A review of “I lost my love in Baghdad,” written by Michael Hastings
Michael Hastings delivers an intriguing and strikingly honest account of the war in Iraq and the life and death struggle faced by members of the press in their efforts to cover it in “I lost my love in Baghdad.” Unfortunately, it is interspersed with an uninspiring and often boring love story between him and Andi Parhamovich, a girl he met just before being sent to Iraq. The details of their relationship often become painful to read and distract from an otherwise fascinating tale about life inside the “Green Zone.” Sadly, it is the tragic death of this young woman, who comes off as an insecure stalker when she follows her boyfriend into a war zone, along with the love story that took her to Iraq that is the alleged focus of the book.
Hastings writes with such passion when discussing his first-hand account of the daily details of the war and the people he encounters. He describes his meeting with Captain Gregory Hirschey who leads a bomb squad unit that searches for IEDs and who came to Iraq because he had a premonition of his own death and felt if he was going to die, he might as well die for his country. And the conversation with the men from the Louisiana National Guard as they realize the devastation caused to their home town by Hurricane Katrina is compelling and fraught with emotion. But the descriptions of Andi and his relationship with her are so tedious and dull, it feels as though he is merely reading facts from a newspaper article. He fails to give her any depth or purpose and appears on the surface to be using her death as an excuse to sell books.
It is easy to understand why Hastings is in Iraq and why he felt compelled to expose himself to the increasing violence. What is not clear is why Andi went to Iraq, what she hoped to accomplish there and what her job description actually was at the National Democratic Institute. Hastings skims over the fact that she began working there as though it were a trivial matter that had no relevance to who Andi really was, perpetuating the insinuation that she merely followed a man into a combat zone.
Perhaps Hastings has not yet come to terms with the loss of his love sufficiently enough to allow him to discuss her death with the same passion and emotion that he discusses the war. Or perhaps he did not believe the book would be published without the hook of a lost love. Either way, the book fails to deliver the tragic, heart-wrenching love story that the title promises.
