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Journalist's Journal

By Michael Lev Posted Apr 1 2005

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Christmas weekend in Beijing was quiet and cozy, I had no ambitions beyond having friends for dinner on Sunday, Dec. 26.

Our guests arrived late and apologized at the door for staying glued to the television watching BBC World. “Have you seen the news?” they asked. “It’s terrible.”

Instantly, I turned on the TV and e-mailed the Chicago Tribune’s foreign editor to see where I would fit in our coverage plan. Early the next morning I was told to get to Indonesia, and by Monday night I had hooked up with Indonesian journalist Handewi Pramesti in Medan. He acted as my fixer and guide.

The daily flight to Banda Aceh from Medan on Tuesday morning was full, and my Indonesian fixer and I assessed the situation. We decided to drive to Meulaboh, on the west coast, closest to the epicenter of the earthquake

How long was the drive to Meulaboh? Some people said 10 hours. Then a hotel employee said it was only five. We could get there, take a look around and come back to the hotel the same day to file. At 8 p.m., we were still on the road and Meulaboh only seemed to recede further. We decided to break our journey and spend the night at a small hostel.

The next morning I awoke to explosions. I shoved my suitcase under the bed and thought I heard the ack-ack noise of automatic weapons fire. I looked out onto the street and saw a military patrol drive by. Something was happening.

We waited for quiet and then asked around. The police insisted it had been children playing with firecrackers. This seemed unlikely.

Back on the road to Meulaboh, we ran into another big problem: the earthquake had knocked out the first of several bridges. Locals had rigged up a raft attached to a guide-wire to pull themselves across. We left our gear, including my computer, with our driver and crossed the river, hopping onto the backs of motorcycles to continue our journey. We hoped to make it to Meulaboh and back the same day and file by telephone.

Once past the last bridge, we arrived in a town that had cell phone service. We hired a van to proceed and hoped to get back to file within hours.

We arrived in the tsunami zone at 4 p.m., driving through the destroyed village of Merbau. An entire house had been shoved across the road from one side to the other. We made it to Meulaboh at 4:30. As far as I knew, we were the first journalists on the scene.

THE DAMAGE in Meulaboh was stunning, but what also was clear was that the town had not been completely wiped out. There were survivors on the streets. We wandered down a side road and saw a sad sight. Someone had placed the body of a baby on a cardboard box in the middle of the street. We noticed more bodies, twisted and filthy, lying in yards. The odor of death – a peculiar, sickly sweet stench – was overwhelming. Yet there were people already at work trying to clean out their houses.

“The living share the streets with the dead,” I wrote in my notebook.

Walking further, we made a mistake- we walked too close to a band of soldiers, and they chased us down. “Who are you? Where is your passport?” “It’s in the car,” I said. “Then we will go to your car,” they said. The area is usually closed to foreigners, but the restriction had been lifted because of the tsunami; there was supposed to be freedom for journalists.

We were taken to a waiting room in the military headquarters. The longer we sat waiting, the more certain I became: we had gotten to the story too quickly and would be punished for it.

My passport had been confiscated, which meant that we were in custody. We were then taken to an office where there was no electricity or cell phone service. I experienced a unique frustration: I had a story in my pocket and couldn’t file it.

We were held overnight, and in the morning, we were put on a helicopter to Banda Aceh. Then we were flown by cargo jet back to Medan. It appeared that I would be turned over to immigration and, presumably, deported.

Did no one understand that I was in Indonesia to tell the story of one of the century’s great tragedies? Didn’t they know that my reporting, along with the work of hundreds of other journalists, would lead to one of the great international relief efforts in history?

In Medan, we were taken to a building on the tarmac to wait until we were handed over to immigration. Now I had a moment with a working cell phone. I told my Indonesian fixer to keep everyone away from me, and I ducked into the little building. I called my wife in Beijing. “Carla!” I said, sounding a little edgier than I wanted. “Get a pen! Grab some paper! Start writing!” I dictated the Meulaboh story and asked her to e-mail it to Chicago.

I felt a lot more relaxed when the story was safely out of Indonesia. A few hours later, with the help of a sympathetic Indonesian military officer who alerted the U.S. consul general, I was released.

WE FINALLY arrived by plane at Banda Aceh late Saturday evening. At 7 the next morning, I called the desk with my plan: I’d wander the city on Sunday and file a story for Monday describing what I saw. But the Tribune’s foreign editor needed more. It was still Saturday night in Chicago, and the tsunami story would be on the front page of the Sunday final edition. He needed some copy within an hour to use as the basis for the daily news story.

It was an easy assignment. We walked outside in the direction of the ocean and came to an intersection. On the right, we saw a park and playground, uninhabited but untouched by the water. Toward the left, there was utter chaos. This intersection was as far as the raging ocean had encroached.

We saw destruction, smelled death and recoiled at a sight: a body hideously positioned horizontally atop debris, its head hanging low as if in defeat.

We came to a knocked-out bridge and talked to locals. Were they looking for their relatives? Yes, they said. “I’m looking for five,” said one. “Thirteen,” said another. “Twenty-one.” “Thirteen.” I wrote it all down and phoned it in to the foreign desk.

Later in the morning, we drove across the area, observed and talked to people. The landscape was desolate. The entire village of Lok Nga had been eviscerated. Hardly a building was standing where 3,000 people had been.

An old man balancing a box of noodles and some water from a pole over his shoulder walked past us. He’d traveled by foot one and a half days to Banda Aceh to buy these few provisions and was walking one and a half days back. He seemed insulted when I asked if he was disappointed to have acquired so little. It was a bounty to him.

Later we canvassed a neighborhood where the houses were just barely standing. A resident volunteered to lead the way. There were many bodies to see, she said.

We traversed garbage mounds and forged gullies and debris piles by tight-roping across planks that had been strategically laid. At one juncture, I paused to set my balance. There was a body just below this plank.

Outside the woman’s house, 12 bodies were strewn about. I looked to my right and caught sight of a corpse. I shuddered and turned quickly to the left. Suddenly there was another body. I turned again, only to face a third corpse. It was like a creepy quick-cut montage from a Hitchcock film. I was surprised not to have fainted.

The bodies were sad to behold, but I did not hesitate to look. They were part of the story.

The living affected me even more.

Every time I heard a survivor’s tale of the sudden raging waters, the fleeing, the drowning, I struggled to keep the images at bay and not place my family, my three daughters, on the Indonesian coastline on Dec. 26.

What must it have felt like to have your child ripped from your desperate grasp?

At an aid station at the airport, we ducked our heads inside a tent and noticed a woman with a bandaged knee sitting on a cot. She stared into the distance and said nothing. She looked hollow. She was alive, but she was dead. I didn’t have to ask. I just knew. She’d lost her children.

“One was 18 days old,” her brother said.

The woman’s face stayed blank.