"Oh my God - we hit a little girl."
05 April 2004. Inspired by .
The ever-superb blog of death reports on the sad death of John Sack, the only man ever to report from every US war in the last fifty years (what's that? Oh, they weren't wars, just conflicts. Well, them too).
His first article for Esquire was the longest they've ever published - 33,000 words. The front page was about as powerful as you can get. It was black and had only the words "Oh my God - we hit a little girl". These were the days of real print journalism.
He also wrote the almost-unpublishable Eye for an Eye, about the post-war Polish prison camps run by Jews where they tortured German prisoners. It took seven years to find someone to publish it.
Without wanting to throw in my uninformed twopennoth, all I'll say is that it must have taken huge moral and journalistic faith to want to write it at all, let alone to go $100,000 in debt to tell a story that no-one else would touch. He then went to speak at a conference of Holocaust deniers (despite not being one himself) - and argued eloquently why he did it, while revealing the intellectual flaws in many of their theories.
Sack is also the man who refused to hand over his notes to prosecutors in the trial of the Lieutenant charged with the My Lai massacre.
No matter how much editors may demand it, the truth is that there is no black and white - only different shades of grey. Sack constantly put his job and life on the line to make that clear.
More links over at Blog of Death.