'I Lost My Love in Baghdad' veers into straight war story

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I wish I could write that "I Lost My Love in Baghdad" is a tragic love story. Or that the author, Newsweek's Michael Hastings, writes a complicated tale of impulse and responsibility and how the two became tangled in the fog of war.Unfortunately, it falls short of its own lofty goals. It's impossible for one to know Hastings' true feelings, but the premise of the book -- a story of his relationship with Andi Parhamovich, who moves to Baghdad to be with Hastings, her boyfriend, and is later killed by insurgents -- seems hollow and created as a vehicle for the author to tell his war stories.And why wouldn't Hastings want to write about his experiences? He was 25 when he took his first trip to Baghdad. He later accepted a permanent role in the magazine's bureau there. He covered some of the most important events of the war (Saddam Hussein's trial and execution, the fighting in Mosul, etc.). And yet a book supposedly centered on a tragic love story focuses instead on Hastings' experiences.Those experiences, to his credit, make for good reading. Hastings has proven to be a fine reporter and a good writer, and it's obvious he has a passion for retelling parts of the Iraq war through his personal prism. He peppers "I Lost My Love in Baghdad" (Scribner, $24) with anecdotes about the day-to-day life of covering a war zone: the lazy, corrupt bureaucrats; the security procedures required to simply drive down the street; the motley crew of madmen and do-gooders who flocked to Iraq after Saddam's fall.(It does get a bit self-indulgent at times, though. Take, for instance, his writing about being embedded with troops: "We spent the afternoon patrolling up and down a two-lane highway, pounding Mountain Dews for caffeine, kicking back a Red Bull, smoking Marb Reds in the Humvee, stopping to (urinate) in the middle of the desert.")Hastings has plenty of these stories. And he writes them in such detail that one could forget about what essentially becomes the side story until later in the book: His relationship with Parhamovich. Mentions of his girlfriend during the middle chapters of the book -- when he most vividly retells war stories -- are relegated to throwaway lines about telling her about it over instant-messaging software or the phone. When the two would meet during his scheduled time off, the chapter describing the visits is short and sentimental. And then it's back to reading about Michael Hastings, war correspondent.Rarely does Hastings include what Parhamovich was doing while he was in Iraq. She had a job as a publicist at Air America; surely there are stories he can share about that. And did she reschedule her day around instant-message and telephone calls to him? Or was she more laissez-faire with communication? Was her taking a job in Iraq (first with the International Republican Institute, then with the National Democratic Institute) the result of a quick decision to be with Hastings?There is plenty of introspection from the author, but the balance is skewed away from Parhamovich, who was killed when the convoy she was in was ambushed in Baghdad. The attackers killed three of her armed guards -- a Croatian, a Hungarian and an Iraqi -- and two other security contractors were wounded.But perhaps the book's largest flaw is that, while Hastings provides the reader with plenty of facts about Parhamovich, he doesn't provide enough to tell the reader who she really is. Telling us that she practices yoga and eats Zone bars isn't enough.The scant insight into Parhamovich's personality unfortunately leaves the reader with no emotional investment in the fate of a woman who was willing to move to a war zone -- at the height of its intensity -- to be with her boyfriend.It's a shame Hastings chose to premise the entire book on the story of his relationship with Parhamovich and her death, because the chapters about his experiences as a reporter in Iraq make for compelling reading. If written from a different angle -- about himself and the tolls covering a war can take -- the book could have been one of the best first-person accounts of Iraq published yet. Instead, it leaves the reader wanting more.(scott.fontaine(at)thenewstribune.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)