CARBONDALE - When she was a student reporter for the Daily Egyptian, Jackie Spinner's face once got her into trouble when angry bar patrons plastered it on posters as the person who'd exposed the dangerous overcrowding of bars in Carbondale. Years later, as an imbedded Washington Post journalist in Iraq, her face gave her a close call with insurgent kidnappers.

It was June of 2004. Spinner, a 1992 alumna of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, was in the middle of a story about the release of detainees from Abu Ghraib, a prison now infamous from pictures of several American soldiers humiliating the prisoners inside. By that point, Spinner said, she had learned how to blend in to the cultural scene, how to look like an Iraqi woman - from heavy makeup to fully covering her body to keeping her gaze toward the ground when walking. Even as an impromptu master of disguise, though, she said she couldn't completely make herself seem un-American; her Arabic had a slight Midwestern drawl, she admitted. And on that day she wasn't fooling everyone.

"I was leaving the prison to go back to the bureau in Iraq, and something about my appearance gave me away; something gave me away that I was American," Spinner said.

Suddenly, Spinner was surreptitiously being carried by two Iraqi men to a waiting vehicle nearby.

"At the time I wasn't thinking, I'm being kidnapped, I'm being kidnapped. I was thinking, I can't let them put me in that car," she said during an interview at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute Wednesday. "It was an uncomfortable situation in that I couldn't cry out, I couldn't scream, I didn't want to attract anybody's attention."

A group of Marines in the area rescued Spinner in time. Today she doesn't speculate, nor does she appear comfortable speculating, what might have become of her had the insurgents gotten her into the car that day.

Spinner has put the attempted kidnapping and her other experiences in Iraq in book form, "Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss and Survival in Iraq." The 35-year-old journalist gave a lecture Wednesday night on campus, sponsored by the institute.

Spinner's main reason for going into Iraq, for writing the book, was to tell an unbiased story of Iraq, something she feels an obligation to do, she said.

"I can only tell you what I know and what I saw," she said. "I can only hope you believe that I'm telling the truth."

The book, which Spinner wrote with her twin sister - an English teacher - was uncomfortable territory for her, she said, because it required her to inject herself into the story.

"The process of writing a book about myself made me feel really self-indulgent," Spinner said.

Spinner was convinced writing the book was acceptable when some of her editors reminded her that journalists were still writing books about their experiences in Vietnam. The Iraq war, Spinner said, was a more prevalent topic at the moment.

While Spinner gave no personal opinions Wednesday night about whether Iraq was a good or bad decision by the administration, she told the audience the campaign is a dangerous theater for everyone involved.

Spinner recounted passing dead bodies in the street, being shot at and having a Humvee she was riding in miss becoming the direct hit of a rocket by mere meters.

Spinner said she had only been in Iraq a couple of weeks when she was almost kidnapped. She was lucky; others, she added, haven't been so fortunate.

For the past month, Spinner has been one of thousands of advocates for the release of Christian Science Monitor freelancer Jill Carroll by her Iraqi captors. The deadline for Carroll's execution approaches, but Spinner - a colleague of Carroll's - would not speculate whether her friend will make it out of her ordeal alive.

"I remain hopeful, as do all her colleagues," Spinner said in the Wednesday interview at the institute. "I think one of the most remarkable things … it's so unusual for all of the world to call for her release. That's never happened before, and that says something about Jill's journalism. I think it delivers a larger message that when you're a reporter and you're on the right path, when you get it right and you're fair … people will come to your defense."

caleb.hale@thesouthern.com

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