Thanks Christie,,,

The honour in bearing witness to war

Like the soldiers she covered, Michelle Lang of the Calgary Herald was a volunteer, doing her job and doing it well

Christie Blatchford

Published on Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009 9:48PM EST Last updated on Friday, Jan. 01, 2010 10:08AM EST

It isn't often that reporters get general condolence notes, but the first of mine came the night before last from a kindly reader, offering sympathy on the loss of Michelle Lang, the Calgary Herald writer killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday along with four young Canadian soldiers.

“My prayers,” the note concluded, “are with you and all our journalists over there.”

In the normal course, we in the newspaper business are such a querulous, competitive, independent lot that it was almost shocking to be reminded that we too are a band of brothers. I found the reader's use of the word “our,” in connection with the motley crew of which I have been a member virtually all my adult life, to be unbearably touching.

I didn't know Ms. Lang – she was 34, engaged to be married and an award-winning health reporter – but I am struck, reading about her now, how very like the soldiers she was there to cover she herself sounds.

Her editor at the Herald spoke about her as a great journalist but also a great person who lit up any room she entered; friends remembered her as kind and thoughtful; my terrific Globe colleague Patrick White, whose Afghanistan overlapped with hers, clearly found her likeable and admirable. And she had that gorgeous wide-open face practically thrumming, even in pictures, with warmth and intelligence.

Very often, when Canadian soldiers are killed overseas, their family and friends are able to find some consolation in the fact that their sons/brothers/husbands so wanted to be there.

This is usually translated as belief “in the mission,” but it is almost always more complex than that.

What soldiers really believe in are each other. The veterans who go back do so because they hope their hard-won knowledge from earlier tours may help keep the others safe; the young ones go to be with those they trained with and want to protect; the injured ones want to get back to duty because they fear without them, their comrades will be in more jeopardy; the officers and NCOs want to lead from the front not only to set an example but also because they hope by learning the ground themselves, they will be better, smarter leaders who lose fewer men.

It is unselfishness on a grand scale, and that, whatever the merits of this mission or any other, is where the soldier's nobility really lies.

The embedded reporter, as a general rule, doesn't get a lot of respect. It is the un-embedded or independent rogue who travels about the country alone or with a fixer/driver, as several of my colleagues both at The Globe and elsewhere have done, who has the market cornered on that.

Yet both ways of covering the war have equal if different risks. The embedded reporter, moving with the army in their vehicles, shares the danger of being blown up by roadside bomb or finding herself the only unarmed non-combatant in a gunfight; the independent reporter is more likely to be taken hostage or killed for the hell of it by a drug thug, gangster or half-assed paramilitary jerk: It is Afghanistan, after all, where as one major once remarked to me, absolutely everything can kill you and if you're not lucky and careful both, probably will.

There's a notion, I think, that the embedded journalist is somehow a tool of the military, while the independent magnificently always rises above that. I think it's nonsense at both ends.

The Canadian Forces are not slick manipulators of truth – rather the opposite, I say politely – and the mere fact of its embedding program, where reporters are invited to live and work alongside soldiers and are subject in my experience to almost zero interference or censorship, alone should speak to that.

And the Taliban, however simple or uneducated its lowest-ranking members may be, are adept at the most basic propaganda; they know very well that the shortest route to sap the will of countries like Canada and Britain is a rising casualty toll. Canadian soldiers who speak to the press are named and accountable for their remarks, both to their superiors and to the public; but for a few top leaders, Taliban and supporters are interviewed anonymously, through interpreters and sometimes fixers, and are usually photographed with covered faces.

It is an odd commentary upon the world we live in that a named and identified Canadian general is often viewed in this country with more suspicion than a masked thug with an AK at his side, yet precisely that view persists in newsrooms and journalism schools both.

The truth, probably, is that the world needs more of both kinds of reporting from Afghanistan, and that done well there is merit in both.

Ms. Lang was one of those who wanted to do the job well. She could have stayed within the confines of Kandahar Air Field, the sprawling base which is as safe at it gets in that country, and not ventured outside the wire, but according to colleagues who were there at the same time, including Mr. White, that wasn't the kind of reporter she was. She wanted to see with her own eyes what Canadian soldiers were doing.

Like them, Ms. Lang was a volunteer. Like them, she knew the risks. Like them, she was doing her job, and doing it right. The best definition of a reporter, in my view, is as witness. There is honour in that, and I hope there's some comfort there for her family and fiancé.

My favourite description of her comes from Colin Perkel, a crankily wonderful and gifted Canadian Press reporter who is still in Kandahar. He remembered how she talked to her folks or her boyfriend, either on computer or phone, every night. It must have been from the media tent, because Mr. Perkel still saw the picture so vividly, describing her as “the essence of a guileless, genuine and gentle girl-next-door type.”

He also said she was remarkably good at putting the soldiers she met at their ease.

My understanding is she spent only a few hours with the soldiers who died with her before their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device, but I bet they loved her immediately.