Reality Check
NBC's Richard Engel describes his grim War Zone Diary

In early 2003, when most news organizations pulled their people out of Iraq before the war began, American freelance journalist Richard Engel stayed. He eventually signed on with NBC News and has been reporting on the violence and occasional progress there ever since. His documentary, War Zone Diary, which premieres March 21 at 10 pm/ET on MSNBC, provides a jarring and grim inside look at life on the ground in Baghdad. It also includes portions of a highly personal video diary that Engel kept during his four years there. The Biz talked with Engel during his recent U.S. visit to find out how he's holding up.

TVGuide.com: When you're in Baghdad, I imagine you have the sense that it's the most important place in the world right now. Then you get here, and, to be kind, the public has a certain level of avoidance about the subject.
Richard Engel: That was surprising to me. On this trip, I notice that people I speak to on the street just don't really want to talk about Iraq. In the past, I used to get many more questions about Sunnis and Shiites and Saddam and Sadr and real specific details of the conflict. And I definitely sense now that people know it's bad and know it's complicated, but they don't necessarily want to talk about it.

TVGuide.com: Does that attitude bother you at all, especially when you're risking your life to cover this war?
Engel: I haven't found any frustration or disappointment in my ability to cover the story. People are still very interested in Iraq, even if they seem like they don't want to hear all the specifics. It is the most important story of our time. It's determining the political agenda here, and more importantly, it's determining the lives of 150,000 troops in Iraq and 26 million Iraqis. It has the potential to destabilize the entire Middle East and have consequences for decades, if not generations, to come. It has nothing to do with me personally. I'm doing it because it's a tremendously important story.

TVGuide.com: There is some pretty gruesome stuff in your documentary. We don't get that sense here watching everyday coverage. What's the difference here?
Engel: I tried not to make this into a tightly focused story that has a beginning, middle and end. It's more of a reflection of what it looks like on the ground. Very unedited. Very raw. There are no cuts. There are no dissolves, no graphics, no happy endings or cute characters. It's a very unedited, unfiltered look at what it can be like in Iraq and what it has been like for the last four years. While there have been moments of great triumph and moments of horror throughout the day, this is war and there are horrors when you have war.

TVGuide.com: Do you sense viewers aren't seeing enough of that?
Engel: I don't want to give the impression that all the work I've been doing up to now has been sanitized, because I don't think it has. If you read the papers today or any other day, you get a sense of how difficult, how gruesome this conflict often is. But when you read about it, it's different from when you actually see it. When you go to the Baghdad morgue and see bodies stacked four deep in a room that is supposed to be refrigerated but isn't, just covered in flies and bodies that are decomposing — I don't know if you can ever properly convey it unless you [show] it.

TVGuide.com: Do the NBC News execs sit you down and say, "You know, Richard, you've had a good run of luck here, and it's time to think about going somewhere else"?
Engel: In their defense, they've always said to me, "What do you want to do?" This is something I'm committed to, and I want to keep covering it. I want to expand the coverage as well, and this past summer we opened a Middle East bureau in Beirut. As it turned out, the war [in Lebanon] broke out a few days after we opened it. But the idea remains to cover the entire story. The Iraq War is not just confined within the border of that country. There is tremendous Iranian influence. The war has had a destabilizing effect on Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait. The entire Middle East is something I want to cover more, but this year and next year probably, the war in Iraq is by far the most important component of the broader Middle East, so it's a story that continues to take up a lot of time.

TVGuide.com: How often do you think about death? Do you ever wake up and say, "This could be the day it happens to me"?
Engel: Fairly often. More than most people, I'd think. It's not something I'm obsessed with, but you have to have a healthy fear if you're going to do this. If you're not afraid of what can happen to you, then you're going to get sloppy. I'm not paralyzed by it. This is a very dangerous conflict, and if you make mistakes the consequences are very high. Occasionally, you get unlucky. I've been very lucky so far and hope it remains that way. There are many people who are taking a much bigger risk than I am.

TVGuide.com: How has covering this story changed you personally?
Engel: I recognize that it has had an impact on me that I don't fully appreciate yet because I'm still in it. You have to worry about having compassion fatigue, which means all the death and destruction seem banal and blends together. I'm aware of that, and I don't want that to happen to me. You not only become a cruel and heartless person but a dispassionate reporter, which is not a service to anybody. I've become astounded by the bipolar nature of human beings. They can compose symphonies and carry on heroics and then torture people to death. I'm shocked by how easy it is for human beings to swerve from one extreme to another when you have a total breakdown of law and order.

TVGuide.com: How often do you call home?
Engel: I call home every day. I speak to my parents constantly. My mother has five TVs in the house and watches. She has a control room set up in her house in Long Island. She's always got story ideas and advice.