The stairs squeaked as we went up. It was a narrow staircase, winding, just wide enough for your body. A nautilus, maybe 100 feet high. Not very stable. Dark, too, but for the holes shot by the tank. I slowed my step. The shot was loud inside the staircase, and I couldn’t see much, because the second marine was falling backward, falling onto Ashley, who fell onto me. Warm liquid spattered on my face. The three of us tumbled backward out the doorway. The second marine, although bloodied, was not hit...

After a long bombardment, the Marines are eventually able to go in and fetch Miller, who had been shot:

Miller was out. Two marines had pulled him from the tower, Goggin one of them, choking and coughing. Black lung, they called it later. Miller was on his back; he had come out head first. His face was opened in a large V, split like meat, fish maybe, with the two sides jiggling.

“Please tell me he’s not dead,” Ash said. “Please tell me.”

“He’s dead, Ash,” I said.

I felt it then. Darting, out of reach. You go into these places, and you think they’re overrated, they are not nearly as dangerous as people say. Keep your head; keep the gunfire in front of you. You get close and come out unscathed every time, your face as youthful and as untroubled as before. The life of the reporter: always someone else’s pain. A woman in an Iraqi hospital cradles her son newly blinded, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. The cheek is so dry, and the tear moves so slowly that you focus on it for a while, the tear traveling across the wide desert plain. You need a corpse for the newspaper, so you take a bunch of marines to get one. Then suddenly it’s there, the warm liquid on your face, the death you have always avoided, smiling back at you as if it knew all along. Your fault.

[NYT Magazine. Pic via NYM]

"As a correspondent for The New York Times in Iraq," Filkins discloses, "I sometimes traveled and worked with Mr. Packer, though not on that piece." No, must have been some other 16,000-word-er. Naturally, we'd assume that two dusty, angularly-handsome war correspondents might cross paths in a war zone or two. That Filkins was also a guest at Packer's June 2006 wedding in Brooklyn and is, we hear, a close friend of Packer's, makes his earnest, passionate review of the journalist's Iraqi translator drama a bit off-putting. If Packer's drama was brilliant, like his book The Assassins' Gate, it might be one thing for Filkins to faun all over it—the plight of translators in Iraq who get tortured and killed for helping out the U.S. deserves as much earnest passion as possible, and Packer is no dilettante with the written word. But in response to exchanges like this one, highlighted in the Times review?

“I don’t want to do anything that someone obliges me to do,” Intisar tells her boss, an American diplomat named Bill. “I hate that. I won’t do it. I was forced to do many things in Saddam’s regime. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

Bill says, “That’s pretty brave of you, Intisar.”

She replies: “It’s not because I’m brave. It’s because I am tired.”

We can literally taste the hail of shit we're going to catch for this one, but the lameness of that dialogue made our toes curl. Come on, Dex. The canapés at Packer's wedding couldn't have been that fucking good.

How ya doin', folks? Great to see you all! Can we talk about this weather for a second? It was so sunny out there yesterday [pause for response] It was so sunny, even Charles Isherwood decided life was worth living! So, what's going on in the news? Iraq, wow. Last week was so deadly in Iraq that Dexter Filkins got to use his "this might be our last day on earth" line with five different women! [pause for laughter] I'll tell you, when John F. Burns was getting so agitated over there and I said "Screw it," I meant the assignment, not the female side of the press pool. Zing! So we've got some famous faces in the audience today. Is my cousin Mikey here? Michael Golden, International Herald Tribune publisher. Mikey? We can never tell if Mikey's around... maybe because I shipped him off to Paris in an internecine power struggle and ever since then he's been plotting in exile to overthrow me! Talk about family control issues! [pause for awkward, strained silence] Is Hassan here? Hassan Elmasry? He's not here? [give leering look to audience] Good. Let's talk about him! Hey, Hassan, I got a Power Point presentation right here in my pants, and it's got your name on it! [pause for laughter] But seriously, Hassan, go fuck yourself. You think you're going to come into Pinch's house and shake up a hundred years of tradition? Sit and spin, my friend. Sit. And. Spin. [sweat copiously, adjust tie] I will fucking kill you and the investment firm you rode in on. [notice you're alarming audience, go to prop material] Look who's here? [pull out plush moose toy from left suit pocket] It's Dryfoos the Moose! Dryfoos, why don't you say a few words to the audience, they're afraid to talk about you. [do moose voice] "Helllllllllllooooooo! Good to see you! Hey Morgan Stanley, lemme tell you what I told Howell Raines when the heat got to be too much: 'There's only room for one serial incompetent in this company, and you sure don't look like Janet Robinson to me! Get the fuck out of here!'" [notice people silently heading toward exits; sit on stage clutching moose and weep openly] Okay, we've got a great show for you today. Some douchebag from About.com who convinced me that a self-help version of Wikipedia would be a good investment is here! Stick around, we'll be right back! [rend garments, moan, collapse] —balk

A Difficult Annual Times Meeting for Sulzbergers [NYT]

We read that, and we thought we'd try something similar—except, you know, with weekend media. We wanted to know: what are the papers like on Saturday and Sunday over there in Iraq? Is it all arts, leisure, and reflective whimsy like it is here? So we e-mailed Dexter Filkins, who had been recovering from a widely celebrated tour of reportorial duty as Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times.

About a week later, the answer came, and yes and no were beyond the point: Filkins was simply severe. Polite but stern, his note was above all short, and it left a mark we will not soon shed. "Sorry," the journalist wrote:

I am just getting this. I don't think I'd be of much help. Iraq is in the middle of a civil war, and there isn't much to say about arts and leisure there at the moment.

All best,

Dexter