By Gerry Boyle '78

Boston Globe reporter Brian MacQuarrie '74 ("On Terror's Trail," fall '02 Colby) continues to ride the wave of events that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

MacQuarrie recently returned from Iraq, where he spent six weeks as an embedded reporter with an artillery battalion attached to the U.S. Army Third Infantry Division. The battalion followed closely behind tanks and infantry as they swept north to Baghdad from Kuwait. MacQuarrie ducked for cover during firefights, wrote his stories with a poncho draped over his head and laptop (its screen glow risked making him a target for Iraqi snipers at night) and witnessed everything from carnage left in the wake of battles, to looters stripping Baghdad, to elated Iraqi civilians waving from roadsides.

"That may have been the biggest surprise of the whole thing," MacQuarrie said, back at the Globe in mid-May. "I thought it was like the end of World War II going through France. There seemed to be genuine relief and welcome there that I did not expect to see. . . . They seemed genuinely curious about us, happy to see us in a way. But this was just after the place had gone down. I would expect it is much different now."

MacQuarrie filed daily stories from the war for six weeks, transmitting to Boston via satellite telephone. His final days were spent in Baghdad interviewing residents and sometimes riding with patrols beginning reconstruction efforts. Often that consisted of driving a Humvee up to a group of Iraqi men on a street corner and asking them what they needed. The answers were the same: electrical power, food, security.

The needs were, and are, overwhelming. "I would liken it to Boston, if all the utilities were out," MacQuarrie said. "Power. Water. Food. No schools, no hospitals except for the most basic care. No police force. It was really a ground-up situation."

He said he came to believe that U.S. soldiers genuinely cared about the well-being of Iraqi civilians, and that the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime was a good thing for many Iraqis.

"I left with the feeling, which I didn't expect, that their lives were better off at that moment than they had been before," MacQuarrie said. "But with a lingering question of whether this, in the long term, was going to be the right thing. That there was a lot of work to do, that this was a great opportunity here, if the United States seized it, to make an impression on a region that has been very skeptical of our motives."

He may be in a place to see what the longer term brings to Iraq. MacQuarrie said he could be back, reporting for the Globe from Iraq, by July.