Johnny’s faxes from Baghdad

Johnny’s faxes from Baghdad are both field dispatches and a fragile domestic lifeline: they tell Kate what Johnny can report from the war, while making her wait for the next proof that he is alive. Arriving intermittently at the kitchen fax-phone, the pages bring Baghdad into the home in Johnny’s handwriting. Their descriptions move between professional access and danger, but as the messages grow scarce, the stack Kate rereads becomes an emblem of how little she can know or control.

Arrival and form

Two days after Johnny left for Baghdad, Kate received his first message. Until then she had moved through the house in a daze, never far from the new fax-phone on the kitchen counter. She cared for Marah—changing diapers, reading stories, and watching the baby crawl among furniture—while hoping for news. Johnny had explained that calls were possible only in dire need, whereas faxes were relatively easy. Kate had argued that her own need was dire, but the faxes, rather than a call, became their available channel.

The first message arrived at four in the morning. Kate threw off her blanket, rolled off the sofa, and stumbled toward the kitchen to read it. Before she reached its words, the sight of Johnny’s bold handwriting made her cry. The delay between transmission and receipt was slight enough for the faxes to feel like contact, yet each one could only report what Johnny had seen earlier. Their immediacy therefore came with a limit: Kate could read his account, but could not answer the dangers unfolding around him or know what would happen next.

Baghdad through Johnny’s reports

Addressed to Kate, the first fax described an unsettled situation in the city. Journalists were staying at the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, where they had unprecedented access to both sides; Johnny believed the war’s coverage would change everything. He told Kate that the team would leave the city the following day and asked her not to worry, adding that he would be careful. The message joined professional excitement to reassurance, offering Kate an account of his work and an attempt to calm her at the same time.

The subsequent faxes conveyed a war whose scale was difficult to absorb even from the hotel. In one, Johnny described the bombing beginning overnight: from their bird’s-eye view, the journalists saw bombs turn a starry Baghdad night into what he called hell. An office tower exploded close to the hotel, and the heat reached them like an oven. Another short update counted seventeen hours of bombing and still more to come, with Johnny writing that nothing would be left when it finally stopped. The sequence compresses enormous violence into brief reports sent home, while the changing detail—from a view of the city to the duration of the assault—makes the danger increasingly immediate.

A later message explained why Johnny had been away from correspondence. The reporting team spent so much time on assignment that he could scarcely find five minutes to himself; he was tired, then exhausted. He also reported that the first American female prisoner of war had been captured, an event that affected the journalists deeply. He hoped he could someday tell Kate what witnessing such events felt like, but said he could not think in those terms then if he wanted to sleep. The fax thus records not only what the team covered but the limits of what Johnny could process and convey while still working. Its closing news—that they were heading to cover the possibility of Iraqi forces igniting oil wells in Kuwait—keeps the next assignment in view even as he sends kisses to Kate and Marah.

Intermittence and waiting

The faxes came about once a week, far less often than Kate wanted. The spacing mattered as much as the reports: each message briefly narrowed the distance between them, and each gap reopened it. Kate’s last fax was dated February 21, 1991, almost a week before she sat watching war coverage at home. She had spent six weeks waiting for a call to say Johnny was coming back and for a special report to announce the war’s end. With a ground assault expected to begin, she feared for him in particular because she knew he would find a way onto a tank to cover a story no one else could tell.

The consequences of that waiting were physical and domestic. Kate had lost fifteen pounds and had not slept well since the night she and Johnny spent at the hotel. She began chores and abandoned them, then sat for more than two hours watching television. Nearby, Marah stood holding the coffee table’s wooden edge, swayed, plopped onto her padded bottom, and crawled away; the child’s ordinary movements continued alongside Kate’s fixed attention to the war and the missing message. The faxes could not make the waiting safe, but their words gave it an object and a ritual.

Kate folded the latest fax in half and placed it on a small pile of earlier ones. Each day she promised herself not to unfold them and reread Johnny’s words; each day she returned to them. That repeated handling turns the messages from one-way reports into a private archive: the pile preserves a sequence of contact, while rereading lets Kate revisit the reassurance and detail they contain. The habit offers a form of closeness, but also exposes the absence that makes the pages necessary.

Significance as a record of connection

The faxes carry two kinds of information at once. They report the journalists’ access, assignments, bombing, and exhaustion, and they preserve Johnny’s effort to address his wife and daughter from a place Kate cannot reach. His promise to be careful sits beside descriptions of buildings exploding and hours of continued bombing; affectionate closings sit beside news of capture, sleeplessness, and the next dangerous assignment. The contrast makes reassurance meaningful without making it sufficient.

Their narrative function also depends on incompleteness. Each message arrives as a slice of Johnny’s experience, separated from the next by days and from Kate’s immediate life by distance. When the latest fax is almost a week old, the silence after it becomes part of what the object communicates. Kate’s repeated return to the folded pages shows how the faxes sustain connection while measuring its limits: they are evidence that Johnny wrote home, not a guarantee of his safety or return. Their material accumulation gives form to the war’s intimate cost in the household, where news arrives in bursts and hope is renewed, then left waiting again.