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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThis is a picture of Anthony Shadid, the foreign correspondent. He's the one with the notebook. He's going to war. Looks happy, doesn't he?\n\n \"We were in Baiji for a story on the training of the Iraqi army, about to go out on a patrol,\" Steve Fainaru said. Shadid and Fainaru were the Washington Post's men in Iraq. Both won Pulitzer Prizes. \"Anthony climbed in the back of an open-air truck to interview the Iraqis, just before the convoy pushed.\"\n\n That day, American soldiers would accompany the Iraqis. The Americans rode in enclosed, fully-armored Humvees. \"They started heckling Anthony,\" Fainaru said. They said Fainaru might be going home alone. They said they'd start praying. \"They couldn't believe Anthony had the stones to go out like that, totally exposed. It was pure Anthony. He didn't make a big deal out of the risk. He just climbed in because that's where the story was. I snapped his picture as he was standing there interviewing them.\"\n\n On February 16, 2012, Anthony Shadid died of an asthma attack while covering the burgeoning war in Syria. Across the last decade, first for The Post and then The New York Times, he earned a reputation as his generation's best foreign correspondent. In an alchemy rarely achieved in journalism, his fearless reporting and lyrical writing transformed war into poetry. He took us with him into houses shuddering from bomb blasts. We walked with him on dangerous streets. People told him their stories and he told them to us. We heard the fear, the sorrow, the hope.\n\n A week after Shadid's death, the American journalist Marie Colvin, working for the London Sunday Times, was killed by a rocket in Syria. With every death comes the question that every foreign correspondent must answer. Is the story worth my life? Colvin lost an eye to shrapnel in Sri Lanka 2001. She answered the question by going to the next war with a black patch over that eye. Shadid answered with a phone call to an editor at 3 a.m. the day before the U.S. would begin bombing in Baghad. The Post had ordered its people out. Shadid told his boss, \"I know you might fire me. But I'm not leaving. I've been preparing for this my entire career.\"\n\n When I began reporting for a book about The Post, I sought out Shadid. I wanted to know how he did the work. I wanted to know why. In this chapter, he told us.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n From a cardboard box on the floor of his apartment in Boston, Anthony Shadid pulled out one of the notebooks that he had shipped home from Baghdad. On its cover he had made a label, \"Iraq (War) April 9.\" That would have been April of 2003, his first year as a foreign correspondent for The Post. He had worked for the Associated Press and The Boston Globe throughout the Middle East before being hired by the Post to cover the coming war in Iraq.\n\n At the top of the notebook's first page was the date: \"4-9.\" Below it, the first of Shadid's notes on the day that American forces pulled down a giant statue of Saddam Hussein.\n\n_ Signs of collapse of auth&amp;gt;\n\n running red lights &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n no traffic cops &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n no BP\u2014the face of gov't in streets &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n driving wrong way _\n\n \"These were signs of collapse of authority,\" Shadid said. He traced a finger across the notes. \"Cars were running red lights because there were no longer any traffic cops. Saddam's Baathist Party militiamen had patrolled the city's streets\u2014now they were gone. Their uniforms and boots were dumped where they had put on civilian clothes to avoid being identified.\"\n\n I first saw Shadid's by-line the day the war began. From Baghdad he wrote, \"At 5:34 a.m. explosions thundered over a city still asleep.\" Every morning without fail, his stuff was reporting and writing so rare as to be his alone. Thirty-eight years old, an Oklahoman of Lebanese descent, Shadid looked like the elegant little man on a wedding cake, provided that man had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair with a matching beard neatly trimmed. His manner was soft, his voice gentle as it danced along on light laughter.\n\n That day in April 2003, reporting on American troops in Baghdad, Shadid went downtown to Firdaus Square. Now, in Boston, he flipped pages in that day's notebook and relived the scene as he recorded it in a reporter's clipped notes.\n\n_ 1st threw rocks &amp;gt;\n\n statue &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n sledge hammer to the purple stand &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n noose ard his neck &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n 6 pm M-88 arrives &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n love machine &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n 6:35 ard rt leg, then both legs &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n i'm 49 nvr lvd single day only now _\n\n Those notes became part of Shadid's page-one story on the chaos in the streets that culminated when an American M-88 tank recovery vehicle\u2014\"Love Machine\" painted on its side\u2014used cables around the statue's legs to pull it down. He wrote: \"They threw a heavy rope tied like a noose around its neck. Many hurled rocks at it. A few minutes later, someone in the crowd showed up with a sledgehammer, and residents took turns pummeling the purple granite at its base. 