A brief taste of war

A poet and performer with only a year’s experience in radio, Jerry Quickley might seem an unlikely candidate for war correspondent. But the host on the left-leaning KPFK-FM (90.7) said he went to Iraq -- until deported on the second day of the conflict -- to cover what he called the most significant news story since the Vietnam War.

Quickley, a garrulous bear of a man heard on “Beneath the Surface,” a news analysis show that airs weekdays from 5 to 6 p.m. on KPFK, returned to Southern California on Monday night, and was scheduled to be back on the air Thursday and again tonight. He said the news he had been getting before he went to Iraq was too focused on policy minutiae and told him nothing about the situation on the ground, in the streets. He wanted to see for himself and report what was going on, as well as meet what he believed was a responsibility to advance the cause of peace.

“My worldview is, if I were having my life threatened, people would travel great distances at personal risk to try to help me,” he said, and that reporting from Baghdad fulfilled his obligation to do the same.

During his two weeks there, sometimes shadowed by Iraqi government guides and translators, Quickley said he was struck by the people’s widespread regard for Americans, but also their resistance to U.S. foreign policy and the invasion.

“They had no thought of not fighting to the death, and these were not people I met exclusively in the presence of government minders,” he said. “It’s the same thing that would happen anywhere in the world, including America. People feel they’re attacking their home country.”

Although his satellite phone was confiscated on his way into Iraq, Quickley telephoned reports to KPFK up to five times a week from Baghdad, Karbala, Najaf, Nasiriyah and elsewhere. When the missiles started falling on the capital, on the morning of March 20, he and other journalists watched from atop the Hotel Palestine while the Iraqi Office of Planning building, across the Tigris River from them, disintegrated into rubble. He said he had never seen anything like it. “All I have to compare it to is South Bronx and the movies.”

But the next day, Iraqi officials deported him -- not for anything he said or did, but because of a paperwork problem, he said. His visa had expired while the government office where he could have renewed it was closed. In a country at war off and on for the past 23 years -- with Iran, then the United States -- he noted that a bombing wasn’t enough to keep the wheels of bureaucracy from grinding along.

Three Iraqi officials -- a driver, a guide and a translator -- took him on a 12-hour drive to the Jordanian border, along the same highway he’d taken on the way in. At one point they stopped next to a bombed-out gasoline station, and his Iraqi minders began arguing about where they would get fuel. Quickley suggested they take the argument somewhere safer, so they drove about 100 to 150 yards away from the bombed-out gas station. Then it was bombed again, the shock wave bouncing their vehicle into the air.

“You’re sitting in the car, they’re arguing back and forth, and all of a sudden I got this lump on my head. There’s no sound, it just happens,” he said. “It’s like something that bends the air and bends it back.”

*

Breaking news or breaking pitches?

“He hits a long drive. Way back. To the warning track ... we interrupt this broadcast for a special report.”

That’s the sound of a nightmare to some listeners of KFWB-AM (980), but exactly what others in the audience would demand because of the station’s legacy as the oldest all-news outlet in the Southland as well as its new role as flagship broadcaster for the Dodgers. Now, with a war on, what will the station do if news breaks in the middle of a game?

“This is kind of new territory for all of us,” KFWB general manager Roger Nadel said, but “we’ve been able to straddle that fence pretty well so far.”

During Dodgers regular-season games, which began Monday, the station offers news updates between innings, and instead of its usual schedule of “traffic on the ones,” reports tie-ups and backups at the top and bottom of each hour, Nadel said.

Before KFWB began broadcasting the Dodgers, Nadel sought advice from fellow executives at WGN in Chicago, KOA in Denver, KMOX in St. Louis and KOGO in San Diego, all of which carry their home teams’ baseball games and are also the news “stations of record” for their cities, he said.

“We’re not a station that has one mission only,” and must be mindful of those listeners who come to KFWB for the Dodgers as well as those seeking news, he said.

Anticipating the war in Iraq, Infinity Radio, parent company of KFWB and its rival all-news channel, KNX-AM (1070), placed ads around the Southland pointing listeners to both for news.Nadel said station officials have plans for when they might interrupt a game, such as “if the president would jump in and ask for time to speak.” A significant local event, such as an earthquake or terrorist attack, would probably halt a game anyway.

But Nadel said the station was spared a dilemma because the initial fighting -- and the consequent wall-to-wall coverage -- came when baseball was still in spring training. “Had the war broken out three weeks later, we might have looked at things differently.”