Why would any journalist born into a rich country choose to be a correspondent in a war zone?
Pay, sure: it’s part of why most of us do some kind of work, but the pay isn’t that good. A median salary of $100k USD is a lot by reporter standards, especially when living in a low-cost, economically depressed country but is the risk worth it? Mission and legacy too.
But rich nations have gone to poor places for many bad reasons for a long time too. Like a twisted voyeurism, where those seeking distinction and violence and terror go. Perhaps One such character is the protagonist of Vulture, a 2025 debut novel by former war corresponded Phoebe Greenwood.
It’s been compared to Heller’s Catch-22, and it is funny and incisive to be sure, reflecting the American hegemony of today: rich, fat and distant, a place where very few of us experience the wars that are waged in our name. The book is delightful, I strongly recommend it. Its writing is light, insightful and vivid. One of my favorite voices is when an experienced journalist is unshackled to write freely.
Below I have a few notes from points that stuck out to me for future reference.
My notes
- Of a second story bathroom with a pink tub and shag carpet, with its walls blown off, now visible from the street: “It looked indecent, exposed like that.”
- Character Doron Weiss is from Philadelphia
- The huge masonry remains from a blown out building were “like guts out of road kill”
- “It was an impossible thing for one man to clear up with a single broom. Why was he trying?”
- After losing his regular newspaper writing, the protaganist’s father would speak “snippets of unwritten columns in conversation, the lost souls of unborn pieces”
- “A lot of this war seemed to be middle-aged men calmly sweeping up their exploded lives”
- An Israeli general told the protaganist off record that every few years they needed a war to “mow the lawn,” trimming Hamas back
- The mother of a slain boy says to the foreign journalist who stays at a hotel where her family works: “My husband cleans your sheets, you kill his family,”