July/August 2000 | Contents

LAST MISSION

BY CHRIS HEDGES

rogberi junction in Sierra Leone is one of those deadly little pieces of real estate, like Sniper's Alley in Sarajevo or the road to Suchitito in El Salvador, where death skulks in the gutted buildings and deserted stretches of bush. On May 24, four miles past the junction, on the rutted red-dirt track that heads to Lunsar and the diamond mines held by the rebels of Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front, two journalists died. Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, fifty-three, and AP television producer and cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, thirty-two, were shot in an ambush, along with four government soldiers.

A small band of rebels stepped from behind an earth bank and riddled with bullets the two cars they were riding in. There is little doubt the insurgents knew who they were killing; they have gunned down a dozen journalists since the beginning of last year. Reuters photographer Yannis Behrakis and cameraman Mark Chisholm, in the car with Kurt, scrambled out of the vehicle and hid in the bush. They brought the bodies home.

The fraternity of war correspondents is small. Most drift from conflict to conflict. The pay, considering what is required, is paltry, and the majority, like Kurt and Miguel, work on contract. They tend to be a management nightmare. The suits back home dislike their chronic insubordination and volatile tempers. But the line of seasoned reporters and photographers willing to go to Bosnia, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, East Timor, or Sierra Leone is short.

Kurt rarely left the siege of Sarajevo for four years, outlasting nearly all of his rivals, and Miguel stayed on in Grozny when all other reporters fled. They both liked risk and speed. They relished the confraternity of danger and the intensity of life lived on the edge of the abyss. Life, because of its obvious and daily transience, was sweeter, fuller, more powerful.

"War," J. Glenn Gray wrote, "compresses the greatest opposites into the smallest space and the shortest time." Kurt said he was intrigued by the job because it was a chance to study, under extreme conditions, "human behavior."

But along with these motives came another. Kurt and Miguel were endowed with the kind of conscience that allowed them to pit themselves against a hostile world, to live solitary and lonely lives in the face of tremendous suffering and indifference. Who really cares about Sierra Leone? Who cared much about Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, or Cambodia? They did. They pounded out stories or filed footage every day, hoping against hope that someone somewhere would do something. They wanted to make a difference, to change something. They did their work in anonymity. They were romantics, idealists. They had a purpose for being.

Miguel abandoned a career in 1993 as a corporate lawyer to ride his motorcycle into the former Yugoslavia. He roared like the Mad Hatter through the front lines around East-Mostar until Croatian HVO soldiers robbed him at a checkpoint of his machine. He was a devout Catholic, a member of Opus Dei, whose mother, upon hearing of his death, said that her son had been "ordained" to do his work. He did not drink. He found strength in prayer. He spent much of his journalistic career documenting atrocities against Muslims.

You have seen his footage; it was sold to nearly every news organization in the world, though he remained unseen. He understood that he was not the story, that he was there to, as he said, "tell the stories of people who are going through the worst experiences in their lives." He filed footage of the Kosovar Albanians being herded by Serb soldiers through the streets of Pristina onto railroad cars. He slipped behind the lines with the Kosovo Liberation Army during the NATO campaign. He was the only Western reporter in Grozny during the worst of the Russian bombardment.

Kurt, a Rhodes scholar with Bill Clinton, left a life in politics and real estate at the age of forty and wound up in northern Iraq, where we covered the Kurds. He stood in a building while Peshmerga guerrillas gunned down some sixty Iraqi prisoners and photographed the slaughter. To the dismay of the Kurds, he filed. He was branded a spy and a traitor, excoriated by those he had come to write about. But he stayed on. There were no more massacres of prisoners, at least not on this scale.

In Sarajevo, where he became the best informed and most intrepid reporter in the war, he carried wounded off the streets into his armored car and used his vehicle to shelter civilians from sniper fire. Kurt and Miguel understood, as Rousseau wrote, that compassion is the quality from which "all the social virtues flow." They covered people who, without them, would have been silenced and butchered. They cast a light on crimes many did not want to see.

And, like so many of the brave, they were wickedly funny. I am incapable of remembering them without a smile. They lived lives of passionate intensity. I mourn them, but I do not pity them. *

Chris Hedges, a former Middle East and Balkan bureau chief for The New York Times, reports for the paper from New York City.