Clips and straps hang from the side, making the vest bulky—like something a Navy SEAL might wear. I thought I had ordered something concealable. I wanted something I could wear under clothing without anyone knowing; I would look confident, experienced. I pull open the velcro pouches in the front and back of the vest, slide the ceramic plates into them, making the vest nearly twice as effective, and pull the rig over my head. I buckle the clasps, cinch tight the rib bands.
I walk into the bathroom and stop at the mirror. I see that the vest fits. I also see fear in my eyes. I am heading overseas to a war zone on a reporting trip. Elettra, my girlfriend at the time (this was back in 2017, we got married in 2018) understands the trip is important, but she’s worried about my safety. I put the vest and helmet into a closet. I don’t want her to see them. I show her no fear.
Kenneth R. Rosen is the author of Bulletproof Vest, coming on April 16 from Bloomsbury. Buy on Amazon. A portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated to RISC, a nonprofit that provides emergency medical training to freelance conflict journalists.COURTESY OF BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
I call Nick, the overexcited and reassuring representative at Bulletproofme.com who sold me the gear, to ask him why this thing is so bulky. Did they send the wrong one? He calls my helmet and vest my PPE—“You didn’t order that PPE?” I didn’t like the phrase personal protective equipment. It calls to mind hard hats and latex surgical gloves—material to guard against inanimate objects and near-invisible pathogens. My gear was to protect me from other humans, ones with guns, so I continue calling it my bulletproof gear.
Nick checks the order. Actually, he says, there is something that might have gotten messed up on his end. Do I want a replacement? I tell him I don’t have time. My trip to Iraq is in a few days. He says he is sorry. He wishes me good luck. “And don’t forget,” Nick says. “Nothing’s bulletproof. The thing’s only bullet resistant.” This does nothing to abate my anxiety.
I play down the anxiety to Elettra later, when she asks if I’m all packed. In her previous life as an aid worker, she traveled to conflict zones. She asks if I really need the custom gas mask with prescription lenses. I tell her yes, better safe than sorry, even if I look ridiculous carrying it around with me when no one else is. I could always be safer. I could put distance between myself and the bullets. I could stay away from the places in this world that require vaccinations for exotic diseases. I could choose not to go. I could stay home.
We go over my emergency contact plan, and I give her the passcode to view my personal GPS tracking device.
“Also, have you seen my Chapstick?” I ask.
“No, sorry.”
“Can I have yours?”
“Don’t touch mine.”
“But, my lips are …”
“You had your own and you misplaced it. I’ll get you another before you leave.” She wheels away, then stops. “And I love you.”
When I land in northern Iraq, I keep the vest close to me, but I barely use it. I also have a new Chapstick. It will inevitably be lost before I finish reporting on the final days of the Islamic State, but it becomes something of a talisman for me.
When I return home to Brooklyn, the cab pulls away and I look up at our second-floor apartment window, excited to see Elettra after what has felt like an eternity. She is frying peanut butter pancakes, my favorite, when I step through the door. It’s coming home I enjoy most, that first embrace after hours or days apart. In those moments, unprotected by any gear, I was bulletproof.
Now, nearly four years later, we are stuck at home together in a house in Massachusetts: my father, Elettra, and our infant son. The coronavirus pandemic stretches its viral spike peplomers across the world and keeps us, like almost everyone else, inside. We take temperatures and startle at every cough. We hear each other through the walls, the slightest of sounds. Nothing is private. The walls are flimsy, and yet they protect against the outside world and its sudden, invisible threats. I see my loved ones in high definition, as for the very first time.
II.
The things I carried overseas: pills to fight bacterial infections, pills to contain diarrhea, pills to combat nerve agents. Chapstick, naturally. I also carried sweatpants and peanut butter Cliff bars, things of comfort and security. And my bullet-resistant vest.
Nick’s words stayed with me on a recent tour of the DuPont factory outside Richmond, Virginia, where I went to learn more about Kevlar, the curious fiber known the world over for its bullet-resistant properties. Luke Jeter is the leader of the ballistics lab there, and as we talk, Jeter loads a .44 Magnum round into a machine (not quite a gun, but rather a collection of all the parts of a gun).
