This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast More What You Here weekday
afternoons on the Drive. Jane Ferguson is a HULK, MP Body, OPCA
and DuPont Award winning foreign correspondent for PBS News Hour and contributor to The New
Yorker. She's reported from nearly every war around the globe, from Yemen to
Syria, during the Arab Spring, Afghanistan and the Fall of Kabul. And
she's joining us now to talk about her new memoir, No Ordinary Assignment,
which is out now. Welcome Jane, Thank you Lee. So it all
started for you in Ireland. It certainly did in a literal sense. I've
born in Northern Ireland, born and raised just north of the border there and
grew up there as a kid. Were you there when things were getting rather
warm? Shall we say? I? I was born in nineteen eighty four,
so that was also I was really growing up throughout the eighties and nineties,
and I was living in just about the last Protestant village before you get
to South Arma, which was a really big ira heartland right on the border
with the south of Ireland. So it was an extremely hot area. You
know, when I was a kid growing up, it was very very normal
to me to have military checkpoints or a British military helicopters landing in my father's
fields were we were a farmers. I lived on a small farm and and
a lot of bombs going off, so it was pretty common to have the
local village police station blown up every few years, bomb scares, a lot
of bomb threats. You know, as a kid, you just normalize everything.
I thought this was normal, so that was certainly a part of life
growing up there. Do you think that influenced your interest in military reporting?
You know, I used to push back against that when people would see me
in the field, older reporters who remembered covering the troubles, more senior veterans,
and they'd say, oh, it all makes sense. Of course she
comes from Northern Ireland. And I would bristle at that and say no,
no, no, that that there's no bearing on my career. But looking
back, and certainly through the process of writing a memoir and looking back,
you really can't help but connect the dots. I spent a lot of my
career really focused on and I'm just sort of really trying to understand insurgencies that
became something I was quite specialist at. I spent time with Hoothie rebels,
Hamas, Taliban, Hezballah, Darfurian rebels my whole career, and I do
think looking back, is this little girl growing up in the foothills of Armah,
knowing that there were IRA units out there in the countryside, and somehow
these groups of mostly men were bringing the most one of the most powerful nations
militaries to its knees with a bunch of shotguns and bags of fertilizer, and
I just I couldn't. I was fascinated by that. I think it's also
worth pointing out that you know, we were growing up in the trouble,
but it was The culture in Northern Ireland is quite an understated one. You
know, there are certain things you just don't talk about, and you certainly
don't talk about them with children. So I think I was fascinated by the
mystery of it all. It's her memoir No Ordinary Assignment. Jane Ferguson writes
all about her correspondence with several New York and PBS networks in Yemen, in
Syria and Arab Spring that all said as it's something about the Middle East in
that intrigues you more than any other type of conflict, or is that where
all the conflicts are. It's a little bit of both. I was growing
up watching on the television as a little girl the First Gulf War as well
as the wars in the Balkans. So it wasn't necessarily that I grew up
very very young thinking about living and working in the Middle East. But as
I got older, I did get really interested in in the Middle East and
the history there. And then when I was in high school nine to eleven
happened, and so I was this youngster who knew I wanted to be a
journalist, but had also just watched journalism really come up as an important source
of information for the world as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan really got started,
So that sort of shaped my future. I was at college just really
itching to get finished so I could go out on the road and be a
journalist. And you're right, at the time, that's where so much of
the news was coming from. Well, and I made a decision in this
business early in my career. I was fifteen when I started in this business.
I knew what it was going to mean, what it's going to what
it was going to take. I was going to move around a lot,
working holidays, working weekends, working overnights, a foreign correspondence in war.
That is probably as dicey as it gets. Were you prepared for it?
I definitely go by the saying what you don't know, you don't know.
So I thought I was. Of course, I had all these romantic notions
of my life on the road, and I think I I was as prepared
for it as anybody can be without having known what it's actually really like.
I was lucky enough to find that I loved the work. But as you
say, those of us you know, who do this work, it is
a massive, massive sacrifice on your personal life. And I do get into
that bit in the book, you know, I really talk about what it
actually takes and what it takes from you as well, you know, things
that that you don't mind doing in your twenties, like running around, you
know, never really feeling settled, never really having a home, living on
the road. That all feels very romantic and exciting and is in your twenties.
But you know, I do dig into that in the book, about
how it takes a lot from you. You know, you're you're You're not
a good partner, You're not a good you know, family member, You're
often just absent for a lot of it. So the cost of this extraordinary
life is not to be underestimated. You hear her work on PBS News Hour
and see her writing in The New Yorker. It's Jane Ferguson and the man
was no ordinary assignment. What has been your most dicey moment? Was there
ever a moment where you didn't you didn't think you're going to get out of
it? I would say, and I write about this in depth in the
book. There's there's one moment where I was very young. I was twenty
seven, and I go to Syria in the very early days of the war,
and I'm really there as a bit of an experiment for a network where
they're sort of throwing me in as a young freelancer, and I essentially connect
with a bunch of activists who connect me with the free Syrian army, defected
rebels and the defected soldiers very very early on in the revolution, and they
smuggled me across the border from Lebanon into Syria, and I spend several days
in Holm's City, which was the very center of the uprising there. And
that was probably the most, even to this day, the most dangerous assignment
I've ever taken. And you know, the little rebel stronghold, if anybody
remembers. This was an early twenty twelve, was completely surrounded by Asad's forces,
by Bashar al Assad's forces in Syria, and journalists were just about being
able to be smuggled in. And I had, and I had had an
incredibly, incredibly frightening time running around reporting. I was able to get my
stories done, but I left, and as I was leaving, they were
essentially smuggling me out simply in effectively a fruit truck part sitting up next to
to the driver disguised as his wife, but traveling through Syrian checkpoints, past
Syrian soldiers, you know, incredibly close to getting caught in the end as
we crossed back into Lebanon. And I've always looked back and thought that was
wild and foolhardy. The reporting was worth it. It was incredibly important to
get the news out. But the activists were rotating journalists in just a tiny,
tiny trickle of us, those who would go following me there was a
team went in that included Marie Colvin, the newspaper reporter from the Times of
London Sunday Times of London, and she was killed actually as the next journalists
going in. So I've always looked back and thought I was really pushing my
luck there, and I was very, very lucky. It was no ordinary
assignment. She writes more about it in her memoir Jane Ferguson, and you'll
hear her on PBS News Hour and read her work in The New Yorker with
thank you for joining us, Thanks so much for having me, Thanks for
listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to
listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and ihearts media presentation.