I just finished reading this remarkable piece by Elizabeth Rubin, a foreign correspondent who’s been coming and going from Afghanistan for quite awhile. Her work in the New York Times Magazine is a reporting tour de force, and she goes to lengths that push the description of her work as “immersion” journalism. No wonder, then, her work is so damn good.
But her essay in the Guardian this week is equally remarkable: Rubin embedded with US troops in the middle of her pregnancy, and managed to keep it a secret (for most of the time, anyway). It’s actually kind of terrifying, the image of a pregnant woman running to dodge gunfire, tears streaming down her cheeks from how hard it is to put one swollen ankle in front of the other.
But it’s also an incredible portrait of Afghanistan, of the civilians who suffer from American bombs and of the soldiers who have to drop them. As gripping as the idea of a pregnant embedded journalist is, it’s the Afghan people who linger in my imagination after the article is over. It’s pitch-perfect first-person writing the way it should be done. And it makes this foreign place all the more real.
The story that came out of that trip is here.
