War Reporter

Why the Best War Reporter in a Generation Had to Suddenly Stop

After fourteen years of being immersed in the bloody wars of our era, C.J. Chivers came home.

By Mark Warren

The forces of Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi had been firing high-explosive ordnance into the city of Misurata for weeks—they'd been shooting tank rounds and they'd been firing rockets. Barrage after barrage. And lots of mortars. And among the 120mm mortars they had been firing were Spanish-made rounds that were a clustering munition that had never been seen in combat before. This was a serious problem, because we now know that the Spaniards had sold the mortars to the Qaddafi government just as Spain was preparing to join the international convention that banned them.

We know this because of the work of C. J. Chivers of The New York Times, also a frequent contributor to Esquire, whose expertise in ballistics and battlefield tactics—and nearly unprecedented experience reporting from war zones—has made him the most important war correspondent of his time. Chivers suspected that Qaddafi was using the Spanish mortars, and it was when he went to prove it that a NATO jet on a bombing run tried to kill him.

By that April 2011, when Libya was collapsing into civil war, Chivers himself had been at war for ten years. He'd been in Afghanistan in November 2001, just after the bombing began, as he'd been in Iraq in March 2003, when the bombing began there—as he'd also been in lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11, and as he had been in every theater since, too many deployments for him to even remember, amounting to years away from his home, his wife, and his five small children, four boys and a girl.

The Times hired Chivers at age thirty-four in 1999 to cover war. That was the handshake, he says. A former Marine officer, he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper figured. What the Times could not have known was that Chivers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other things, its study of the weapons we use to kill one another. After reporting on a firefight—whether he was in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Ossetia, Libya, or Syria—he'd look for shell casings and ordnance fragments. If he was embedded with American soldiers or Marines, he'd ask them if he could look through what they had found for an hour or so—"finger fucking," he'd call it—and ask his photographer to take pictures of ammunition stamps and serial numbers. Over time and in this way he would reveal a vast world of small-arms trade and secret trafficking that no other journalist had known existed before.

And what no one could have known was that the experience Chivers has had at war would be a mirror for the experience of the United States over the same period. Only for him, that experience—and its damaging effects—has been far more personal.  

In the center of Misurata, where the mortars were falling, Chivers found pieces of Qaddafi's banned mortar rounds, but he didn't know exactly when they'd been produced or how they'd been imported to Libya. The best way to find out would be to try to find the positions from which government troops had fired them. He had examined many of the Qaddafi positions as they changed hands inside the city—along Tripoli Street, the same street where his friends the photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington had been killed by mortar fire three weeks before—but hadn't yet been able to find any identifying documents or shipping crates that would tell him what he needed to know.

So on the day after the siege lifted, he walked the hills surrounding the city. He was methodical, drawing on his own experience in the infantry to decide where he would put the mortar pits. Then he slowly walked in an ever-expanding square looking for his evidence. He found some old military equipment, perhaps from an antiair training site used by Qaddafi's military. But judging from the way it was arranged, it wasn't related to the latest fighting. He kept walking the hill as his square grew wider still.

Chivers and his translator, Hadi, were in friendly rebel-held territory, so feeling relaxed, he had removed his helmet before leaving his van. This was a rare thing for Chivers to do anywhere, but especially in this shitty war, as he called it, as there had been a lot of terrible things falling out of the sky and two of his friends had just been killed. Chivers is disciplined about when and why he won't wear his gear. Besides his desire to live, he also feels ethically bound to protect himself because being wounded meant that, as he says, a doctor or a bunch of nurses and an ambulance driver were all helping you instead of helping someone else. It is a rule when you're covering a war zone, you try to not go into the casualty stream and further clog it up.

So even as Chivers took his helmet off, he observed himself doing so. Ten years into this job—a job in which he would vacate his feelings about virtually everything and become, as he puts it, "a somewhat robotic observational machine," because if I start thinking about myself and how I'm feeling, then how can I do my job? I'm not interested in how I feel. Who gives a fuck how I feel?—he felt certain as he removed his helmet and deliberately placed it on the back bench of his van that this is not the day that I die. What I am doing here is not dangerous.