The machine fires the bullet down a short corridor, through several velocity sensors, into 12 sheets of Kevlar XP woven and heat-pressed together and hung against a block of neutral grey clay. When we walk downrange to see how well the layers did against the round, I see the Kevlar pocked by a massive divot, but the bullet did not penetrate. The clay behind it had, however, exploded and disbursed the impact in the shape of a mushroom. “That is around the trauma your body would get,” Jeter says.
The person wearing this vest would still need medical attention, but they would survive. Then Jeter loads a 5.56-mm round, standard for rifles like the AR15, and fires it into the same panels. It punches a hole right through. More strength, like ceramic plates behind the fabric, would be needed to stop rounds from automatic weapons.
“No armor is bulletproof,” Jeter says, just like Nick had.
Discovered in 1965 by a DuPont scientist named Stephanie Kwolek, Kevlar is made of ultra-strong plastic polymers tightly woven into a flexible fabric. In Kevlar, the chains of molecules—the long strings of terephthalic acid and other chemical compounds—line up parallel, like soldiers in a military parade. Plus, the chains of molecules are studded with interlocking ring structures. Order each line of soldiers in your parade to link elbows: Now your adversaries are slowed by a coalition that is bound together against a common enemy.
Kevlar is like the Kleenex or Xerox of PPE, a brand name synonymous with bulletproofing, armor, the military and police forces, but moreover safety. The material is used in lots of things: heat-resistant garments for firefighters; consumer-grade gloves, chaps, and the “Ove” Glove for barbecuers; motorcycle riding gear; protective jackets and masks for fencers; abrasion protection for speed skaters in case they fall; protective blankets for horses in the bullfighting arena; basketball shoes; paraglider suspension lines; bicycle tires; table tennis paddles; tennis racquet strings; woodwind reeds; wicks for fire dancing; brake pads and the bodywork of sports cars like the Ferrari F40; drum heads and parts of bowed string instruments; loudspeaker cones and a roof for the Olympic Stadium in Montreal; wind turbines; smartphones like the Motorola Droid Razr; Goodyear tires; and DuPont skis. In 2003, DuPont created an above-ground panic room reinforced with Kevlar so you can weather the tornado season in a quarantine you put together yourself.
Tornadoes are bad, carelessly slinging everything from boulders to school buses. Bullets are worse, more deliberate. Pointing out a .44 Magnum and various other munitions, Jeter says. “If you have a given threat you can use any material to stop it. It might take a whole factory of pillows, but pillows can be bullet resistant. In a sense, yeah, you could make armor which is very heavy, very expensive and uncomfortable, but it could stop all of these things.”
Sitting at home now, locked with my family, our physical links to friends and the outside world severed, I know he’s right. Some of the most bulletproof material on earth is inexpensive and cheap: dirt and sandbags and distance. But at what point does that distance turn from protection to exile? Isn’t the strongest defense against external forces one that binds individuals tightly into a unit?
III.
In 2018, I am based in Beirut. I land not long after the US launches airstrikes against government targets in Syria. It seems the world is heating up for fresh chaos. I travel to Syria and Iraq and Egypt and elsewhere across the region, reporting on elections, political instability, war, refugees, and migration. When I return to Beirut, I binge on Jack Ryan movies from the 1990s. It is comforting, recentering, to know the world has always been on the brink of disaster and that people were working together to prevent it.
At night, when my roommates are asleep and the only thing lighting our apartment is the soft glow of a sign affixed to a nearby high-rise, I slip into my bulletproof vest. I stare at myself in the mirror. The vest is tight. It fits snugly. I wrap my arms around myself, for extra protection, as though a hug were an embrace against death.
In early 2019 I prepare for another trip to Baghdad, and I pack a new vest. It is not made of bullet-resistant fiber, but it can accommodate my two ceramic rifle plates. It is the opposite of my first vest: subtle, light, concealable. I am just as scared as before, but I have a routine now. Spend weeks planning, book my flights, arrive in a conflict zone, report a few stories, hope they work out and get published, fly home. The vest became as standard a packing item as the gas mask, carried with me out of perceived necessity though rarely worn.
