Excerpts from Tell Them I Didn`t Cry
From the Foreword by David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and former editor of the International Herald-Tribune

As readers of this book will see, Jackie has written a love story. It records her passionate commitment to the people caught up in this war—Iraqi civilians and American soldiers alike. It expresses her love for her colleagues—especially the courageous Iraqis who work in The Washington Post bureau in Baghdad and have kept us alive and functioning. Jackie baked them cookies, read them poetry, suffered, rejoiced with them. When she became bureau chief, her first order was that everyone take a ride on the backyard swing to relax. In these pages, you’ll come to know our cooks, bodyguards, drivers and translators—and understand why, for those of who have spent time in Baghdad, they feel like part of our family.

Jackie Spinner

In my head, I swim, slow laps in the chilly waters of a long rectangular pool that exists only in my imagination. My arms, pale and thin, dip in and out of the water in methodical strokes. I am alone, and the sun is shining. The sun is always shining in Baghdad. I swim whenever I start to panic: when my breath comes in short grasps and I feel like I will float away, a drifting, tattered kite that disappears into the endless red glow of a desert sunset. If I don’t keep moving, I won’t survive.

Contribution by Dr. Jenny Spinner

As the weeks and months wore on, I began to realize that whatever Iraq had given my sister, had given all of us, the war had taken more. I thought back to the night we had collected her from Dulles, how we had arrived far too early because we wanted to be there the moment she came through customs. At last she emerged, skin brown from the Iraqi sun, too thin from the diet of rice—and fear—and from her recent illness. She was dressed all in black, her headscarf wadded up in one of the nine suitcases she pushed. We chattered all the way to the car, but after the first minutes of frenzied conversation, we fell into silence. Aidan beamed in wonder at the woman beside him, who was gazing out the window, her tired face lit up by the northern Virginia cityscape. “Tell Aunt Jackie you love her,” I nudge my son.
  “Love you,” he parroted.
  “Tell her thanks for coming back to us.”
  “Come back,” he said, his tiny hand reaching fo her in the dark.
My own hand cuts through the dark, reaching, still reaching.

                        

.   Jackie reads samples of her writing at the Life Healing Center in Santa Fe, N.M., December 2006. She was a client there for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder from October 2006 through February 2007.