GroundTruth

On a farm in the middle of nowhere in northern Virginia, a group of eight of us are gathered for a two-day refresher course on Hostile Environment and First Aid Training offered by Centurion Risk Assessment Services.

We are all journalists who’ve come to get kidnapped and to trip landmines and get shot at and then to treat massive, life threatening wounds. All of it, of course, is an exercise. It’s not real. But it feels very real if you are heading to places like Pakistan and Afghanistan or even Juarez, Mexico where several of the photographers who’ve come here are working on a regular basis. In all of these places the risk level for journalists rises steadily every time you turn around like a treacherous tide coming up on you.

Jan, a former member of the British military’s special forces, who teaches the risk assessment class for Centurion, one of the best risk analysis firms in the business, is clicking through a power point presentation on recent kidnappings in Pakistan from where he has just returned.

“If you are taken hostage, remember you only have a five-minute window. Your best chance of escape is in the first five minutes. So fight for your life. Go for the eyes. Do what ever you can. Go all the way.,” he says with a crisp British military precision.

The line is delivered with a sort of casual sense of horror and is punctuated with a disconcerting grin. I still have fake blood caked in my hair from the field exercises in treating wounds. And there I am sitting in a folding chair listening to this briefing and thinking, “What the hell am I doing going to Afghanistan and Pakistan?”

Jan, who prefers that only his first name be used, has just returned from Pakistan where he says the risk for journalists is ratcheting up at an alarming rate. We break and Peter, a former Royal Marine in charge of the first aid portion, quips, “Okay, lads we’ll do head trauma right after lunch.”

Aren’t I just getting too old for this? I have a wife and four sons and a noble, aging yellow Labrador all of whom I love and with whom I cherish every minute. The newspaper on the breakfast table is almost daily filled with headlines about bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the worsening situation. I try to keep the sports page on top of the front page so my sons don’t see the news. My wife is smarter than that, but still understands on some level what I do. My mother, who is a great supporter of my career, believes the trip is insane and has taken to letting me know it in repeated early morning phone calls. But I’m still planning on going, and here’s why.

What reporters do in the field in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan matters. We need to keep reporting from there. We need to keep bringing home truths. At GlobalPost, we strongly encourage our correspondents who work in these places to take this hostile environment training and so I am here at the hostile environment class in part to live up to our own standards. The training is disturbing and the paper work is worse. For example, I just completed my KPP or “Kidnap Prevention Protocol.” These are difficult times to work as a journalist in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At GlobalPost, we have correspondents like Shahan Mufti in Pakistan and Jean MacKenzie in Afghanistan who risk their lives every day to report the stories you need to know from there. And I am proud of their courage and the service they offer to those who view our site and come there to find what we call GroundTruth. Most days I am safely ensconced in Boston editing the site. To be returning to the field is the best of what we do, the pursuit of GroundTruth, which put simply is the belief that you have to be there to get the story.

I have been in and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan since the mid 1990s when I first started covering the Taliban. I was among the first reporters on the ground in Afghanistan after the September 11th attacks. And I feel like I have history and context to add to the reporting there and I hope it might add to the understanding of the Taliban for visitors to our site and the challenges that US and NATO troops face there. I hope my reporting might contribute something to the understanding of that complex culture and forbidding terrain, that place that is a graveyard for empires throughout history. I still believe in that kind of reporting and that is why I am going.

But even as I was washing the fake blood out of my hair and watching it pool in red and circle down the drain at the end of the training, the questions about whether I am taking too big a risk to be going don’t go away. They are always there.