I deplane at the Baghdad International Airport, and on the jetway I see a man with a very high, coiffed fade, dressed in a threadbare brown suit. Something about him reminds me of an undercover policeman, and I look down as I walk past him, hoping he doesn’t stop me. As I am stamped through immigration, I see the man in the suit again. He introduces himself as my fixer; he’ll help me navigate the country and try to keep me safe as I do my reporting. I’ve never worked with him before, and I joke weakly about walking past him.
We get my bags and soon we are driving through the streets outside the Green Zone, passing beneath the 14th of July Bridge bathed in neon lights. He grumbles to himself as we pass through another checkpoint: “I hate it,” is one of his favorite phrases, along with “You’re high,” and “I’m not your girlfriend, man.”
We talk about why he lives here, in Baghdad, where it’s still dangerous, and what things cost and how expensive it is to live in the United States. “All people think foreigners have much money,” I say. “Not me,” he says. “I’m different.”
We pull over for dinner. We talk briefly about how a man must appear in Iraq, how officials care that he has two nice phones. They judge the shoes he wears, the car he drives, the phones he uses. We eat kabob at a second-floor restaurant in the darkness of a cool winter night, everyone dressed in hoodies.
A fixer is an indispensable lifeline to a foreign journalist working abroad. They provide everything from sources to housing to security. They offer cigarettes and companionship, risking their lives to help tell stories that are oftentimes close to home for them personally. That dynamic, so intimate a relationship in small bursts, can be difficult to navigate. I tell him I am nervous.
“No one has ever said that to me before,” he says. What I meant to say was that I was scared about the assignment, not of him. He puts down his kebob. He sits straighter in his chair, avoids eye contact. He has misunderstood me. He thinks I don’t trust him, is insulted, and now we have disconnected. We fall silent. I reach for my Chapstick and pop the cap on and off and on again, dawdling as I try to pull the conversation out of a stall.
I feel vulnerable. I scan the exits and realize I have no idea where I am in relation to the compound where I am supposed to stay. I had read and heard about fixers, or those who disguised themselves as fixers, selling other journalists to militias. I had read and heard about wrong turns taken down wrong roads controlled by bad people.
He toys with his phone, checking the time. Or maybe sharing our location with someone, or a group of people. The men behind me get up to leave. I’m twitchy. Since our first WhatsApp conversation he had demanded money, he was nasty when I was late to reply, and he had me buy him cologne to bring him as a gift. I had been traveling for 36 hours, at this point though. Maybe I was tweaked and needed to sleep, a refuge I can turn to almost anywhere with the help of a pill.
If he is going to sell me out, my PPE isn’t going to help me. We leave the restaurant and drive away toward the compound where I’m staying. I hope. I check our location on my phone, making sure we are heading in the right direction. Why’d he turn there? Is this the right street? “Let me ask you a question,” he says as he stops the car outside the compound and pulls the emergency brake.
I believe he is going to ask why I said I was nervous. He drapes himself over the steering wheel, looks at me and says, “Can I have money?” I ask him how much and he says, “$200.” I tell him, “No, absolutely not.” I had sent him more than $500 before the trip and would pay him more after the trip was finished. Money, another protective layer we can wrap around ourselves, felt like good insurance. I understood that to keep it until the end of the assignment meant that, at least until I finished my work, I held some power over him. He says, “Thank you.” And, thinking he did not understand, I say, “No. I said no.” He says it again, sarcastically, staring into the dark alleyway: “Thank you.”
I think he’s going to call off our trip if I don’t pay him. Or maybe he’ll call friends to come collect his money and call off our trip anyway. It is late and dark. I’m exhausted, and I panic. I dash to my room and use the key he had given me to unlock the door, then lock it behind me. I wedge a door jammer between the floor and the door and breathe a bit easier. Then I begin thinking he copied the key and now has access and can come and grab the money. So I sit on my bed, staring at the ceiling, listening for footsteps in the stairwell.
