Nightline: Witness to Genocide

W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 7 -- The Rwanda-Zaire border. 1994. We were making our way deeper into Camp Cholera.

At least that's what the journalists called it. It wasn't a camp. Just thousands — 50,000, 100,000, we never really knew — of people lying head to toe in a lava field. These were big, sharp lava rocks. Some people had a straw sleeping mat. Others a thin blanket. But most were just lying on the rocks. But the cholera part was true. Disease was ravaging these people. Many of them were already dead. The rest were dying.

There were no paths, no roads, to get toward the center of the "camp" — you just had to step over the people. I'm not particularly graceful, but I was trying my best not to step on anyone, not to disturb them. For those who were alive, I didn't want to make their last moments any worse. For the dead, I didn't want to disturb their peace. All of us in the Nightline team were picking our way deeper into the nightmare. Refugee camps have a sound all their own. It's a sort of dull roar of human misery. It sounded the same in Rwanda as it did in Kosovo or Somalia. But the smell. That's what you can never get across on TV. The smell of death. It overpowers you.

I was last in line; our correspondent, my fellow producer, and the camera crew were ahead of me. I was literally straddling a woman, waiting for the others to move on. I didn't have the courage at that point to look down to see if she was alive or dead. Then I felt something on my foot. I looked down and saw a small boy. He looked to be about 5, which meant he was probably 10. Malnutrition will do that. He was lying on his back, and had thrown his arm up over his head. His fingers had gotten tangled in my bootlaces. I looked down at him, and as I looked in his eyes, I saw the light go out. And he died. A stranger's face, my face, was the last thing he saw. And all I could do was shake my foot to free my laces from his fingers, and then move on to catch up to my team.

It was five years before I could tell that story. We had gone in to Rwanda thinking that we could handle anything. At that point in my career, I had been in a dozen wars, natural disasters, you name it. We all thought we were as tough as they come. We were wrong. Within the first day or so, I think each of us had broken down. We were having food flown in. We finally told them to just send beer and wine. We would trade the beer to the French Foreign Legion troops holding the airport for their rations. But after a day or two, I stopped eating entirely. Instead, I would sit in front of my tent at night and drink a whole bottle of wine, hoping that the alcohol would kill the pain. But for all the peace it brought, I might as well have been drinking water.