Gulf War period

The Gulf War period brings the distant violence of war into the daily lives of Tully Hart, Kate Mularkey, and Johnny Ryan. Johnny leaves for Baghdad as journalists anticipate the first bombing; Kate waits at home for messages, and Tully, working in a newsroom, promises to follow events and tell Kate the truth. That pledge grows more difficult as the danger escalates and the boundaries between professional reporting and friendship become consequential. The period links the immediacy of war coverage to the private uncertainty of the people waiting for someone to come home.

War, reporting, and the promise to Kate

As concern mounted over developments in the Middle East, journalists prepared for a possible attack. Johnny told Kate he was going to Baghdad the next day. Tully reassured her that many journalists were going and promised to follow his progress from the station, where she expected to receive news quickly. When Kate asked her to tell the truth whatever happened, Tully agreed. The familiar assurance that she would tell Kate the truth took on a darker weight in the circumstances. Tully nevertheless tried to comfort her by predicting that the war would be brief and that Johnny would be home before their daughter, Marah Ryan, took her first steps.

The promise was tested almost immediately by the distance between the people involved. For the first days after Johnny left, Kate waited near the new fax and phone on the kitchen counter while caring for Marah. Johnny had explained that calls were possible only in dire need, but that sending faxes was relatively easy. When the first message arrived at four in the morning, its familiar handwriting moved Kate to tears before she had read it. Writing from Baghdad, Johnny described journalists based at the Al-Rashid Hotel, their unusual access to both sides of the conflict, and the uncertainty of waiting for events to unfold. He said the team would leave the city the next day and promised to be careful.

The bombing made the distance more than a matter of separation. Johnny wrote that bombs had turned a starry night into a scene of destruction, and that an office tower close to the hotel had exploded. In a later fax, he described seventeen hours of bombing and the expectation that little would remain when it stopped. The messages convey the pressure of witnessing and reporting a war even as Johnny tries to reassure Kate with brief updates and assurances that he is continuing his work.

The waiting at home

The faxes became an irregular connection between Baghdad and Kate’s household. In one, Johnny apologized for the time since his previous message, explaining that the team spent so much time on assignments that he could hardly spare a moment. He described himself as exhausted and said the capture of the first U.S. female VOW had affected the journalists around him. He also reported that the team was preparing to cover the possibility that Iraqi forces would ignite oil wells in Kuwait, closing with messages to Kate and Marah.

By the time Kate read that fax, dated February 21, 1991, it was almost a week old. She had spent six difficult weeks waiting for news that Johnny was coming home and for a report announcing that the war was ending. The possibility of a ground assault frightened her particularly because she knew Johnny’s instinct to pursue a story others might not be able to tell; she imagined that he would find his way onto a tank to cover it. The difference between the brief reassurance Tully had offered and Kate’s mounting fear underscores what the promise could not control: Tully could watch the news and pass on information, but neither friend could make the danger or uncertainty stop.

Tully’s reporting and its limits

When word of the bombing reached the newsroom, reporters spent three days waiting for official information about Johnny’s condition. In the meantime, they reported known facts, including the circumstances of the bombing, field accounts of his injuries, and his earlier reporting in Central America. They also used the developing story to address broader subjects, such as the risks journalists face covering wars, the challenges of Desert Storm, and injuries associated with bombings. The newsroom’s work made Johnny’s situation part of a public news cycle even while his family waited for definitive information.

Tully faced a particular conflict: she needed to report the story while protecting Kate from details that could cause additional distress. She resolved to report carefully and tactfully, avoiding mention of brain damage or possible blindness. This was not a choice between reporting and silence; she still had to break the story. Instead, she tried to control how it was told, attempting to meet her newsroom’s demands without disregarding her friend’s vulnerability.

Her report from outside the hospital described Johnny as seriously injured in an explosion near the Al-Rashid Hotel, noted the death of the reporter who had been with him, and explained that the Ryan family and the German hospital were not available to journalists. She framed their privacy as understandable in a moment of personal tragedy. The report also said Johnny had suffered serious head trauma and had undergone a complex procedure at an army hospital near Baghdad; without the lifesaving surgery performed there, specialists said, he would not have survived. The broadcast then showed Tully beside Johnny’s hospital bed. In this sequence, the private promise to Kate and the public work of journalism meet on camera: Tully reports verifiable facts while trying to keep the most frightening possible consequences out of the story she tells.

A period within Tully’s longer career

The war belongs to a larger arc in which Tully’s vocation begins with a female news anchor as an example of what might be possible. At the Mularkey home, Mrs. Mularkey pointed to Jean Enersen as one of the first women to anchor a nightly news program. Tully responded that she would become a reporter. The ambition became a private mantra, a way of imagining a future beyond the abandonment and uncertainty of her childhood. She and Kate shared the dream of working as reporters together, a vision of friendship expressed as a professional team.

At the University of Washington, Tully approached that future with deliberate preparation. She read at least four newspapers a day and watched as many newscasts as she could, while repeatedly consulting her School of Communications adviser to work out her academic plan. Because her youth kept her out of upper-level broadcasting and journalism courses, she had to wait for access to the training she wanted. The impatience of that delay contrasts with the later urgency of war reporting, where events move faster than either a student or a newsroom can control.

Tully’s career eventually made sustained exposure to conflict part of her working life. She recalled her years through the stories she covered, including the launch of Operation Anaconda against the Taliban, worsening violence in the region, the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, and the beginning of the war against Iraq. By spring 2003, after years of travel and reporting, she was exhausted by the violence. Even amid public attention and people eager to be near her, she felt isolated. The earlier Baghdad crisis therefore sits within a recurring tension: the work that fulfills the professional ambition formed in childhood also brings danger, fatigue, and distance from ordinary life.

Significance

The Gulf War period tests the idea that friendship can be protected by a promise to tell the truth. Tully’s assurance to Kate sounds simple when Johnny is leaving; it becomes ethically complicated when his condition turns into a developing news story and Tully must decide what to report, when, and with what degree of detail. Her solution preserves both obligations imperfectly but deliberately: she reports the serious injury and the lifesaving surgery while withholding the most alarming possibilities from the account she gives the public.

The war also reveals the difference between public knowledge and private certainty. Reports can describe the hotel, the bombing, the medical response, and the wider dangers facing journalists, but Kate still waits for news of her husband, and Tully cannot guarantee an outcome. Across the period’s messages, broadcasts, and newsroom decisions, the conflict is not only a subject Tully covers. It is a strain on the relationships that give her reporting personal stakes, and an early part of a career whose accumulating stories will eventually leave her worn down by violence.