by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Dateline: A Dangerous Place
“Asthe 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling
city today, exploding thunderously into buildings all around, a
disheveled, stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a
plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his
cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio.
“There were only two people to hear him, and both fled, dodging from doorway to doorway, before the performance ended.
“Each day at 4 P.M., the cellist, Vedran Smailovic, walks to the same spot on the pedestrian mall for a concert in honor of Sarajevo’s dead.”
That’s the opening of a piece of reportage – dateline SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 7, 1992 – by Times foreign correspondent John F. Burns.
Burns reported 3300 pieces for the Times, most of them from war zones beyond numbering. He retired this week after nearly forty years with the paper. Many of us saw entire wars through Burns’ eyes – and to spot his byline was to know that the paper had its very best reporter in the war zone, not a stringer or a headstrong young reporter with a taste for danger.
Burns has a successor in C.J. Chivers, who has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Russia and the neighboring republics for … I was going to write “for more than a decade,” but I see now it has been nearly twenty years.
Chivers and photographer Tyler Hicks spoke about their work at Georgetown the other night, in the first conversation in a series dedicated to the slain Lebanese journalist Salim El-Lozi.
Here is Chivers on reporting from a war zone, particularly an ambush during a patrol in Afghanistan in which Hicks nearly died:
“From the moment you’ve diverted the activity or the direction or the decisions of the people you’re with, if anything happens it’s on your soul,” Chivers said.
“You’re in a tunnel, everything vanishes,” Chivers said of the ambush. “You have to toggle between your safety concerns, which are constant, and being able to inform the reader you’re out there because you’re not out there for you, you’re out there for your readers. Everything you do has to have a journalistic purpose.”
Lucky we are that reporters like John F. Burns and Chris Chivers and photographers like Tyler Hicks are out there – and not for a year or two, but year after year, decade after decade. Out there – lest we forget – for us.
