Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home A memoir by Sean D. Carberry ISBN: 978-1-956440-55-3 paperback $20.95 ISBN: 978-1-956440-56-0 ebook $9.99 August 2023
A candid, darkly comic, and emotionally naked tale of a journalist who—driven by grief, loss, and the desire to find his “tribe”—seeks solace in the world’s most dangerous places and his pursuit to join the ranks of combat-tested war correspondents. The learning curve of reporting in hostile environments is steep and at times comical, at others nearly fatal. He encounters a lot of dust, ragged infrastructure, weaponry, scary driving, whiskey, lust, and way too much food poisoning. When the assignment ends, he is left to confront the mental and emotional impact of the years of danger, death, and destruction. What people are saying about Passport Stamps: Passport Stamps tells the story of a wartime journalist earning his stripes as he seeks out danger in Kosovo, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Tripoli. With the obvious discussions of foreign policy that are inherent to relaying the story, this memoir is not journalism per se, but rather a narrative about a man’s search for fulfillment, adventure, and companionship, as Carberry relays what it was that first motivated him to become a war journalist and then also how the experience of seeing violence, danger, and poverty up close changed him as a person. A man who begins the novel much like a bored American seeking romance and adventure and wanting to earn his stripes, or his passport stamps, if you will (in the book, he also refers to having first experiences like being shot at as “merit badges”), in the world of international journalism, which he hopes will grow his career and benefit him both emotionally and financially. However, as the memoir moves along, we see a man torn by what he sees, who has trouble readapting to his routines after being in a warzone for ten days, and who increasingly comes to weigh the costs of his desire to write a good story versus his knowledge that in a warzone, a good story means violence, and violence always has a human cost that is hard to reconcile with how it promotes career advancement. —Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies
Sean Carberry an award-winning writer, editor, and foreign policy and national security expert. In his more than 15 years as a radio and print journalist, he traveled to dozens of countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. He was NPR’s last Kabul-based correspondent, covering the country’s security and political transition 2012 through 2014. Before journalism, he was a Gold Record-winning recording engineer and producer. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his cat Squeak who he rescued from the streets of Kabul.
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