Casualties of War   

Afghanistan has proven to be exceedingly dangerous for journalists.

Rush hour in the Times Square subway station, and the shuttle to Grand Central is so packed that I have to inhale to create a membrane of personal space. This being a chill, damp morning, the close air is redolent of perspiration, cologne and mothballs. After the short ride we pour out of the car's double doors, and first one, then another, hurried commuter unintentionally clips at my heels. I smile, realizing I have yet to gear up my stride to New York mode.

I am back in the city I love.

As a child of the Midwest, I was in my 20s before I saw New York with my own eyes, and even then I could scarcely believe what they were telling me. I walked around for a solid week staring straight up with mouth agape, like some huge, featherless turkey. To come upon Times Square at night, as garish as it was mesmerizing in its unapologetic peddling of perdition, was to see what Dante might have imagined for his inferno if he had been doing magic mushrooms.

My most enduring image of the city, however, materialized as the Staten Island ferry pulled away from Battery Park and that incomparable skyline came into perspective. The twin towers of the World Trade Center were still so new--this was 1978--that they were more novel than iconic, and as they loomed over the west side of Manhattan you half thought the city might tip into the Hudson.

I fell hard for New York, and over the years, intentionally or unintentionally, I seemed to seek out projects that kept me coming back, among them several books about the early years of The New Yorker. I would come to know stretches of Manhattan as well as my own home. To now see the hole in the skyline where those towers should be is to browse the family album and find that a favorite relative has been ripped out.

So we are at war with the cowards who perpetrated this outrage. As is always the case, ambitious and talented journalists have gone off with the armies. Just as predictably, they won't all come home. Indeed, for journalists Afghanistan has proven to be particularly murderous--a word I use advisedly.

Back in 1944, The New Yorker lost one of its many fine war correspondents, David Lardner (son of Ring), when his Jeep hit a pile of mines near the German front. Tragic as it was, the accident was not all that remarkable as journalism fatalities go. That's how war correspondents die sometimes. But at least there were fairly clear rules about covering the war, and if the combatants didn't always love the reporters, they didn't gun for them either. Certain conventions were observed, ones that had been recognized, more or less, for generations.

There has been nothing of the kind in Afghanistan. On the contrary, media representatives have actually been targeted by a desperate, collapsing Taliban, and journalists--with their expensive equipment and ready cash--have been prey for roving marauders and thugs (see "A Killing Field for Journalists," page 32). When Swedish cameraman Ulf Stroemberg was shot to death by robbers in Taloqan just after Thanksgiving, he was the eighth journalistic fatality of the fighting in just over two weeks. To put that carnage in perspective, it's been estimated that some 60 journalists were killed in all the long years of the Vietnam conflict.

Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists and a veteran foreign correspondent herself, agrees that Afghanistan presents a brutal new challenge for journalists. It is of a piece with modern warfare, marked less by conventional armies and goals than by tribal rivalries, shifting loyalties and confusion in general.

"The comparison that I've made is to Somalia, which I covered myself, and to Sierra Leone, based on the descriptions of journalists who were there," she says. "It can be very chaotic. In Somalia in particular there was no government in the early 1990s. The country was just divided among warlords, and all these groups were driving around with machine guns. How do you know one from the other? If you're a journalist and you're trying to figure out if this is a safe area to go, there was often no way of doing that."

As New York pulls itself up off the mat--it already is--the city will replace that unimaginable scar in the ground with a memorial. It will honor the innocent and courageous people who died at the hands of terrorists on September 11.

It's unlikely anyone will build a memorial to the journalists who died covering the aftermath of that terrible, terrible day, but their courage likewise should never be forgotten.