He graduated in 1975 from the Loomis Chaffee School, a private boarding school in Windsor, Connecticut. He founded an underground newspaper at the school that was banned by the administration and resulted in his being put on probation. Hedges received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Colgate University in 1979. He received a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University's Divinity School (where he studied under James Luther Adams) in 1983. He studied Latin and Classical Greek at Harvard and speaks Arabic, French, and Spanish in addition to English. Latin America   Hedges began his career as a freelance journalist in Latin America. He wrote for several publications, including "The Washington Post", and covered the Falkland War from Buenos Aires for National Public Radio. From 1983 to 1984 he covered the conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala for "The Christian Science Monitor" and NPR. He was hired as the Central American Bureau Chief for The Dallas Morning News in 1984 and held this position until 1988. Noam Chomsky wrote of Hedges at the time that he was one of the "few US journalists in Central America who merit the title." The Middle East  Hedges took a sabbatical to study Arabic in 1988. He was appointed the Middle East Bureau Chief for "The Dallas Morning News" in 1989. In one of his first stories for the paper he tracked down Robert Manning, the prime suspect in the 1985 bombing death in California of Alex Odeh, head of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Western office, in the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba in the Israeli West Bank. Israel, until Hedges discovered Manning, said it had no knowledge of Manning’s whereabouts. Manning, linked to the militant Jewish Defense League and allegedly behind several murders, was extradited to the United States in 1991 where he is serving a life sentence. In 1990 Hedges was hired by "The New York Times". He covered the first Gulf War for the paper, where he refused to participate in the military pool system that restricted the movement and reporting of journalists. He was arrested by the U.S. military and had his press credentials revoked, but continued to defy the military restrictions to report outside the pool system. He entered Kuwait with the U.S. Marine Corp. He was taken prisoner in Basra after the war by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite uprising. He was freed after a week. Hedges was appointed the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief in 1991. His reporting on the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein in the Kurdish-held parts of northern Iraq saw the Iraqi leader offer a bounty for anyone who killed him, along with other western journalists and aid workers in the region.