The safety of the room, the privacy, gave me perspective. My suspicions were off-base. My fixer probably just felt repulsed by my perceived disrespect and my fear. I should have concealed it, not worn it on my sleeve. If I had passed on dinner and gone straight to the apartment, if I had slept before meeting him, perhaps our rapport would have started in the fresh light of morning and been stronger. I would have been more assured. Confidence begets confidence, and I hadn’t given him a chance. My armor is near the door. An hour passes. I settle. I breathe. I am calm. My sweatpants and Cliff bars and soft items of comfort distract me. They keep me safe.
We end up working together for the next week, nonetheless, but at arm’s length. Lots of shouting and fighting, miscommunication and derisive comments. It was a transactional exchange. He got paid, I got paid. Our time together was an unfortunate tangle of anxiety, fear, and good intentions gone awry.
I never wear my vest, in the end. I did not encounter situations where gunfire seemed likely, though it was always possible. As for other threats, PPE rarely protects against things as heinous as humans. It does not protect against backstabbers, or fixers and translators who may sell you out.
When I interviewed civilians struggling to rebuild their homes, in Mosul and in Northeastern Syria, I would ask if they had hope for the future. They told me ISIS was gone, things were getting better, and I wrote that down. They were lifting the remains of a crumbled wall, felled by a missile or rocket or endless heavy gunfire, collecting the wreckage of their lives, as snipers pierced the air not two neighborhoods over. I would report their optimism, and I hated the thought of wearing my PPE while interviewing people so resilient yet vulnerable, so I kept it packed away in the car.
Our ideas of safety were asymmetric. Their idea of safety in that moment was in the absence of something—ISIS. What I wanted was a fixer I trusted and a better internet connection so I could talk to my wife on WhatsApp, eight hours away. I wished she was with me. Back at the apartment in Baghdad, I stayed up all night watching Netflix, pretending she was there too.
IV.
Now she won’t leave me alone. It’s March 2020 and we’re stuck in our house under a self-quarantine.
I’m on the phone, working, when she comes in wielding a tape measure. She handles it like a whip. The yellow metallic tape licks the carpet, smacks the floor, whacks the walls I had painted not four months ago.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Sorry, sorry, just want to get a measurement,” she whispers. She’s ordering furniture. Lockdown retail therapy.
“This isn’t that BBC News interview with the cute kids crashing in, get the hell outta here!”
She walks away, tape measure trailing behind her.
“And where’s my goddamn Chapstick?” I shout at her back. My father, who is also staying with us and looking after my son, the house growing smaller, coughs in the other room.
“Dad, are you sick?”
“Just fine, my boy.”
“Then why are you coughing? Why are your eyes red?”
“They’re red? I don’t know.”
“Elettra,” I shout, “have you seen my Chapstick?”
“Yeah, I threw it away because I didn’t want you asking me about it anymore.”
I’ve been looking for my Chapstick for three days now. I went from having five sticks to none. I am certain she forgot to check the pockets when she did our laundry, ruined my Chapstick, and tossed the evidence.
We’ve been in isolation together for weeks. First, self-isolation because we had returned to our home in America after leaving Italy, thinking we’d put distance between us and the coronavirus, and then under state-mandated stay-at-home orders from Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker.
I’m with people I love and trust, but the distance, which helped our relationships stay strong in the past, is gone. I hear everything. House noises. Chewing. Ants in the walls, I could swear. When and what my dad is doing in the bathroom.
Senses are turned up when under lockdown. I feel under siege, and there’s little I can do to protect myself. No bulletproof vest, no surgical mask, can give me the distance I suddenly crave. The rest of humanity feels the same way: Slathered in hand sanitizer and socially distanced, they are blanketed in worry. People who normally move through the world with little fear of attack suddenly fear everyone, dreading a lethal enemy that’s everywhere and nowhere.
Later, over dinner, my father, feeling insecure about being with us, our son asleep in the next room, asks if Elettra and I want some time alone together. I tell him no, but that we could use more time apart. The more we put distance between ourselves and the world, the farther we needed to get from each other, too. In this concentrated, enforced isolation, we’ve discovered that we can’t function so close together. It turns out my wife and I need regular absence to foster love. That time apart, those miles between us, came to imbue our marriage with urgency. When we were together, everything had a fleeting, precious quality. We knew our embrace would not last—each moment was something to cherish. Distance and time were barriers that enclosed our love, protecting it.
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