War reporting

Sarah Byrne is covering her first war and, after a slow start, things are finally picking up. Sweating in her flak jacket and undersized helmet, the twentysomething British freelancer is aiming for a scoop. One of her contacts might be persuaded to arrange a visit to ‘terror tunnels’, the headquarters of a Palestinian network whose activities Israel cites as justification for bombing Gaza City. Fed up with ‘monkey journalism’, Sarah wants to move on from recycling press releases to proper reporting. At the same time, she keeps asking herself what she is doing here. Do these people dragging bodies from under the rubble of their houses need yet another ‘misery

When you are a foreign correspondent and have covered wars in dozens of countries, the last place you’d expect a threat to your life to come from is your own cells. Yet this was the predicament in which the New York Times reporter Rod Nordland found himself in July 2019. Despite close shaves in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central America and Darfur, he only really became aware of his mortality after collapsing with a seizure in India and discovering the existence of a ‘space occupying lesion’ (SOL) in his brain – a euphemism for a growth, benign or malignant. On transfer to a hospital in Manhattan, Nordland learned that his was