The one time I lied about being a journalist

I was in Baghdad in 2006, at the height of a lethal insurgency against the American-led coalition in Iraq. Few people in the NYT newsroom (and none of the married ones) were volunteering to cover the war. When the Jordanian guy seated next to me on the flight from JFK to Amman learned where I was headed, his eyes got big as melons and he solemnly shook my hand.

Baghdad in summer was an infernal 115 degrees made more oppressive by the ubiquitous high earth-colored military barriers, oversoldiered checkpoints and early-morning car bombings. Once while swimming laps in the Baghdad bureau’s backyard pool (I know…), I retrieved a spent 9mm bullet from the bottom. Iraqi police officers regularly fired into the air as a crowd-dispersion technique.

For weeks, I’d been asking our Iraqi fixers to arrange permission for me to travel to Sadr City, a Shiite slum in Baghdad controlled by a formidable militia that regularly sent mortars screaming over our heads into the American-controlled Green Zone. Word finally came back from the militia that I would be permitted to enter Sadr City. Just one thing, my fixer said: I had to say I was Canadian and I had to say I was reporting for The International Herald Tribune, not The New York Times.

The latter lie was a soft one; The Times owned a stake in the IHT, and whatever story I wrote would likely show up in both papers. The nationality fib was bald-faced and unvarnished. It was the only time in my reporting career that I misrepresented myself.

My destination in Sadr City was a restaurant. The most popular chicken joint in Baghdad, despite being repeatedly truck- and car-bombed by a rival Sunni Muslim militia. I wanted to know why patrons continued to show up to a place where the chances of being killed en masse were so great.

It was one of the best stories I wrote from that godforsaken city during that terrible time.