Bravery and Brilliance

I had never heard of David Rohde before today, but his daring exploits have now firmly caught my attention. Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban, escaped Friday night, and made his way to freedom, after more than seven months of captivity in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. When he was captured he was with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, researching a new book. Mr. Ludin joined him in climbing over the wall of a compound where they were being held in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. They made their way to a nearby Pakistani Frontier Corps base and on Saturday they were flown to the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan.
This is a great story on its own, but it gets even better. Rohde has won two Pulitzer Prizes! The first was in 1996 in international reporting for documenting the massacres of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, where he uncovered grave sites and photographed piles of clothing and human bones near an earthen dam. But he was detected by a plainclothes watchman and turned over to Bosnian Serb authorities and imprisoned. His tenacious reporting played a crucial role in exposing the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia. His second was as part of The New York Times’s reporting team that won a this spring for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan last year.
David Rohde is a great profile at many different levels. Number one, he is known by colleagues as fearless yet unassuming reporter; someone who conducts himself modestly around the office. Affable and soft-spoken, he is not one to regale colleagues with war stories, instead saving his storytelling for articles. He is described as one unbelievably dogged reporter who brings an open mind and big heart to every story. All characteristics that we can relate to and admire.
Number two is bravery. His father, Harvey Rohde, said that while he regretted that his son had made the trip, he understood his motivation, “to get both sides of the story, to have his book honestly portray not just the one side but the other side as well.” “I guess that personifies my son.” To go repeatedly into war zones across the globe armed only with a pen and notebook takes a special kind of courage. Yet war correspondents have done exactly that for as long as some form of media has existed.
Number three is something that I have written about before. David Rohde and those like him restore my faith in credible reporting. In late November 1995, and Mr. Rohde’s editors joined 11 of his relatives on a trip to Dayton, Ohio, where the Bosnian peace talks were being held, to urge American diplomats to demand his release from Bosnia. After 10 days of imprisonment, during which he was interrogated relentlessly and deprived of sleep, Mr. Rohde was freed. When he arrived in Boston, he was greeted by a phalanx of cameras at the airport, which made him cringe, said his older brother, Lee. “He’s old school,” Lee Rohde said. “The last thing he ever wants is to be the story. He’s supposed to be the storyteller.” The press, television, the Internet, whatever the media source, are supposed to tell the story not set it in motion themselves. David Rohde is a real and courageous man, a fine reporter; and one that I will delight in reading in years to come, because I trust him to tell me the facts and let me decide what is true. Bring back old school in a very big way.