Spinner, Jackie

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Spinner, Jackie

PERSONAL:

Daughter of David (a pipe fitter) and Donna (a school teacher) Spinner. Education: Southern Illinois University—Carbondale, B.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Washington, DC. Agent—Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management, 505 8th Ave., Ste. 603, New York, NY 10018. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Washington Post, Washington, DC, military affairs correspondent, 1995—. Previously contributed to Oakland Tribune, San Diego Tribune, Decatur Illinois Herald & Review, and Los Angeles Times TV Magazine.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Distinguished International Reporting award, Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, 1995 (cowinner).

WRITINGS:

(With contributions from Jenny Spinner) Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival in Iraq, Scribner (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Frustrated with her assignment to write about accounting policies among reconstruction contractors in Iraq, Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner requested that the newspaper send her to Baghdad so she could get to the root of the story there. To her delight, they agreed. She arrived in Iraq in 2004 and spent nine months there, surviving a kidnapping attempt and covering not only the reconstruction business but also the court martial of the first soldier to be tried for abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison. Her memoir of this time, Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival in Iraq, which includes contributions from her twin sister, Jenny Spinner, received admiring reviews.

There were many days, Spinner writes, when she feared she would not survive. Only a few weeks after arriving in Baghdad, she was almost abducted outside the Abu Ghraib prison—an experience that both frightened and angered her. She also felt the effects of the huge assault on Fallujah, which resulted in massive casualties. This, she says, was a turning point for her: "The part of my brain that processed fear just shut down," she writes. "I sat there wondering if my new courage … was a sign that I was becoming a better reporter, or a mentally unhinged human being."

"I needed to be honest [in the book]," Spinner said in remarks quoted by Editor & Publisher contributor Barbara Bedway. "I needed to talk about the struggles I had, the chaos I felt, and the anxiety I still have being home without the same sense of purpose I had in Iraq." She writes about daily frustrations, such as her difficulty in finding vegetarian food or in communicating without a knowledge of Arabic, as well as larger issues like friendship, fear, courage, and the emotional toll of warfare on soldiers and their families. She writes about her deep bond with her colleagues and with Iraqi translators and other staff members who took her into their homes, describing the weekly meals she would cook for them and the spontaneous indoor soccer games they would play. Many readers were particularly moved by her account of her friendship with an emotionally damaged young woman who had been raped by Saddam Hussein's son Uday; the woman later died in gunfire at a U.S. military base.

"Spinner does not tackle the big-picture questions about the war," commented Carl Sessions Stepp in the American Journalism Review, "but high debate is not [her] goal." Her aim is to show readers what the reality of reporting from a war zone really is, to provide, in Stepp's words, "an intimate, inside look at a dangerous side of the business." Spinner succeeds in this goal, Stepp felt, because she "combines the professional and personal without narcissism or pomposity." Stepp noted that Spinner confronts situations that pose difficult ethical choices and sometimes necessitate responses that do not strictly conform to what is taught in journalism school. When it is too dangerous for Spinner to leave her car to interview sources in a large crowd, for example, she asks her translators to do so. She also passes herself off as a citizen of Canada or Ukraine, rather than risk her safety by admitting her real nationality; when she is confined to quarters and can't scout out the information she needs for a story, she makes deals to get it from rival journalists. Praising Tell Them I Didn't Cry for its honesty, Stepp added that the book can also be read as "a memorial for the nobility—and vulnerability—of all those normal people, journalists, soldiers, doctors, nurses, diplomats and peacekeepers, groping to carry on with honor under ghastly conditions."