Another rule is that if you're with someone who wants to leave, then you leave. If you're with another journalist and you're getting shot at, and he feels in his gut that it's time to get out of there, you go. In Syria in 2013, he and photographer Bryan Denton were driving to the rebel front one day just as the government dropped artillery along the route. "It was a very scary run," Denton remembers. "Basically, they'd cut the Aleppo-Damascus highway. There was a regime position about five hundred meters away, which is a terrible spot to be in because you're far enough away that they can use artillery, but close enough that they can still use tanks and small arms and heavy machine guns. It's one of the only times in my career that I've been just too afraid to work. And Chris was calm and we were just getting our stuff done, and I remember at one point he asked me, "Are you good to go?" And I was like, "Yeah, man, I need to get out of here. I can't work. I'm too spun." Chivers abruptly stopped what he was doing, Denton says. No more questions asked. And they left.

He is not one to leave a dangerous place easily. On September 11, 2001, he was working in downtown Manhattan, a few blocks from the World Trade Center, for the Times's metro desk. He had put on his one tie and headed out to cover primary Election Day when his pager started going crazy. He ran toward the burning buildings only to just miss being killed at 9:59 by the falling South Tower, and again at 10:28 by the falling North Tower. He remained on the pile, reporting for the paper, for the next twelve days.

A few weeks later, he was in Uzbekistan en route to Afghanistan. That would begin fourteen years of reporting on war, of being in an almost constant state of almost getting killed, during which time he wrote hundreds of stories from dozens of places. And his skill as a journalist became directly proportional to his powers of self-denial. "The work isn't all that good," he says. "It's just a few stories." He is known among other journalists for this self-negation, but even more so for his remaining unruffled in even terrifying situations. Like Denton, those who have gone to war with him tell stories of Chivers keeping them calm, often by narrating the incoming fire. He knows ranges and probabilities, has a good instinct for whether their position is at risk of being overrun, and on occasion offers basic tutorials. The Times photographer Tyler Hicks, a frequent reporting partner, recalls Chivers saving him from being hurt badly as he was standing behind a gunner: "RPG back-blast, Tyler! Get back, dude!" Or, as Denton says, "He'd call, 'That's a missile, not a rocket—remember, a missile is powered throughout flight, a rocket is powered at launch.' "

Chivers has spent more time in the field with Hicks than anyone else. Hicks remembers a night in Afghanistan when a short patrol turned into something much longer. They were usually meticulous in their preparation for joining a patrol, but on this night they found themselves caught out in the open and ill equipped. The patrol had gone south, and they were out for the night—without food, water, or gear, sleeping in the dirt. "A freezing rain started. Absolute misery. Chris and I actually had to hold each other to try to keep warm that night," Hicks says. "Those times are just as bad as being in a firefight. Hungry all the time. Thirsty all the time. Headaches from dehydration, and the dirt gets into absolutely everything. Grit in your teeth. In your eyes. In your food. In your water." The fuller story of that harrowing patrol and an ambush and the company's hectic scramble back to base would become a classic piece of Chivers reporting in Esquire ("The Long Walk," August 2009).

Anytime Chivers embeds with a unit, before actually going into the field, he gathers all the soldiers to introduce himself and to describe the work that he intends to do. "It was one of the smartest things he could have done," Hicks says. "Because when someone would get hurt or killed, and we'd be trying to do our job, sometimes people around us would get upset because they didn't fully grasp what we are doing there."

We'll be out there with you, going on the same patrols, making the same movements, and taking the same risks, Chivers will say. The main difference is that we are not armed. And if something happens, our job is different from yours. Our job is not to influence what happens or to turn your attention away from your work, but to document what is happening.

Chivers searched the hillside outside Misurata for a while but found nothing. He remembers tapping his watch, thinking, I've gotta get back and call in. The afternoon was a bust. He said to Hadi, Fuck it. It's not here. Let's go. He turned to leave; he could see his car. And a few seconds later, the sky just roared. A sound, at first, more than a flash. I knew this sound because I had been around a lot of air strikes. But he had never before been directly beneath an air strike. He had never been the target of an air strike. This one sounded like a bomb—a five-hundred-pounder—dropping down an elevator shaft, with Chivers at the bottom. There was no time to react or even say anything. His mind formed the simple thought: Air strike. Dead.

The bomb landed in front of Chivers and Hadi, and the shock wave lifted them and threw them backward. Chivers landed hard on his chest, cutting his arms and face, and he remembers being surprised still to be thinking thoughts, remembers thinking: These things throw up a lot of debris. Okay, you survived that, but you don't wanna get killed by a car bumper hurling down on you from a hundred feet. So the instant he hit the ground, he rolled and scanned the sky overhead, a quick scan, but saw nothing.

