Thinking of our own
It didn’t take long for the tight-knit Baghdad journalists’ community to hear a roadside bomb injured ABC News’s Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt.
Dozens of reporters were sequestered at the trial of Saddam Hussein inside the U.S.-controlled "Green Zone" for most of Sunday. Stripped of their cell phones for security reasons, reporters used phones and an Internet connection provided by the court to spread the word.
Bob and Doug, thank goodness, are alive, in no small part due to the unfortunate reality that the military surgeons attending to them get round-the-clock practice on victims of roadside bombs, the hallmark of Iraq’s insurgency.
I do not know Bob and Doug personally. But when a fellow journalist is hit, the reverberations bring back memories of a friend I lost in the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya.
The first conflict I covered, in 1994-5, Chechnya is still very much with me. One long-cited statistic frames the nastiness of that war best: during the height of the siege of Sarajevo, 3,000 projectiles a day fell on the embattled city; in Chechnya, 3,000 fell every hour. Journalists who reported on that conflict can still feel the thunder of Russian artillery raining down around them. Cynthia Elbaum, a talented photojournalist on assignment for Time magazine in Chechnya, didn’t make it out. On Dec. 22, 1994, at age 28, she was killed by a Russian air raid over the Chechen capital, Grozny. She was one of the first journalists to be killed in the war in Chechnya. Were Cynthia alive today, she certainly would have been in Iraq. I like to think that her impressive work would have won her dozens of awards. She was that good. Unfortunately, she died before the age of the Internet and, while her photos have been exhibited, they aren’t online. One last note. Journalists also grieve for the thousands of U.S. troops killed in Iraq. Before someone blogs back that we’re a bunch of self-centered, blow-hards, give us a moment to think of our own.
TELLING THE IRAQI STORY
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