Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper Read Free Book Online Page A

own room or look at the balcony outside it. My mother talked about Carter, went over theories in her head. I listened but couldn’t add much. It was like staring into a bottomless chasm. I worried that there was nothing to stop me from falling if I took the next step. I was there, I listened, we were together. It was all I was capable of.
    I graduated college nearly a year after my brother died. My mom came up to New Haven, we took some pictures, and that was it. She returned to New York to pack up the apartment and move to a townhouse on the other side of the city. She no longer wanted to live in a penthouse. After my brother’s death, both of us developed a fear of heights. I asked her what she thought I should do for work, now that I’d graduated.
    “Follow your bliss,” she said, quoting Joseph Campbell. I was hoping for something more specific—“Plastics,” for instance. I worried I couldn’t “follow my bliss” because I couldn’t feel my bliss; I couldn’t feel anything at all. I wanted to be someplace where emotions were palpable, where the pain outside matched the pain I was feeling inside. I needed balance, equilibrium, or as close to it as I could get. I also wanted to survive, and I thought I could learn from others who had. War seemed like my only option.

I N COLLEGE I’D read a lot about the Vietnam War and the foreign correspondents who covered it. Their tales of night patrols and hot LZs made reporting sound like an adventure, one that was also worthwhile. News, however, is a hard business to break into. After college, I applied for an entry-level job at ABC News— photocopying, answering phones—but after months of waiting, I couldn’t even get an interview. Such is the value of a Yale education.
    I finally got a job as a fact-checker at Channel One, a twelve-minute daily news program broadcast to thousands of high schools throughout the United States. I knew that fact-checking wasn’t going to get me anywhere close to a front line, but I needed to get my foot in the door somehow. After several months of working there, I came up with a plan to become a foreign correspondent. It was very simple, and monumentally stupid.
    I figured if I went places that were dangerous or exotic, I wouldn’t have much competition, and if my stories were interesting and inexpensive, Channel One might broadcast them. A colleague of mine agreed to make a fake press pass for me on a Macintosh computer, and loan me one of his Hi-8 cameras. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I’d watched a lot of TV news growing up, and had some idea how stories were put together. The rest I figured I’d learn along the way.
    I quit my job as a fact-checker, but didn’t inform the producers who ran Channel One of my plan. I figured they’d tell me not to go, or refuse to look at whatever material I shot. In December 1991, I flew to Thailand and met up with some Burmese refugees who were working to overthrow their country’s military dictatorship. Apparently, my fake press pass was convincing because they agreed to sneak me across the Thai-Burmese border so I could shoot a story about their struggle.
    Their camp was in dense jungle. Throughout the day, you could hear mortar fire in the distance from an unseen front line. I found it all very exciting, and loved being in a position to ask questions and shoot pictures. None of it seemed very real to me, however, until I went to the field hospital where young soldiers, many just teenagers, lay with bloody wounds and missing limbs.
    A doctor in surgical scrubs was operating on the leg of a young man whose face was badly bruised; his eyes had turned milky white. I saw the doctor reach for a stainless-steel saw, and at first didn’t understand what he was going to do with it. When he began cutting the teenager’s leg off, I nearly passed out. The soldiers who were escorting me laughed.
    Channel One bought the video I’d shot, and when I arrived back in Bangkok, I knew