Hadi seemed to be unharmed, and they both got to their feet. Neither could hear what the other was saying, but Chivers was yelling. He knew the architecture of air strikes, and he knew that attack aircraft often move in pairs. He also knew that the targets who were still moving on the ground after a strike were considered to be especially annoying targets. The pilots call them "squirters"—the people who survive the first blast and then try to escape. And there's the practice of "plinking squirters," sort of a clean-up process. And that's what Chivers was yelling: We have to get the fuck out of here. Now.

He started weaving, running in one direction and then zagging in another, a 20-degree zag. His head was heavy and his brain was swelling from a concussion. But Hadi ran right to the car and jumped in. As Chivers was still zagging, Hadi pulled up alongside, door open, yelling, "Get in, get in, get in!" Chivers was thinking, It's a lot easier to hit a car than a man, and I don't know if I wanna be in the car. But there was no getting Hadi out, so he dove into the backseat and Hadi floored it.

The rebel guards at a checkpoint 150 yards down the road were surprised to suddenly see this little van screaming out of the huge mushroom cloud. The guys manning the checkpoint were wide-eyed and talking really fast, Chivers recalls. One of them pointed excitedly at Chivers and said, "Big boom mister! You still alive?"

At home in Rhode Island, Chivers keeps a piece of the bomb that almost killed him on the wall of the office off the garage where he writes. It was a GBU-12, stamped with for use on mk82. That incident was extremely valuable, he says.

An aircraft, a pilot, put a guided munition very near to me on a piece of ground where I was standing that was unquestionably out of the Qaddafi forces' hands, and then proceeded to brief the strike publicly as if it was a valid strike. They said things that were not true. They may have believed them. Either way, it's a problem, right? It shows that they don't know what they're bombing in many instances, and they convince themselves that they do, which is an incredibly dangerous use of lethal power. And it just was extremely useful to see that and consider other things they may be saying to you on one story or another. Because there's no question to me about what happened.

Chivers laughs. I had some proximity to the event.

He survived that bombing because of topography and geometry. Dumb luck, really. Since September 11, he says, he's often thought the difference between living and dying came down to where your feet are.

And today, that's home. Here he's Chris, and knows you're a stranger if you call him C. J. He made captain in the Marines, but it was when he made lieutenant that he started having other Marines to account for, and evening paperwork to do. Signing "Christopher John Chivers" dozens of times a night was a chore. So he became C. J. to the Marines, and when he got out and went to Columbia Journalism School after service in the first Gulf War, it stuck for his byline, too.

The Chivers house is full of children and noise and life. It is where he has spent virtually all of his time since returning from war and where he does most of his writing. He intensely dislikes writing about himself, and likes talking about himself even less. He'd much rather talk about "murdering fish," as he puts it. He's got an open fishing boat: twenty-six feet, fiberglass, forty-five hundred pounds, nine-and-a-half-foot beam. Deep V, he says. It takes seas well.

No belowdecks. Head's a bucket—his and hers. There's no bed or bunk or galley or cabin. It's just, you know, whatever the weather is, you're in it. I'm at my best when I'm sort of hyperstimulated mentally. Or I am most like myself, let's put it that way. I feel at my most calm if I'm out on a boat in the middle of the night in bad weather and fog with the kids aboard, many, many miles out, you know, working the boat and trying to solve the puzzle of the fish, and then trying to get the boat in with no visibility and this blackness and mist and fog and the possibility of collision with the various tugs and barges that are navigating the same waters. A lot of people would not want anything to do with that. But I am never more blissfully satisfied and calm.

He and his wife, Suzanne, bought the place when he was assigned to the Times's Moscow bureau from 2004 to 2008, a posting that allowed him to take his family along and gave him perfect time-zone proximity to the wars.

The wars, of course, have been traumatic for his family. When he was reporting in Afghanistan that first time, just as the wars of this century were starting, he was away for four months and got home late in January 2002. At the time, he had one child, Jack, then almost two. His second son, Mickey, was born five weeks after he returned. He would be back in conflict a couple months later, spending that summer working in Israel.

To prepare for the coming Iraq War, which would start the following March, Chivers left home for the Middle East again that November and would be gone for more than six months, missing Christmas for the second time in a row and marking his single longest stretch in a war.A whole family is happening. And I am not really part of it, as I should have been. Right?

His Iraq War nearly ended before it started. All the borders were closed and he almost couldn't get into the country. The Times had several people in Baghdad, but no one in the north, in Kurdistan, which is where he needed to go. But while waiting in London he got lucky, accidentally running into an important fixer.

This guy happened to be passing through London. I arranged to meet him, and I told him I wanted to go to Kurdistan and that I intended to stay. He read his newspaper the whole time I was talking to him and seemed incredibly, imperially bored. But I laid my case out for him and he finally said, "Okay, fine. I'm going to help you."

