People always ask me if there was a trajectory, a leap to me becoming a war reporter, and my answer is always no. I think if I had set out to do it, if it was my goal and my intention, it never would have happened. Instead, it more or less found me. And I am a frightened person, afraid of the dark and spiders and fearful of the future with its big dark claws.
I was the youngest and greenest reporter, hardly a reporter at all. I had trained as a writer of fiction, and as an academic in comparative literature, in love with Chekhov and Tolstoy. I fell into reporting one spring, one morning in April...