Jack Kelley was terrified.
It was September 1994 and two gunmen were chasing him through the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Sweating and dizzy, he sprinted to save his life.
Scrambling down an empty residential street, staying close to nearby houses for cover, Kelley breathed heavily and prayed silently.
The would-be assassins were part of an anti-democracy militia group that had American journalists in their crosshairs and Kelley, a foreign correspondent for USA TODAY, was marked for death.
Kelley heard one bullet zip past his right ear. Numerous rounds followed.
"They fired at least 15 times in three minutes," he said. "I remember thinking, 'This is insane. Run and run fast.' "
Finally, Kelley escaped the gunmen by running down a tight alley that lead to the U.S. Embassy. The exhausted men never followed.
"I really did think I was going to be killed," he said. "That's when I realized what my old friend, Bill Ringle from Gannett, once said is true: 'It's not worth spending the rest of your life chained to a radiator for an 8-inch story.' "
Kelley, like other major foreign correspondents, is on call to cover world conflicts that erupt -- now more suddenly and in greater numbers than ever before.
Unlike the correspondents who covered World War II, Korea or Vietnam, today's journalists often are sent on short notice to the latest trouble spot -- armed only with sparse background on the region of conflict.
"Reporters need to be left on scene [to get a full of picture of the situation] rather than have them parachute in for short periods," Walter Cronkite, legendary anchorman and World War II correspondent, said in a telephone interview from his New York office.
Cronkite said the American audience should be "led into each case" of overseas conflict.
"The media must give time and space to foreign news -- they think people don't know the news -- but this does not mean to make it entertaining," Cronkite said. "The Vietnam coverage by correspondents was impressive. This was pretty dramatic reporting. The nation was divided. But the responsibility of every journalist is to form facts, have fairness of presentation, cover all angles and give equal representation."
Los Angeles Times correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino also realizes the importance of how foreign coverage is presented to the American people.
Context is Important
"I think our readership wants strong, factual, balanced reporting on major world events," Zucchino wrote in an e-mail. "They also want powerful human stories with a strong sense of place, along with detailed presentations of current political, military and diplomatic trends. I try to provide detail and background to help readers make sense of the story. I also try to weave in both recent and ancient history to put current events into historical context."
And while neither Kelley nor Zucchino think the role of foreign correspondents has changed drastically since Vietnam, both agree the government has become too quick to impose restrictions on access to information during times of conflict.
"I envy the Vietnam generation of reporters for the remarkable access they had during coverage of the war," Zucchino said. "The Pentagon has since shut off reporters from combat, relying instead on formal briefings that deliver a sanitized, rigidly controlled version of combat. It's harder than ever to get close enough to combat to describe what really goes on. I would love to see the Pentagon return to the open coverage of World War II and Vietnam, but the military seems determined to restrict war coverage to the official version of events while snuffing out all independent coverage."
The Associated Press reported recently that, in an effort to better its relationship with the media during wartime, the U.S. military has promised new hands-on training sessions for journalists.
Officials say the Department of Defense wants to improve its image after the Persian Gulf War and the Afghanistan conflict, where reporters' access was severely restricted.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke was quoted: "We want to raise the comfort level."
While today's correspondents unquestionably have greater difficulty prying information from the government and hardly ever are able to spend enough time on foreign soil to become experts on the region, they still face many of the same challenges that others who went before them, like Cronkite, confronted: the terrifying danger, locating and earning the trust of sources in strange places, and mentally separating the ugliness of war from their personal lives.
The Defense Department recently reiterated that safety for correspondents on overseas assignments always is a concern. Eight journalists were killed in the Afghanistan conflict, including Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, while working on a story about Islamic militant underground organizations.
Zucchino was in Pakistan when Pearl was kidnapped and murdered.
"Every correspondent I talked to at the time was horrified and saddened," Zucchino said. "We all agreed that we would have handled the story the same way, and we admired Pearl's courage and dedication. His death sent a shock wave through the correspondents' corps. We all realized we needed to be more careful."
Kelley met Pearl briefly through a mutual friend at The Washington Post.
"What happened to him proved to me if they're going to get you, they'll get you," Kelley said. "It's a tragedy but serves as a reminder [of the danger that accompanies the job]."
A Globetrotting Journalist
Kelley has learned to travel light: only two changes of clothing despite staying overseas for up to nine months at a time.
He carries sterile needles and syringes to draw his own blood for AIDS tests, which are required to enter many Middle Eastern countries. And he carries his Bible, which has been confiscated three times by Middle Eastern customs officials who have ripped out nearly every page that contained the name of Jesus Christ.
Kelley has found himself staying up until the early morning hours searching for hidden "bugs" and other listening devices in hotel rooms. In Baghdad's Al-Rasheed Hotel, he even dressed in the shower after a newlywed couple warned him that all the rooms had hidden cameras. Kelley found one above the door and put tape over it. By the end of the evening, the tape had been removed.