He would have to go to Tehran, the guy told him, another impossible spot on the map for an American journalist. The fixer gave him a letter of reference, an address, and a name. He wrote a letter in his hand. He sealed it and handed it to Chivers.

He went to the Iranian Embassy in London and told them he was a bird-watcher and that he wanted to go look at the migrating birds in Iran, and could he please have a visa? The clerk slid a form over to him to fill out. For profession, he wrote "writer." And I gave them my passport, and I thought, There's no fucking way they're going to give me a visa.

A week later, he returned to find a visa waiting for him.

In Tehran, he checked into a hotel with the stack of bird-watching books he'd picked up at the Natural History Museum, and the next morning made his way to the address his fixer had given him, taking a cab to a tired-looking apartment complex on the edge of the city. Upstairs there was an office and a couple Kurdish guys in shabby suits, cigarette smoke hanging down to belt level. "Mr. ___ sent me," Chivers told them. "I have a letter."

In English one of the men said, "No shit?"

He read the letter and intensely smoked a cigarette, and he doesn't take his eyes off of me as he puts it on the table, and finally I say, "So what's the fucking letter say?"

The guy replied, as if reciting the letter, "These men are our brothers. Take them into Kurdistan, and kill them."

Then the man threw his head back and laughed. Wiseass.

Following the guy's instructions, Chivers drove across Iran to a town on the Iraqi border. A few days later, after getting discovered by the Revolutionary Guard and a nervous and angry brown-robed cleric who took him in for questioning and seemed undecided what to do with an American journalist posing as a bird-watcher and wandering freely about, Chivers finally made it to a dirt road that went down into a gulley, and on the other side of the gulley was Iraq. There on the side of the road one morning at dawn waited a Mercedes. One of his fixer's nephews got out of the car.

"Hey, dude!" he said in a British accent. "Welcome to Iraq!"

More specifically, he would be in Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where he would spend the next few months building the infrastructure of a news organization from scratch—locating decent hospitals, getting plenty of cash, vehicles, reliable drivers, translators, and fixers. At the time, there was basically no one else there.

I ended up with good drivers, excellent translators who happened to be medical students, so they could put a tourniquet on us or themselves if they had to, he says. Sturdy vehicles. Bags of cash. First-aid kit. Worked through the bazaars to get helmets and flak jackets.

The armies amassed and the U. S. invasion began and seemed to end rather quickly. The Times offered him the Baghdad bureau. His editors told him that Baghdad was going to be a great story of reconstruction, that he'd have a house, with a swimming pool, and that he could even move his family there. Chivers was startled. You realize that the war is still going on, right? You understand that it's really just getting going, right? I'm not gonna go to Baghdad for the swimming pool.

He turned down the job. He suspected that a lot more destruction and death would happen before anything that could be called "reconstruction" would begin, and believed from what he'd seen that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would likely engage the United States for years to come. The fundamental story of the wars—at least the story that he felt best equipped to report—would be the experience of the American soldier as only a former Marine could tell it, and he thought that a significant part of that story would be embedded in shell casings and bomb fragments and the complex new ordnance of extraordinary power that soldiers would be subject to. He believed that the globalization of the arms trade would have unintended consequences for American forces. Many of the endless arms America had exported over the years would wind up being used against it—a story no journalist had yet seen fit to pursue.

What Chivers didn't know was that in the coming years that story and the larger story of the twenty-first century's wars would take him from Iraq and Afghanistan to the "Arab Spring" in Libya and Syria to Vladimir Putin's territorial ambitions in Ukraine; from his landmark chronicle of the Chechen school siege at Beslan for Esquire to his harrowing report in the Times on the previously secret American casualties of abandoned chemical-weapons stocks in Iraq to The Gun, his definitive history of the AK-47.

I understood the war wasn't going away, he says. None of these stories that I had worked on were going to stop. They still haven't stopped. I understood that this was going to be a marathon. More than a marathon. I didn't know it'd be a lifetime.

It's hard to identify exactly when the turning point came.

Was it the moment when he became so hypervigilant, so tactically alert, that he analyzed every common moment of every common day—from taking his kids to school to having a cup of coffee with a friend—in terms of survivability? I wouldn't sit there if I were you, Chivers told his friend at a café in midtown Manhattan on a sunny day a couple years ago. When the blast comes, you'll be covered in glass.

