At 64, California grandmother blogs from Baghdad

BERKELEY, California — Jane Stillwater is an unlikely war correspondent. She is 64, a self-described Berkeley "flower child, 40 years later."

So how did she end up in Baghdad, churning out commentary ranging from shock at Thursday's bombing of the Iraqi parliament cafeteria, to the weirdness of touring Saddam Hussein's bathroom?

Inspired by a sense of outrage and determined to blog from inside the war zone, Stillwater ate peanut butter sandwiches for months to save up for a ticket to Kuwait. She got a small Texas newspaper to sponsor her, and eventually boarded a troop transport to Baghdad.

Getting Department of Defense credentials took patience. Stillwater says she was discouraged at first as an "opinion-based, not fact-based" journalist. But after securing her sponsor, she arrived in the Green Zone in late March and has been posting her online missives ever since.

"I'm really glad I came," she said, reached Thursday by phone at the Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad. "I don't know whether I would ever come back."

Some of her entries are slice-of-wartime-life. Others are strongly political, musing on the effects of fighting violence with violence in what she sees as the "broken egg" of Iraq.

"Its like being on an adventure with somebody," said W. Leon Smith, editor of The Lone Star Iconoclast, a liberal weekly based in the George W. Bush territory of Crawford, Texas, that is sponsoring, but not paying, Stillwater. "She's like an ordinary person that's over there ... people can identify with it."

To some, the idea of a grandmother with no formal journalistic training dropping everything to report from Baghdad seems far-fetched at best.

Not so much to her friends.

"Having known her for many years and having seen her do things that nobody else would think of taking on ... she's a pretty irrepressible force of humor and passion mixed together," said Kriss Worthington, a Berkeley city councilman.

Stillwater planed to soon return to the United States and her job as a Juvenile Hall substitute teacher.

The mother of four grown children, Stillwater has a long history of activism.

In 2003, she went to the White House in an effort to serve Bush with an "eviction" notice. "You have to be elected to live there," she said. In the close 2000 election, Bush did not win the country's overall popular vote, but he won enough states to gain the official electoral votes needed for the presidency.

Long ago, Stillwater opposed Vietnam and marched for civil rights.

Baghdad, she says, "is insane."

Many of Stillwater's postings have dealt with her frustration at being firmly relegated to the U.S.-protected, fortified Green Zone that houses the Iraqi government and the U.S. embassy.

Twice, Iraqi army officials promised to take her out into the so-called Red Zone _ the military's term for the rest of the city. And twice she got stood up.

A day before Thursday's suicide bombing in the building housing the Iraqi parliament, Stillwater was there, wandering around the cafeteria where she met and interviewed with two English-speaking female politicians.

After filing her story Thursday, she returned to the cafeteria to find the women, but had no luck. shortly after that came the bombing that left one person dead, according to the U.S. military. The attack was claimed by an insurgent umbrella group that includes al-Qaida in Iraq.

"I keep thinking, What if my friends had been there?" she said. "I would have sat down with them, we would have been all three of us blown up.

"It's a slap across the face. I was just thinking, `The Green Zone is America in the '50s where everybody has a good job and everybody's happy.' Suddenly, I realized that Iraq is really a dangerous place."

Dangerous and confusing.

When she went to Iraq, Stillwater was for an immediate troop pullout. Now, she is not so sure what is the best way forward.

"What I realized is it's just very, very complex," she said.

She remains adamantly opposed to the war. "People are being KILLED over here folks. I don't CARE who started it. I don't CARE who's to blame," she wrote. "I JUST WANT IT TO STOP."

Reaction to the blog tends to be love it or hate it. "People will say, `Hey, you're an idiot.' Or, `Hey this is wonderful and we're so proud of you," she said.

Worthington's in the second camp _ and looking forward to her return.

"I will breathe a sigh of relief when she's home," he said.

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On the Net: http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/

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