"Journalism school doesn't teach you how to de-ice your 82-year-old interpreter after she freezes to an outhouse toilet seat in war-torn Chechnya or how to cut yourself out of a stuck seatbelt aboard a Russian Aeroflot flight," Kelley once wrote.
Technology Helps
Recent technological advancements have helped journalists, but filing stories from overseas still can be difficult.
The Pentagon and the media are still debating how reporters can file stories and images from the front line, when they can file and what they can file.
"As long as I have enough battery power, I can operate my satellite phone and laptop from anywhere," Zucchino said.
"Because communications in Afghanistan are so difficult, and also because of the 11-and-a-half hour time difference, I almost never talk to my editors. We communicate mostly by e-mail. I keep them informed about stories I'm working on. They use e-mail to send me copies of my edited stories and to ask questions."
In a story for USA TODAY, Kelley wrote that the most aggravating and anxiety-ridden part of his job is trying to file a story from a war zone where there are no telephone lines or faxes.
"I am convinced there is no better sound in the world than 'Operator, how can I help you?' " he said.
Just a decade ago, filing stories was more difficult.
Inga Saffron, correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer, said: "In '94 or '95 I was sending a story from Chechnya [to the states] and had to figure out latitude and longitude so I could point this satellite thing in the right direction -- I actually had to aim it at a tree and just pray that the battery wasn't down.
While advanced technology is vital to foreign reporting, so are translators.
Kelley said a major frustration while traveling is finding an honest interpreter who will provide more than a three-word translation after a 10-minute speech: "Sometimes I find them [translators] by the seat of my pants -- taxi drivers, hotel workers ... There are times I've walked to a college campus, to the English department and just said I'm looking for talented, energetic people who can run fast."
Kelley's interpreters have included an elderly nun, a retired 82-year-old Russian school teacher, a fundamentalist Kuwaiti Muslim and Pakistani graduate students.
Zucchino, in contrast, has come to rely on a single translator, who speaks five languages.
Another benefit of interpreters is their ability to help correspondents complete the often-daunting task of quickly securing sources in foreign lands.
"In places like Afghanistan, the sources are wherever you find them -- in villages, in government offices, on the street," Zucchino said. "I rely mostly on Afghans --government officials, workers for international agencies, shop owners, refugees, warlords, soldiers, etc."
'Cowboys' and 'observers'
Methods of maintaining sources and acquiring information can divide correspondents into two groups that Kelley calls "cowboys" -- those who like to be on the front lines with the flying bullets -- and "observers," who stand 100 feet away and take notes.
Kelley considers himself a cowboy, and said that Daniel Pearl once confided in him that he was an observer.
But Kelley is no Indiana Jones. He more closely resembles an English teacher than daredevil -- not unlike a guy that quarterbacked his high school team to the state title but who now has settled into a life of polo shirts, jeans and loafers.
He has an unimposing presence, a soft voice and a pleasant, polite demeanor.
Yet Kelley likes to be on the battlefield -- as close to the action as possible.
Zucchino also can be classified as a "cowboy."
In October, he went along on several combat missions with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan, riding with troops in helicopters and armored Humvees. He had a helmet and a flak vest, but no weapon.
The missions were offensive, with the group searching villages and compounds for al-Qaida or Taliban fighters and sympathizers.
Inga Saffron is not a cowboy.
"I'm no daredevil -- when reporting in Chechnya, everyone hooked up with somebody, the more people I was with, the better," she said. "Wars have become more dangerous, and they have changed a lot."
Saffron gave up the beat after covering two wars.
"If you want to be a decent parent, you can't do this," she said. "It is very difficult to balance family life and that of a correspondent's. I was born in a time when women weren't correspondents...I had to make certain choices."
While Kelley and Zucchino cited a decline in government cooperation, Saffron mentioned some positive developments since Vietnam.
"There is no longer a stigma surrounding female journalists -- especially female foreign correspondents -- like there was when I first started," she said.
"The world has changed enormously, and there's been this evolution for women. But still, when traveling for a war -- no matter man or woman -- there's a chance you may not come back."
Correspondents who spend chunks of their lives dodging bullets and witnessing bloodshed generally look at the world differently when they are home between assignments.
"It's difficult to spend your life overseas and then return here, go into a cafeteria and see how much food there is, how much food people waste," Kelley said, his voice filled with a new intensity. "I just want to take those people by the neck and make them understand what other countries are dealing with."
Despite the frustrations and challenges of grappling with government restrictions on access to information, immersing themselves quickly in new cultures, tracking down dependable sources and living with ever-present danger, correspondents like Kelley find themselves constantly marveling at the courageous human qualities they observe in people trapped in war-torn locales.
Kelley refers often to a captured 18-year-old Kuwaiti freedom fighter who, rather than give Saddam Hussein's soldiers the name of his fellow Kuwaitis, watched silently as Iraqi soldiers cut open his chest and cut out his nipples.
"It's those people whose names or faces you'll never see again -- the poorest, the most uneducated -- and then they'll say something and do something and it'll just get to you," Kelley said. "I've learned something from all of them."
