We’re All War Journalists Now
Reporting, live from New York.

By Rod Dreher, a columnist for the New York Post
October 16, 2001 8:55 a.m.

nnie Aquilina is a top editor at the New York Post, in charge of keeping the office running. In truth, she's more like a den mother to us all. She keeps candy and cookies on the shelf outside her office, and when you see her walking around distributing goodies, she's usually passing out a special tray of sweets.

Last Friday, on the day anthrax scares at NBC and the New York Times topped the news, that changed. Annie made her usual rounds, but this time she was distributing masks and rubber gloves to reporters and editors frightened to open their mail.

This is what it's like to be a journalist in New York now. Actually, journalists anywhere can be and are being targeted by bioterrorists using the mail, or sick pranksters seeking to emulate them. What distinguishes the New York journalist from his colleagues elsewhere is that the worst of September 11 and its aftermath has taken place not far away, but in his own city.

Like all other New Yorkers, he has had to absorb the psychic trauma of the World Trade Center attack, which he may well have seen up close in the course of doing his job that day. A Post colleague was nearly killed in the first collapse. Two of his close friends did die, and 50 people from his hometown in Long Island perished. My colleague has continued to file stories without cessation since that day. He is far from alone in this.

The New York journalist is also a citizen of this city. He lives here, as does his family, if he has one. Like firefighters and cops, when disaster strikes, he runs toward the danger, not away from it. This takes a toll on his loved ones. On the morning of the disaster, with the Twin Towers ablaze across the East River, the last thing I said to my wife before racing, notebook in hand, toward the scene of the crime, was, "I'm going to get as close to them as I can."

I made it as far as the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge before the first tower fell, and I had to turn back. My cellphone was kaput, and my wife didn't know if I was living or dead; had I not stopped on the bridge to interview a few downtown office workers fleeing the burning buildings, I would have had time to have made it to Ground Zero. My wife knew that, and until I showed up at our front door, dusted with ash 45 minutes later, she wasn't sure if I was coming home.

Every day now, she still isn't — and she isn't sure if I'm coming home with deadly spores on my cuff. The only American journalists who, with their families, live with this daily life-or-death uncertainty are war correspondents. Now, we are all war correspondents.

And not only war correspondents, but combatants. What we write or broadcast makes us special targets. Judith Miller of the New York Times was targeted for a powdered letter attack — which as of this writing, appears to have been a hoax — apparently because of her writing on bioterror. I have received hysterical e-mails from Muslims in response to an NRO piece I wrote criticizing Oprah Winfrey's kid gloves treatment of Islam. The letters are frothing with accusations of bigotry and hate (while not addressing a single factual point I made in the piece), and a colleague has already suggested that I send one of them to the FBI. Hate mail is part of the job, but now that this stuff could be lethal, all journalists have to weigh whether it's worth risking one's life to write a particular column, or report a certain story.

The answer has to be, "Hell, yes." But all personal snail-mail sent to one goes in the trash can unopened, all hostile e-mails are stored for possible examination by authorities, and one takes other precautions, especially if one's face is known from TV, or from a photo that runs with one's column. I had altered my appearance significantly in the wake of multiple death threats from fans of the pop star Aaliyah, with whom I share the city's sidewalks and subways. After 9/11, I'm sticking with the new look.

That said, it is a marvelous time to be a journalist anywhere, but especially in New York. As a fellow writer told me days after the attack, "This is probably the story of our lifetimes." We are here to bear witness — literally, at Ground Zero — to the most extraordinary events this city and this nation have lived through in a generation. Our vocations and our press passes give us a front-row seat at history.

Most of us didn't get into this business to write about puppy dogs, prize begonias, and Britney Spears's navel, though the relative quiescence of American life prior to 9/11 often made it feel that one's work really didn't count, that it was simply part of the national chit-chat.

Now, words matter more than they have in living memory. Simple accounts of the burial of a heroic firefighter take on an elegiac quality. The lines one writes in these times aren't poetry, but they will be saved in countless scrapbooks by readers who want to be able to tell their descendants: that's what it was like to live in those days.

And sometimes you can do positive good, in ways big and small. A reader let me know about his five young nephews in rural Pennsylvania, who had given six years' worth of savings toward a Disney World vacation to the relief fund for the families of Brooklyn firefighters killed in the disaster. They had read in my column about how neighbors around one hard-hit Brooklyn Heights firehouse turned out to support the men, and the boys wanted to be a part of that. When I reported on the money they gave to the widows and children, generous Post readers responded with donations. Live with Regis and Kelly had the kids on, and gave them a free trip to Disney World — which the boys are now trying to donate to five fatherless firefighters' children.

All I did was tell a story, but so many people who need inspiration were moved by this one (or so they have told me). Bearing witness to the goodness and bravery of people in this time is as important as telling the truth about the terror and cowardice.

Being a New York journalist now, with its very real danger and concomitant excitement, feels a lot like ... well, hey, I'm a New York journalist, and still too much of a smart-ass to tell it straight. Maybe I'll just put it this way: He also serves who only reads a TelePrompTer, or labors at a word processor.