Love under fire Couple to speak at UMPI about reporting from war zones

The last time Rick Davis took his wife to the airport, his parting words to her were: “Remember Beirut.”

The farewell is not one typically given by husbands saying goodbye to their wives leaving on a business trip. But this is no typical couple, and this was no conventional work assignment. Davis is a former reporter for NBC News and has covered conflicts in Eastern Europe, Central America and the Middle East. Deborah Amos, his wife, is a former correspondent for ABC News, has worked overseas for National Public Radio, and, for the last year, has been filing live reports from Iraq.

“I tell her if the bombs go off, don’t go near the bomb site for an hour,” said Davis, who is retired. “It’s not: I love you, darling. But remember Beirut.”

Next week, the two reporters will be Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, where they will meet with students, faculty and community groups to talk about the years they spent together in the Middle East. They will also give firsthand reports and analyses of the current events there.

The fellowship, which generally hosts speakers for a week, is designed to encourage the flow of ideas between the academic and nonacademic sectors of society. Journalists, public servants, diplomats, artists and business executives spend a week attending classes and participating in informal discussions integral to a liberal arts education.

For Amos and Davis, the appointments have been fruitful encounters with young thinkers.

“The reason we do it is that we end up getting more out of the students than they get out of us,” said Davis. “Some of the conversations get intense and are quite challenging. It’s important to realize there’s another generation out there we better start listening to – and our politicians should, too.”

Amos and Davis have been fellows at a variety of colleges, from liberal to conservative. At one, three students introduced themselves as the Democratic club, and when Davis asked them about the enrollment, they told him they were the enrollment. Last winter when they were visiting fellows at St. Mary’s College in California, Amos met a Christian from Bethlehem, Israel, who gave her a story idea she is currently pursuing.

“We want to tell what our lives are like, especially now after we’ve been in Iraq,” said Amos, who was Nieman Fellow in 2000-2001 at Harvard University and has won several prestigious awards for her work. “But always these are two-way streets. We take away as much as we give.”

“What we bring to it is a reality, a nonscholastic base to what we say,” said Davis, who has been in 84 countries and shot at in 12 of them. “We have an on-the-ground reaction to the world. We try to do as many classes together as possible because we don’t always agree. We look like something out of a Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie. And that’s fun, too.”

Amos, who has spent five- and seven-week stints in Iraq since the war began, said she started to rethink her work as a journalist after Sept. 11. When an invasion with Iraq was looming, Amos wanted to be on the story. She made arrangements with NPR to cover the events, first from Turkey, then from Baghdad, Iraq.

In the beginning, both she and Davis were in favor of the war, even though her early responses were complicated.

“I was an anti-war fraud,” said Amos. “I couldn’t passionately be against it because, being a longtime Middle East correspondent, I so desperately wanted Saddam to go. But I always worried that this administration wouldn’t know what to do the day after.”

And the day after, they agreed, is messy, perilous and confusing.

While Davis is more pessimistic about the outcome of events in Iraq, Amos holds some hope that the coalition presence will create a constitutional democracy rather than incite a civil war.

Amos plans to return to Iraq in June. Each time she re-enters the country, she has more knowledge about navigating the area, but that also includes more knowledge of the increasing danger. Both she and Davis recalled Iraq of the last 15 years as a place of horrifying oppression, but as Davis noted, there are new concerns.

“It’s very worrying and getting more so,” said Davis about his wife’s work assignments in Iraq. “This next trip I am extremely worried because it’s soft target time – they are going after Americans and Westerners no matter who they are.”

But Amos spoke confidently about devices for dealing with the scene in Iraq. NPR has recently rented a house in Baghdad, which means she won’t have to stay in a hotel that might be targeted, and her dark hair makes it easier for her to blend into the local crowds.

“It’s a little easier each time, but also a little more dangerous,” said Amos, who is 53. “The first time I went, I broke out in hives a week before I left. They disappeared the day I arrived in Baghdad. When I’m there, I can manage the danger. But when I am here and I read about it, I think: How can I ever go back?”

Davis and Amos annually co-produce a documentary for NPR. Yet Davis said he was not interested in going back to Iraq where, before the war, he was declared an enemy of the state because of his reporting there. But that’s not why he is hesitant to return. Ten years ago, when he was 59, he covered events in Bosnia and decided he was done with wars and revolutions.

Davis now spends most of his time in upstate New York, where the couple has a country home in the Catskills. They also have an apartment in Manhattan. Part of their discussion in Presque Isle will be on the challenges and payoffs of being a two-career couple, which they have been since they met in Beirut, Lebanon, during the Israeli invasion in 1982.

“He caught my eye,” Amos said of the day they met. “We were overwhelmed. And that was that.”

They eventually moved to Amman, Jordan, to work. And after about 10 years of being together, they married. Their relationship, they each said, is about mutual support, humor and an ongoing interest in the other person’s work and thoughts.

So when Davis says goodbye to Amos at the airport, his line – “Remember Beirut” – surely is both one of caution and of a loving memory, the likes of which only married reporters might understand.

The University of Maine in Presque Isle will host Deborah Amos and Rick Davis as Woodrow Wilson Fellows April 12-17. Amos will present “Reporting from Baghdad: A Day in the Life of an NPR Correspondent” at 7 p.m. April 13 at the Campus Center. For information about other public events, go online to www.umpi.maine.edu or call 768-9400.