'Scum, son of scum,' shouted Yusuf Abed Kadhim, as he swung at the pedestal. 'I'm 49, but I never lived a single day. Only now will I start living,' he said.\"\n\n Two hours later, at dusk, the statue fell.\n\n \"A seminal moment,\" Shadid said.\n\n That was why he did the work. To be there when history was made, when a statue falls, when a dictatorship falls. It made it worthwhile. Not that he expected to change the minds of people who thought he was crazy to subject himself to the dangers and deprivations of doing journalism in a war zone. But those were the moments a foreign correspondent lived for.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Those moments could get you killed.\n\n Until the Israeli sniper shot him, it had been a good day. Shadid's notebook was full because he had been eyewitness to a drama that was a perfect metaphor for the latest Israel-Palestine war. He started a long walk back to the hotel. There he would write for his newspaper, The Boston Globe. He was looking at his notes when he realized that his body was falling. He was halfway to the ground before he heard the gunshot.\n\n It was March 31, 2002. Shadid remembered the sky over Ramallah as cemetery gray. Once the bustling hub of a new Palestine, the city was cloaked in silence. War in its third day had emptied the streets. That day, as on all days, Shadid was driven by a reporter's questions: Why? How do I put the pieces of the puzzle together? Here in Ramallah, why did Israel's army wage war against civilians when the nation's prime minister said the objective was to eliminate a' \"terrorist infrastructure\"?\n\n Shadid had gone to Ramallah Hospital to interview doctors, nurses, ambulances drivers, and humanitarian workers. He wanted to talk to people who had found themselves in harm's way by leading their everyday lives. As he arrived, so did the roar of war. A tank rolled up, and two armored personnel carriers unloaded soldiers. The soldiers rushed toward the hospital with rifles leveled on people who had come outside. Someone said, \"This is a hospital!\" The soldiers, seemingly in search of an enemy, shouted, \"Everyone back, everybody inside!\"\n\n Shadid saw it all. The scene spoke to the asymmetry of the conflict Here were doctors in white smocks facing soldiers with M-16s. As an Israeli lieutenant talked to the hospital chief, Shadid listened. In their confrontation, he saw the war. The lieutenant was an army that had to search among civilians for the enemy. The hospital chief was Ramallah, powerless against power.\n\n \"The doctor and this Israeli were face-to-face and they were yelling at each other,\" Shadid said. \"I'm standing right next to them. And I'm writing down every word. This was one of those moments. Through it, I could tell the entire story of this fifty-year conflict. I was so excited. This is it. You could see how the entire story would be structured. So excited.\"\n\n When a peaceful compromise was made, Shadid headed back to his hotel with a colleague, Said al-Ghazali. They walked in the middle of the street lest they raise suspicion by moving along walls. Both wore white flak jackets marked on the back with red-taped \"TV,\" the best-known symbol for international press. He had his notebook in his hands, flipping pages to read notes.\n\n Then he was falling before he heard the gunshot. \"It was deafening, like they shot next to my ear,\" he said. \"Probably twenty-five feet away.\" On the street, he couldn't move. He first thought someone had thrown a stun grenade, a weapon that momentarily paralyzes its target. Then he felt pain on his spine. \"Said,\" he said to his friend, \"I think I was shot.\"\n\n Al-Ghazali was down on the pavement with Shadid, searching for blood. \"I don't see anything,\" he said. Shadid now reached behind his flak jacket and brought back a bloody hand. He thought to tell his wife and infant daughter good-bye. He thought of ambulances that couldn't move on Ramallah's streets. He also thought, \"I'll die if I wait for help.\"\n\n Al-Ghazali carried him twenty yards before they fell. \"Journalists!\" Al-Ghazali shouted. \"Help! Bring us a car!\" There was no one in the street, no one could hear them, no one except perhaps the Israeli who shot him. Shadid thought that man might now be watching him struggle toward a vehicle in the street ahead.\n\n \"He's wounded!\" al-Ghazali shouted.\n\n An Israeli said, \"Show us!\"\n\n Al-Ghazali turned Shadid so the soldier could see the white flak jacket red with blood. The bullet had passed through Shadid's left shoulder, sheared off part of a spinal column vertebra, and burst through his right shoulder, a classic M-16 wound: tiny on entry, huge on exit. Twelve pieces of shrapnel remained inside the reporter's back.  In his Boston apartment years later, I asked Shadid, \"Did the guy intend to shoot you?\"\n\n \"There were rumors that Palestinians were posing as Red Cross workers and journalists. I don't think if they knew I was an American journalist that I'd have been shot. They might have, who knows? They can be rough on journalists. I think they wanted to teach a lesson. 'Here's what we're going to do to people acting as journalists.'\"\n\n \"God,\" I said.\n\n \"A cold-blooded ecution.\"\n\n \"From point-blank range,\" I said.\n\n \"They were looking to kill me. Crazy, but reading my notes may have saved my life. I think they were aiming at my head, and I moved my head down looking at my notes.\"\n\n \"The M-16 wound makes you sure an Israeli did it?