Searching the World for a War to Call ‘Home’
BOOK REVIEW: Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home
By Sean D. Carberry / Madville Publishing
Reviewed by Jean-Thomas Nicole
The Reviewer – Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government.
REVIEW — Full disclosure from the outset: This is a real book review of Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home by Sean D. Carberry. Yes, I did my research and I have seen some humorous and imagined reviews on the author’s website by his own personal journalistic and musical luminaries; people like the late Hunter Stockton Thompson, famous author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, founder of the gonzo journalism movement and of Warren Zevon, an American rock singer, songwriter, and musician known for his dry wit and acerbic lyrics.
What is then clearly intended as an inside joke, as well as pointed literary and musical references, is more understandable when we know who Sean D. Carberry is. Following his own words, from 2007 through 2014, Carberry traveled the world reporting from war zones and fragile states for public radio, mainly America Abroad. He spent time in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Congo, Colombia, Kosovo, and Sudan and other rough international locations before settling down in Afghanistan in 2012. There, he served as National Public Radio’s Kabul correspondent until the end of 2014, when NPR closed their bureau.
After that, Carberry spent several years working for the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General, writing and editing oversight reports on counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the Philippines, and Africa, before returning to journalism.
Currently, he is managing editor of National Defense Magazine and is involved in activities to raise awareness and promote mental health for journalists. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his cat Squeak who he rescued from the streets of Kabul.
Passport Stamps specifically chronicles Carberry’s journey from novice, bumbling around places like Sudan and Iraq, trying to earn his place among the pros, to full-time war correspondent in Kabul as a pro with a major story to cover.
As 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan were happening, Carberry shares that he felt called to become a war correspondent out of a sense of public duty. In his view, as he tells it in his preface: “I felt compelled to experience it and communicate it back home.”
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The book itself is structured in three main layers, a bit like a tasty opera chocolate cake: at its most basic, this work is a self-described Bourdainesque (as in the late Anthony Bourdain’s famous television series Parts Unknown but without, at first, the cultural openness and awareness) travel book that takes the reader on a tour of different countries and societies, often on the verge of total collapse, disintegration, or in the best cases, slow reconstruction.
Most of the time in this part of the book, Carberry seems to be trying way too hard to prove his journalistic chops to his reader and his manhood to himself, by earning self-awarded, illusory, and cocky merit badges for getting his ‘arse’ in a war zone and experiencing the shit, as he writes matter-of-factly. Fortunately, his whole attitude would change over time in that respect. Looking back, he notes indeed lucidly:
“It had not yet set in for me that conflict meant death, destruction, and devastation. It would take another year or two before I would internalize the reality that the shit wasn’t some joy ride, it was life and death and involved tremendous human suffering and cost.”
There are definitively comic bits, too. For example, the whole episode of getting into Iraq while on the equivalent of military standby; and experiencing the unforgettable smell of the hot latrines once safely on the ground, rings particularly true and deeply felt.
The next layer of the book is a behind-the-scenes look at conducting journalism in far-off places. It is a candid (and often self-deprecating and critical) discussion of the challenges of the craft and the steep learning curve of parachuting into unstable countries that are either emerging from war or nations on the verge of being plunged into conflict.
That’s the saving grace of Passport Stamps. While the book is definitively not destined to be or become a literary chef-d’oeuvre, it is easy to read and get hooked. His style is not prose, rather a spoken train-of-thought or a radiophonic flux of consciousness. The reader thus becomes an armchair war correspondent having a buddy conversation around beers with the author. Sometimes it’s dumb, sometimes it’s funny, witty, prosaic and tragic.
The only problem is that from a historical point of view, it is coming ten years too late (or just in time, maybe?). Let me explain.
As a war correspondent, Carberry probably knows full well the paradox of writing the first version of contemporary history. For maximum impact, he should have written about his travels and experiences as he was living them, i.e., in the midst of the global war on terror, mostly. However, that is not always possible nor desirable. On the contrary, proper healing, as for research and investigations done internally, requires time, distance and a good dose of introspection.
Carberry’s story also reminds us that the human mind and its emotional memories can be tricky things to process or simply acknowledge, especially following multiple traumatic circumstances and situations. In the meantime, history keeps marching on.
Beyond that, this book is about universal human experiences—a journey to process loss and grief, to understand identity, and the search for purpose and a place where one feels at peace. It’s the quest for a “tribe”, personal or collective, inclusion, truth and authenticity. The reader can feel Carberry evolving and changing as the book progresses; that’s what makes it compelling and hopeful in a sense.
At the end, even though Carberry emerges still broken and full of holes, he has learned to live with them. Now, he hopes to continue the conversation about the psychological and emotional impact of working in war zones and hostile environments since there are thousands of civilians including journalists, aid and development workers, and diplomats who are deployed to dangerous places doing important work, saving lives and informing the world.
Passport Stamps earns a respectable 2.5 out of 4 Trench Coats
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