The Night We Held the Phone Out the Window in Tripoli

People sometimes ask me which of the places my work took me to I still see most vividly, and the honest answer has less to do with beauty than with chemistry. You remember what floods you. Adrenaline is supposed to sharpen memory, and that is exactly what it does. That is why the conflict zones come back first, because those were the nights when the most adrenaline was moving through my system.

If you asked me which story returns before all the others, it would be the bombing of Libya. I was on the ground in Tripoli when President Reagan ordered the bombing of Gaddafi. It was retaliation for a terrorist act they believed Libya was behind. I cannot tell you now which one.

It was 1986. At that time, the network evening newscasts were the most important broadcasts of the day, and the timing of the raid reflected that. The bombs began falling just as the news was coming on.

I went on live and held the phone out the window so Dan Rather could hear them going off. He talked about what he was hearing. I tried to talk about what I was seeing. I was not very good at it. But it was intense.

I watched one of the planes go down that night. An American plane was shot down, and I think they lost that pilot.

The days afterward stayed with me just as strongly, because the Libyans took us out and showed us the damage caused by the bombing. We walked into Gaddafi’s palace. We walked into his living room. I picked up a piece of the rubble, which turned out to be the wallpaper off his wall, and I still have it.

Nobody yet knew whether he had been killed. That uncertainty was the frightening part. There were mobs of Libyan militias in the streets with Kalashnikovs, and any American on the ground in Tripoli during those particular days understood how quickly the situation could change. We were nervous about it.

Then they flew us to Benghazi, where the Americans had bombed an airstrip using cluster bomblets. Those are little tiny bombs, and some of them had not gone off. Someone had gathered the ones that failed and arranged them on the ground to spell a message back to the Americans who dropped them. They meant it to read DOWN USA. They got the English spelling wrong, so what it actually read was DWON USA.

I remember the plane they put us on to get there. It was a DC-10 or something close to it, old enough that smoke was coming out of the engines while we sat on the ground. Flying from Tripoli to Benghazi in their aircraft, watching the engines smoke, and nobody saying very much.

It all worked out fine. It was just kind of crazy. That is the part people who did not do this work tend to miss about it. The nights that stay with you forty years later are not the ones you would have chosen.