused, assuming this was the moment of our execution. And then we slowly crouched down and begged for our lives.
I pressed my face into the soil, sucking in a mouthful of fine dirt as a soldier pulled my hands behind my back and kicked open my legs. The soldiers were all screaming at us, at one another, pointing their weapons at our heads as the four of us sank into silent submission, waiting to be shot.
I looked over at Anthony, Steve, and Tyler to make sure we were all still there, together and alive, and then quickly looked back down at the sand.
“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Please, God. Save us.”
I raised my eyes from the ground and looked up into a gun barrel and directly into the soldier’s eyes. The only thing I could think to do was beg, but my mouth was so dry, as if my saliva had been replaced with dirt. I could barely utter a word.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please.”
I waited for the crack of the gun, for the end of my life. I thought of Paul, my parents, my sisters, and my two grandmothers, well into their nineties. Each second felt like its own space in the universe. The soldiers continued barking at one another, with their guns leveled at our heads.
“Jawaz!” one of them suddenly yelled. They wanted our passports, and we surrendered them. The soldier leaned down and started searching my body for my belongings, pulling things out of my jacket pockets: my BlackBerry, my memory cards, some loose bills. His hands moved quickly, skipping over my second passport, which was secretly tucked into a money belt inside my jeans, until they reached my breasts. He stopped. And then he squeezed them, like a child honking a rubber horn.
“Please, God. I just don’t want to be raped.” I curled as tightly as I could into a fetal position.
But the soldier was preoccupied with something else. He removed my gray Nikes with fluorescent yellow soles, and I heard the whipping sound of the laces being pulled out. I felt air on my feet. He tied my ankles together. With a piece of fabric he pulled my wrists behind my back and tied them together so tightly they went numb. Then he pushed my face down into the filthy earth.
Will I see my parents again? Will I see Paul again? How could I do this to them? Will I get my cameras back? How did I get to this place?
The soldiers picked me up by my hands and feet and carried me away.
? ? ?
THAT DAY IN LIBYA I asked myself the questions that still haunt me: Why do you do this work? Why do you risk your life for a photograph? After ten years as a war correspondent, it remains a difficult question to answer. The truth is that few of us are born into this work. It is something we discover accidentally, something that happens gradually. We get a glimpse of this unusual life and this extraordinary profession, and we want to keep doing it, no matter how exhausting, stressful, or dangerous it becomes. It is the way we make a living, but it feels more like a responsibility, or a calling. It makes us happy, because it gives us a sense of purpose. We bear witness to history, and influence policy. And yet we also pay a steep price for this commitment. When a journalist gets killed in a firefight, or steps on a land mine and loses his legs, or tears his friends and family apart by getting kidnapped, I ask myself why I chose this life.
The location where we were taken, photographed about one month later by Bryan Denton for the New York Times. Following photograph: My shoe without laces where we were tied up.