Which of Us Dies First? the Achilles Heel of the War Reporting Business
I can not fully express my respect for these people. They give so much for so very little. We learn so much that the combatants would not have ever let on. So anyway as some somber food for thought I give you this Page about the men and women that do us all a great service with their craft.
“I wonder which one of us dies first?”
It was 2003, and a stray, morbid thought crossed my mind one night in a hotel in Iraq. I was in a room full of twenty and thirty-something photographers and journalists, in the Al-Hamra hotel in Baghdad. A few miles away, the grown-ups from major label news organizations had filled the Sheraton-Palestine hotel—the Al-Hamra was the low-rent downtown spill-over tent.
I used to call it Melrose Place Baghdad, and in the evenings, after day trips to bomb sites and mass graves, the pack would convene at the poolside for blurry nights fueled by bad Lebanese wine. In retrospect, those days felt like the proverbial fun and games that preceded the losing of eyes.
As it turned out, the first to die from the Al-Hamra scene was Marla Ruzicka, a 28-year-old aid worker-activist. I’d first met her on another drunken bender in Kabul, a year earlier. She was killed in Baghdad by a vehicle-borne suicide bomber who plowed into the military convoy she was driving with.
Many more died in the years that followed.
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