\"\n\n \"Yes. And the Israelis were in complete control of that area that day.\"\n\n He could have been dead. He could have been paralyzed. Instead, he was in a Ramallah hospital away from the one he had visited that day. From his bed, he called Boston and told his editor what happened. He also said, \"I got this great story. I think I can still write it.\" And the editor said, \"If you think you can do it, we'll take it.\"  Before Shadid could get his laptop, common sense, in league with morphine, prevailed against the idea. Besides, he hadn't been in the hospital an hour before here came more Israeli soldiers, guns drawn, entering his room and shouting something in Hebrew, a language he did not understand. He said, \"Back off. I'm an American journalist.\" They answered, \"Get your hands up\"\u2014as if he could. He was mummified in bandages around his chest and shoulders. He raised his forearms.\n\n Later that night, an Israeli army officer stopped by. \"If we shot you,\" he said, \"I apologize on behalf of the army.\" Then he shrugged. \"But you know, you were in a war zone.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nShadid's notebooks were tangible evidence of a reporter's adrenaline rush. Well formed and orderly notes suddenly skittered across the pages and landed wherever there was white space. Sometimes he even made space by turning the notebook sideways to write along what used to be margins of the page. We were in Boston looking at notes made years before, notes of events so vivid that he still could translate the scribblings. He kept the apartment to be near his daughter, Laila. She lived with her mother, a doctor who had loved Shadid but not his work. When it was clear to both the husband and wife that the man and the work were inseparable, they divorced. He said, \"That combination of altruism and ambition that makes reporters who we are\u2014sometimes I wonder if only journalists understand that. You think you're doing something good, something worthwhile, and you like doing it.\"\n\n He loved the Iraq story in 2003 and 2004, Lebanon in 2006. \"You basically lose yourself in it. You take a deep breath and sink into it. The story becomes you. It defines your life in a way I've never experienced elsewhere. The downside to that is, it takes a bit of your soul away. You're thinking about the story constantly. How do I understand that story, how do I put the pieces of the puzzle together?\"\n\n \"And you're thinking of that,\" I said, \"instead of playing Scrabble with your daughter?\"\n\n \"Afraid so. This will sound cheesy, but it is an overwhelming experience when you're defined by a story to that degree. And that's when journalism can really be great when that's who you are, you're here to report that story.\"\n\n The old general assignment reporter, Don Graham, now the Washington Post Company's CEO, knew that about newspaper people. He told staffers in Iraq, \"No story is worth your life.\" Shadid disagreed, almost. \"Some are really important. It's worth taking a risk to stay in Baghdad. This is a seminal moment in our country's history and to not have someone in Baghdad for The Washington Post\u2014that wouldn't make a lot of sense.\"\n\n I said, \"So you say to your wife, 'I need to do this,' and she says, 'Anthony, you can make a living doing something else.'\"\n\n \"In some ways, that's why our marriage dissolved. It was a choice of how we were going to live our lives. Her contention was I just should have never put myself in a position where I could get shot, that I brought it on myself.\" \n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n George W. Bush's vice president had promised that American troops would be celebrated as liberators in Iraq. To understand how mistaken a notion that was, I needed only one source of information in Baghdad. That source was Anthony Shadid, who did in The Post every day what American political leaders never did. Because he spoke Arabic, he talked with Iraqis. Because he cared about them, he listened. He reported that while Iraqis despised Saddam Hussein, they preferred tyranny over a superpower's invasion that would kill tens of thousands of innocents and unleash anarchy in a country forever near civil war. Iraqis asked Shadid, Why are the Americans doing this?\n\n \"Shadid is simply the best foreign correspondents working for any English-language newspaper or magazine ,\" the freelance foreign correspondent/photographer Mitch Prothero said. I had asked him for twenty-five words on his friend. He e-mailed seven hundred. \"Anyone can learn to speak Arabic or push themselves harder through fatigue or dangerous working conditions, but I doubt very much anyone can learn to listen to people with the skill and grace of Shadid. It's not just that phony crap reporters always pull out\u2014particularly in the Arab world\u2014where they condescendingly nod their heads as someone explains what it feels like to be humiliated, to lose a loved one, to be oppressed and afraid, or to be so enraged and alienated as to take up violence. Enough with the callow head-bobbing. Anthony, on the other hand, sits there and listens, asks some questions, and everyone just loves him.\" Prothero then wrote, \"To conclude this nearly nauseating tongue-bath, he's funny, humble, hard-working and never obnoxiously self-loving like so many of his colleagues and peers at The Post or The New York Times. And I'm pretty sure he beats his maid, tortures neighborhood pets, and sacrifices babies to the devil.