Well we lost another one. Journalist Steven Sotloff was beheaded by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) early this week, two weeks after fellow-freelancer James Foley was decapitated by the same unlovely bunch.
I frankly don’t know how I feel about this right now. It could be that I’ve been enjoying life on the road with my kids so much I’ve been mostly ignoring the news. It could be that getting the kids into school and taking care of all those details I’ve left for the last minute is so consuming it leaves little energy to pay attention.
And it could be that I’m still numb.
In 2005 I was studying journalism at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at Oklahoma University on a fellowship. I’d gotten into journalism quite by accident while I was working as an English teacher in Poland.
I started out writing “adverticals,” i.e. advertising thinly disguised as articles for The Airport Magazine, a bilingual publication for tourists. As a bennie they’d publish articles I was proud of about the history and culture of the country.
I also contributed articles about the events in that exciting time for “journals of much passion and small circulation,” in Prince Kropotkin’s elegant phrase.
After writing stories such as an interview with the widow of a murdered dissident in Belarus, and covering the election that brought down the Milosevic regime in Serbia from the streets of Belgrade I thought, “I’ve got to get back to the States, get some formal training and turn pro.”
So there I was, getting that training and exercising my bragging rights back in my old university.
It was there that I made the email acquaintance of Steven Vincent.
Vincent was an art critic of all things, until the day he saw the twin towers go down on 9/11.
He was a supporter of the Iraq War, but felt obligated to go and see for himself. He self-funded and went as a freelance journalist to Basra, Iraq, reporting for The Christian Science Monitor, National Review, Mother Jones, Reason, Front Page and American Enterprise, and others.
I contacted him via email and described a project I had started with friends, to organize English-teaching summer camps using the best writings in the English language to explain the principles of political liberty and free markets. That project, The Language of Liberty Institute, is still ongoing in the capable hands of my friend Glenn Cripe.
I thought we could get Vincent to come to one of our camps in Eastern Europe, and maybe he might share our dream of a camp in Iraq someday.
We were never more than correspondents, but I really looked forward to the day I could meet and become friends with this man I admired so much.
Then a day after our last email exchange I got up in the morning, switched on CNN, and read on the news feed that Vincent had been murdered in Basra.
It was like waking up from a pleasant dream to find a nightmare crouched at the foot of your bed.
Ever since then I’ve thought, I should have warned him.
I’ve traveled and worked in some dicey places. But unlike Vincent, Foley and Sotloff I generally go where I don’t look different from the locals at first glance. I usually blend in fairly well if I keep my mouth shut, and in a couple of instances I could just start speaking Polish and let people assume what they will.
What happens to you in these appalling countries where ordinary people are trying to hang on to some semblance of a normal life amidst the horror, is you come to love and respect them – and you feel you have to share their danger or no longer call yourself a man.
What you forget is that these people have a lot more experience dealing with that $#!+ than you do. And that can make you hesitate when it’s time to cut and run.
Vincent, Foley and Sotloff were freelancers, the kind we need these days when the profession of foreign correspondent has almost disappeared, and let’s face it the major corporate news organizations are corrupt and lazy.
They will be hard to replace after this.