Kounalakis in Sacramento Bee

CMCS Fellow Markos Kounalakis wrote about the difficult work of reporting from countries in crisis.

Nightmares of abduction and confinement disrupted my sleep the night before I left for Afghanistan. It was Dec. 1, 1991, and I was working on a freelance piece for The Los Angeles Times Magazine, flying into Kabul from Uzbekistan on a Soviet military transport on my birthday. My best friends were foreign corresponding colleagues and together we made a pact over shots of vodka that if anything happened to us in the field, we would immediately mobilize media and the U.S. government to aid and rescue us.

But we also knew that if anything happened to us back then, there was likely nothing much that could be done to save us. Coldly aware of the bad odds, I agreed with my friends to start a foreign correspondents’ scholarship if any of us fell. Moscow correspondents Mark Bauman of ABC News and Terry Phillips of CBS News and I always reminded one another – sometimes jokingly, usually cavalierly – that the creation of this fund was a solemn commitment before one  of us headed into another dicey reporting situation or war.