Was it the day during the worst of the Libyan conflict, when the government shelled the hill Chivers was on as he tried to find a safe place to stand? He was on the phone with a Times editor named Rogene Jacquette, who could hear the artillery barrage, when he had to hit the dirt and suddenly lost the call. A few minutes later, he managed to get Jacquette back on the line, but she was too distraught to talk. She had thought he was dead.

Or was it on that day in April 2011 when he was blown into the air by a NATO bomb? Or a few weeks before when Hetherington and Hondros were killed by mortar fire? After that day, Chivers, along with Sidney Kwiram of Human Rights Watch, made hasty arrangements to get the dead out of there. This required finding a refrigerated truck and persuading a vessel in Misurata, a port under bombardment, to stay long enough to take them to Benghazi, where the bodies could be airlifted home.

"I have to write about this," he told Denton, who was with him in Benghazi. "We were in Chris's room, and I remember looking over as he was writing," says Denton, who recounts the moment as if it were something he would never forget. "And then he stopped and just started quietly sobbing in his hands."

Denton and Kwiram put a hand on each shoulder. "I just need a minute," Chivers said.

Many journalists say that the deaths of Hetherington and Hondros changed the way that business is done in war zones and drove some writers and photographers from war coverage altogether. No doubt that thought occurred to Chivers, too. But no, Misurata wasn't the moment, either.

I always thought I'd be done when I got shot, or when something worse happened to me, he says today.

Before leaving for his last trip to Iraq last year, he and Suzanne and two of their sons were sitting around the dinner table playing pitch when one of his boys started to itch terribly. He was suddenly covered in hives from head to toe. They called the family doctor, who was puzzled because he could find no clear medical reason for the hives. There was no indication of an infection, and the hives didn't resemble the kind caused by allergy. A couple days later, Chivers left on his trip to Iraq. It was to be a short assignment—three weeks or so. While there, he spoke regularly with Suzanne, who said their son's rash had not gone away. Then, on the day he arrived home, the hives disappeared, suddenly and completely.

Chivers consulted the doctor, who told him that the rash was almost certainly an autoimmune miscue and was probably caused by terror. His son had been afraid for his father's life.

A switch went off at that moment for me. You know...I mean, I realized I couldn't do that to him. And for a few weeks, I quietly argued with myself about this and tried to find a way to mentally, to see if I could get the switch back into its old position. I remember lying in bed night after night saying, I think that's it. I think I'm done.

Chivers talked to his brother, also a former Marine, and he said, "If your kid's sick and you know the medicine that will heal him, do you withhold it?"

Late last summer, in 2014, after returning from a trip to cover the fighting in eastern Ukraine, Chivers wrote to his editor at the Times and asked to be reassigned. "I have basically been studying organized violence and combatants since I was nineteen and decided to join the Marine Corps," he wrote. "I welcome the chance to open myself to new themes." He has not been back to a war zone since.

Over the past year, he has dedicated himself to what he calls a program of return, of integrating back into normal life. Which means, among other things, that he is trying to be less vigilant.

I think if you talk to any well-trained small-unit infantry guy, whether an experienced NCO or up through captain, they'll tell you that when they move through civilian life—when they're driving through, say, a town—they endlessly are thinking about how they would do various tactical things in that environment.

Does that constitute PTSD? I have never sought diagnoses, and I don't study that. Do I feel different? I'd say, sure, I am different. I should be different. Is it all bad? It's bad when it takes up too much of your bandwidth, because you're thinking about that you're not thinking about something else, and that can be stunting, to put it gently. But it's also maybe why a lot of people are still alive, right? You go into the forest long enough, you become a forest creature.

He has devised strategies to exhaust himself, he says, so that he can get true rest, without the persistent thoughts and alertness and memories of living in war. He has decided that he has to remain in motion: He takes his boat out with his kids every day the seas aren't too choppy. Last year alone, they hauled in a thousand pounds of fish. He splits wood. And he gardens, or it would be more accurate to say--—given the amount of potatoes and onions and beans and broccoli and squash involved—he farms.

And he has a new role at the Times. As word got around the paper last fall that Chivers was leaving the foreign desk, he was in the newsroom in New York, putting the finishing touches on his major chemical-weapons story (part of his new role with the investigations desk). When the editor he'd been on the phone with from Libya, Rogene Jacquette, spotted him, she walked over to say she had heard the news. Chivers told her about his boy, about the game of cards and the hives and his terrible dread. He said it was as if a message were being sent through his son that it was time to go, in a way that even I could understand.

Jacquette took that in for just a moment and said, "We should all be thankful for your son." And then she said, "Because he is a blessing."