My baby and the front line

As an award-winning war reporter, covering conflicts as far afield as Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Chechnya and Iraq, 40-year-old Janine di Giovanni thought she had seen it all. "But nothing," she says, "could have prepared me for my newest adventure: having my first baby. I'm trying to make it as low-key as possible because I don't want my life to change completely."

We meet at her tastefully furnished Notting Hill flat, all pastel sofas and Space NK candles, a world away from the trenches and minefields that have been her home for the past two decades, where she often wouldn't get to wash for weeks on end. "I love beautiful things," she says, "but I don't need them. The one thing I've learned through war is that human beings don't need very much."

Despite the baby, her first, being due in February, di Giovanni has only just hung up her flak jacket. At six months pregnant, she took her last assignment to Gaza for three weeks. "My husband is incredibly protective but he trusts me and understands me better than anyone. He lets me do what makes me happy."

Luckily, her husband, Bruno Girodon, is a French television correspondent, and they met at the Holiday Inn during the siege of Sarajevo. "I was walking to the underground car park with the BBC's Jeremy Bowen when suddenly, out of nowhere, this handsome man ran across the lobby towards me, sliding the last bit of the way on his knees, until he got to my feet and muttered words of love. Jeremy rolled his eyes to the ceiling and just said: 'Ahhh, the French.'

"I met him again, coming back from the last Bosnian point of resistance against the Serbs, just outside the city. I was in my helmet, bulletproof jacket and covered in mud from having rolled down a hill. I spotted Bruno having rosé wine with two Bosnian girls, as though he were in Marseille on a beautiful summer's day." They got together for three months, but both eventually went back to their respective long-term relationships. They wouldn't meet until five years later in Algeria, and finally tied the knot last August.

Growing up in an affluent Italian-American family in New Jersey (her father gave up finance to become an educational psychologist and teacher to inner-city children, her mother a housewife), Janine longed to be a novelist. "Then in my mid-twenties, while working as a freelance journalist in London, I came across Felicia Langer, an Israeli human rights lawyer, a victim of the Holocaust, who was defending the rights of Palestinians. She prompted me to go to Israel and interview her for the Sunday Correspondent."

Since then, di Giovanni has covered many conflicts, both for The Times and Vanity Fair. Like most war correspondents, her life is schizophrenic, and she admits she often finds it hard to reconcile the two worlds. "Once, travelling home from Sierra Leone, I was shocked that everyone I came across had arms and legs - I had become so used to seeing maimed human beings."

When she started out, di Giovanni was one of only a handful of female war reporters, but now they are almost commonplace, with the likes of Saira Shah and Jackie Rowland coming through the ranks. Is her gender a help or a hindrance in the field? "It's impossible to generalise. Ann Leslie from the Daily Mail said she would dangle her bangles at check points and they would let her through, thinking she was a bird-brain. But often soldiers won't let you through if you're a woman, because if something should happen, they don't want to have it on their conscience. Soldiers often prefer to be with men; they don't want you in a tent when they go to sleep - they want their privacy."

The criticism women war reporters most often face is that they will be more sensitive - "I disagree with that entirely. I've written military reports and I've written about the suffering of civilians. A good reporter should be able to do both."

One difference in the field is that women have to be more careful to observe local customs. "I was appalled in Iraq by how many of the young female reporters for the American networks turned up in cropped T-shirts and low-slung jeans. You wouldn't visit your grandparents like that, so why would you subject Muslim people to that? One female reporter was even ordered out of a canteen in Afghanistan by the US military so as not to distract their troops. My generation went out of its way to be taken seriously."

She is fiercely proud of her profession: "The horror in the Balkans came to the attention of the world because of a few persistent reporters. Our job is to bear witness, and I think we can and do make a difference."

The brutality of the decade-long war in the former Yugoslavia is powerfully described in her new book, Madness Visible. "During the siege of Sarajevo, we'd go to the morgue every morning to count the corpses. It was a really dark time in European history," she says. "That's why I wrote the book. So that people don't forget."

But the conflicts kept on coming. Di Giovanni had been in Baghdad since December 2002, until she was pulled out two days before the war started when it was deemed by her editor to be too dangerous, especially for a reporter with both an American and a British passport. The press back home made much of her departure.

"The editor of The Times made the decision to close the bureau for safety reasons, and I didn't have the right to override that. I was initially disappointed, but in the grand scheme of things, I can understand why such a decision was made." Once the war started she went into the desert with the British troops, and was back in time to witness the fall of Baghdad.

She has had her close scrapes with death: one in Chechnya, where she and a French writer and a German photographer were the only foreign reporters to witness the fall of Grozny. "I was there for six weeks; it's terrifying to be in a city that's falling into enemy hands. We were being bombed, Russian tanks were everywhere. I thought I was going to die. I managed to call my husband who told me: 'Remember, the best reporter is the one who comes back alive to tell the story.'"

Another make-or-break moment was when she was picked up by Serb paramilitaries in Kosovo. She somehow managed to shred her notes containing names of informers and sites of mass graves by opening the car door very slightly, and dispersing the incriminating papers onto the snow.

But will she honestly be able to take as many risks once she becomes a mother? "I will continue to work - I will have to assess everything as it happens. I don't know if I will be able to spend three months in Iraq again, but I will still want to be where the big stories are. You don't lose all drive simply because you've had a baby.

"I entered this profession to report human rights violations and that won't change. Bruno and I will just have to make sure we aren't covering wars at the same time, and we'll take it in turns to stay home. I guess I will be doing the opposite of my mum, who always stayed at home with us. I'm never going to give it up."

Old habits die hard.

Madness Visible is published by Bloomsbury on 19 January, price £16.99.