\" Anthony Shadid found the quiet places inside war, and no place was quieter than the simple cement and cinder block home of a man named Salem Kerbul. It was the quiet of heartbreak.\n\n This was in the desert oasis town of Thuluya, ninety minutes north of Baghdad. A month before, four thousand American soldiers moving by helicopter gunships and armored vehicles swept down on Thuluya. They took away four hundred insurgents, as identified by informers in the town. One informer had been recognized by villagers despite covering his face with a burlap mask. That man wore distinctive yellow sandals. That man had a mutilated right thumb, severed long before in an accident. That man was Salem Kerbul's son.\n\n Because Kerbul's son was also blamed for the deaths of three villagers in the raid, and because tribal customs demanded vengeance, the informer's family was told it must kill him\u2014or they would be killed in his place. The ecution had, in fact, taken place. With the help of his Iraqi driver/fir Nasir Mehdawi, Shadid learned that Sabah Kerbul had been killed by his brother and father, both using AK-47s.\n\n \"Then I said, 'I gotta talk to the father,'\" Shadid said. \"Everybody told me, 'They'll kill you if you go to the father.' I didn't believe that. And I had to try. Better hearing no than not knowing. And he actually let us in. He knew we were journalists, but he brought us into the house.\"\n\n And so, in the house of a man said to have killed his own son for the treachery of informing on village neighbors, Shadid sat with Salem Kerbul. They sipped tea. The father sat cross-legged on the floor against walls yellow with green trim. He smoked a cigarette and rubbed his thumbs restlessly against black prayer beads. Two overhead fans turned against the desert heat. Shadid had done this work for twenty years, but he had never asked this question.\n\n \"The father knew why we were there,\" Shadid said, but I kept thinking, 'How do I bring this up?' We were skirting around the question in a very Middle Eastern way. You don't go for the jugular. You dance around the edges. But, finally, it came to a point where all the questions had been asked and I needed to say, 'Did you kill your son?'\"\n\n He didn't say it.\n\n Wouldn't say.\n\n Couldn't.\n\n \"I decided, 'I've got the story, I can write.' I just didn't want to hear him say yes. There had to be some dignity. I didn't want him to be humiliated again. I didn't want to see him cry. For him to cry would have been to lose every shred of dignity. So I said something much looser, like, 'How did you feel after your son died?'\"\n\n The light caught the glimmer of a welling-up in Salem Kerbul's eyes. He spoke softly, a whisper of grief. \"I have the heart of a father, and he's my son.\" Then he cast his eyes down. \"Even the prophet Abraham didn't have to kill his son.\"\n\n Shadid called those last words the most chilling he ever heard. \"I'd never come across anything so devastating. A bombing is one thing. You see body parts. It's traumatic. I still have dreams of it. But this, where you catch your breath and have an emptiness in your gut\u2014I'd never had that kind of reaction to any story. It told me, again, that this place, Iraq, is just fucked up. A brutal place. Thuluya is not even a footnote in this war's military history. But American troops set into motion events that end up as this biblical moment. A father had to kill his son. This is the detritus of military intervention.\"  \n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nSoon after, Shadid took leave to do a book about his family's ancestral home in southern Lebanon. Then, restored by the time away, he was eager to again be part of what he called the story of a lifetime. \"The idea that Iraq has fallen off the front pages of America's newspapers because of a lack of commitment is breathtaking,\" he said. \"That's why I want to go back.\"\n\nThen, early in 2009, he sent me an e-mail from Baghdad: \"When I asked two colleagues to join me in Baghdad, they politely refused. When I asked why, my fiancee answered for them.'They've moved on,' she said. I guess I haven't. I can't say that Iraq was my favorite story.Although I adore Baghdad and cherish its memory, it is not my favorite city. But something feels undone here. It still feels like there's work to do. Before I left in 2002, I told my editor thatI thought Iraq would be the most important work I did in my career. I still feel that way. And at a time the country is more complicated and more ambiguous, I'm wondering if that work hasn'tjust begun. My first impression when I returned was that it felt like 2003. No one then reallyknew what was ahead in those tumultuous months after Saddam's fall. It still feels like 2003 to me.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Shadid left The Post in mid-September 2009. He said the paper was \"going a different direction in foreign, a lot more about policy.\" He lived to report the day's news. For The Times, he covered the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya (where he was kidnapped, held six days, and beaten before being released). He entered Syria despite a ban on international journalists. He was leaving on foot for Turkey when he died.\n\n Steve Fainaru flew from California to Beirut for his friend's funeral. He said, \"What a huge hole in the world.\"\n\nReprinted from Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life, with permission from Doubleday."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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