PREPARING for a trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in September, I telephoned Charles Glass, a colleague who had been in the area for several months working on a book, to talk about people worth seeing there and other details.
"Do you think I need to take a flak jacket?" I asked him.
"No," he replied. "You and I don't go where people need flak jackets. Young people do that."
He was right, of course. Working in a war zone is young people's work. Older people have no business getting caught in the middle of firefights, especially if they've been in a few and their number hasn't come up yet. Bad odds.
This came to mind recently when I read about the special training the Pentagon has been laying on for the men and women who will be going to cover the war in Iraq. It is offering a kind of boot camp for those upon whom the privilege might be bestowed.
There are valuable lessons journalists need to learn. The Pentagon might teach some. Carry a gas mask and know how to use it. Be careful where you walk because mines are all over the place. Learn first aid. But it probably won't teach others. Get to know how to talk to the military outside the Pentagon because if they start trusting you, they'll tell you when they think things are going badly, or stupidly, or both.
The Sun did not have a training program for correspondents sent to war zones when I went to my first area of conflict for the newspaper in 1973, so it was just as well that the Arab-Israeli war of that year was mostly over by the time I got there -- on nothing more than two weeks' notice.
Against his better judgment, Paul Banker, the managing editor of The Sun at the time, acquiesced to my plea for a stop in Paris to see Gilbert Lewthwaite, the correspondent who had been dispatched to the war in its first days. This would prepare me for this assignment on such short notice, I argued. Banker countered something like this: "The prospect of you and Lewthwaite together in Paris on The Sun's expense account frightens me more than war."
Whatever Banker may have thought of my performance elsewhere, I certainly exceeded his expectations in Paris.
My on-the-job training as a full-fledged war correspondent came in an unlikely place, the island of Cyprus in 1974.
As far as most Middle East correspondents were concerned at the time, Cyprus, an island of divided Greek and Turkish ethnicity, was a nice little getaway in the Mediterranean, less than an hour's flight from Beirut or Tel Aviv. Great, historic scenery. Beautiful beaches. Good food. It was a place to go for rest and recuperation from the Arab-Israeli conflict. Then, some crazy Greeks decided to overthrow their own relatively moderate leader -- Archbishop Makarios -- and got the Turks so upset about it that Turkey invaded Cyprus.
From the capital, Nicosia, I headed to the eastern coast of Cyprus to watch the invasion, driving a car with three colleagues. These were experienced war correspondents from Vietnam: Nick Proffitt of Newsweek, Holger Jensen of the Associated Press and Michel Laurent, a famed war photographer. It was an odd experience. We arrived at a small beachside hotel, which like most of the buildings on the coastline, had been strafed by Turkish aircraft.
The owner was wracked with fear and told us to take whatever we liked: food, drink, whatever. It was about 7 a.m. We took a bottle of champagne -- isn't that what Hemingway would have done? -- and went to the seafront veranda and watched the Turkish landing, which looked like a mini-D-Day. Once the Turks settled in, we thought, we'd go down and interview them. But instead of settling in and waiting to be interviewed, the Turks started lobbing grenades into the buildings on the shoreline and shooting at us.
Better surrender, we thought. So we grabbed the white cloth from the table on the veranda and began waving it as we stumbled toward the beach. The first Turk had no idea what to do with us, so he ordered us to lie face down on the beach. Eventually, an officer who spoke English came along.
We told him we wanted to follow his forces. But he refused and ordered us to drive back to Nicosia.
We did not argue.
I was driving the car on the way back. We ran into tanks and artillery from both sides, neither seeming to care about our safety. Turkish aircraft were dive-bombing vehicles on the road to Nicosia. At one point a Turkish F-4 dived at us, and I accelerated.
"What are you trying to do?" Proffitt screamed at me. "Outrun an F-4?" The idea, he explained, was to stop the car and scramble out if it seemed to be under attack by an F-4.
Jensen told me that when we encountered a tank, I should hold out my hand as a gesture of noncombatancy. We encountered several tanks, and I followed instructions.
"Why the hell are you jerking your hand up and down like that?" Jensen hollered. "It looks like you're making an obscene gesture to them."
I said a bleep. "You guys are the big experienced war correspondents. Why isn't one of you driving the car."
"Because," said Proffitt, "the driver is always the last guy out of the car."
That was my little lesson. I never was the driver in a car in a war zone again. I'd hire a driver, but I wouldn't drive.
Jensen and Proffitt are still alive and well.
Laurent is dead. He was killed by communist forces moving into Saigon during the fall of the capital, the last Western press casualty of the war. He had more combat experience than most of the soldiers in Vietnam, and it didn't save him.