Risky Business

I had just been with Bob Woodruff in New York last Monday, when he said goodbye to Elizabeth Vargas and his other ABC colleagues before heading to the airport, en route to the Middle East. I had spoken to him several times in the previous two weeks, about his life and why he got into journalism, and my piece on the network's new co-anchors had just run in Style yesterday morning.

That's when I got the chilling news. Woodruff and a cameraman, Doug Vogt, badly wounded in Iraq. Roadside bomb. Head injuries. Going into surgery.

Every death or injury in Iraq is important, whether it's a journalist or soldier or civilian. But when you know someone, or have talked to someone, just before things take a turn for the worst, it hits home in a very personal way. I remember the same feeling in 2003 when I interviewed David Bloom by phone from the Kuwaiti desert just days before his death.

I've asked reporters this question again and again: Why go to places like Iraq? Why risk your life? How do you blot it out and work when danger is always lurking just around the corner? I've asked John Burns of the New York Times after he was kidnapped and Jackie Spinner of The Washington Post after an attempted kidnapping and Canadian journalist Scott Taylor, who spent weeks in captivity and says he was tortured. The answer, I think, boils down to the fact that for some correspondents, it's in their DNA. They are drawn to the story, by the sense of history and the importance, or excitement, of serving as an eyewitness.

After Jill Carroll's kidnapping, there was a sense that stringers like her, with no armored cars or security apparatus, are taking the greatest risks. But being embedded with an Army unit, as Woodruff was, may be even more dangerous, despite the illusion of safety from being surrounded by soldiers, because you're literally on the front lines.

Woodruff didn't have to go to Iraq. He could have stayed home and anchored from the safety of a Manhattan studio. But he chose to go, wanted to go, and thereby reminds us of the risks that lesser-known journalists in Baghdad take every day.

ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff was with David Bloom outside Iraq days before the NBC correspondent died of a pulmonary embolism, and he immediately raced home to help Bloom's family with the funeral arrangements -- and to comfort his own wife, Lee, and their four children.

The reason, Woodruff explained to New York's Daily News in 2003, is that "they equate my life and situation with Dave's." The families have remained close since then.

When Woodruff left ABC's newsroom last Monday, hauling two suitcases and a computer bag, he betrayed no sense of nervousness about the risk of returning to Iraq, where he and a cameraman, Doug Vogt, were seriously wounded yesterday by a roadside bomb. He talked about deadlines, such as landing in Israel in time to interview Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and the challenge of sleeping on overseas flights, but not about the danger he knew all too well from repeatedly flying into war zones.

In the four weeks since Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas became co-anchors of "World News Tonight," ABC has made clear that the new format would keep them constantly on the road. That was just fine with Woodruff, 44, a former London correspondent who reported from Pakistan for four months after the Sept. 11 attacks and also covered the war in Afghanistan. He was in the midst of his second trip to the Middle East this month and embedded with an Army unit when the bomb exploded.

"He is one of the bravest and most rugged and curious journalists I've ever worked with," said former ABC correspondent Linda Douglass. "He came into our bureau, so handsome you couldn't even find the words to describe it, and won everyone over by being hard-working and nice. He has an insatiable desire to get to the story, along with great devotion to his family."

Woodruff saw himself in the mold of Peter Jennings, whom he and Vargas succeeded after the veteran anchor's death from lung cancer last summer. A lawyer by training, Woodruff was moved to get into television by the Persian Gulf War, after having spent time as a CBS translator in China following the Tiananmen Square uprising. Since then, Woodruff said last week, his main aspiration has been "to be the best damn foreign correspondent I can be."