The Life of a War Correspondent

Dec. 13 -- They are the grunts of the journalism world: wire-service reporters and cameramen who risk their lives covering dangerous wars in obscure places for the world's media.

Newspaper and television correspondents get their name in print or their face on air, butjournalists at international news agencies like The Associated Press and Reuters mostly work anonymously, feeding print stories and raw television footage to news outlets.

They endure discomfort and danger, driven by the conviction that "the story must be told" — even if the rest of the world is not paying attention.

"I felt very passionately that everyone in the world deserves at least a voice," says Ian Stewart, an AP reporter from Canada who was shot in the head while covering the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1999.

The injury paralyzed Stewart's left arm and hand, and impaired his left leg — but at least he got out alive. Myles Tierney, the AP Television News producer-cameraman he was traveling with, was not so lucky.

Foreign Correspondent: The Romance and the Reality

Like other journalists who travel to far-off lands, Stewart was attracted by the idea of being a foreign correspondent: "Romance, exotic locations, dashing off to exciting places.... When everyone else is coming out, I'm going in. That's really romantic. It's sort of Lawrence of Arabia kind of stuff."

At 27, Stewart became a correspondent for The AP, a job that took him to India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Afghanistan. Five years later, at 32, he headed for Africa as The AP's West Africa bureau chief.

He learned that when the romance fades, reality sets in. Recalling a winter he spent covering the Taliban in Afghanistan, with temperatures below freezing and no electricity or running water, Stewart says: "It's not glamorous at all. It's miserable. It's a really, really unpleasant existence."

Amputation as a Means of War

By the time Stewart and Tierney arrived in Sierra Leone in January 1999, the war had been raging for eight years. It was a particularly brutal war, with tens of thousands of civilians killed or mutilated. A favorite technique, used by rebels and government soldiers alike, was chopping off civilians' arms or hands.