So a reporter walks into a newsroom …
Not exactly man bites dog type stuff.
But this reporter was David Rohde, who escaped from the Taliban last month after seven months in capitivity. He walked in to the New York Times newsroom Wednesday to “perhaps the most sustained ovation ever heard in the paper’s newsroom,” and so Clyde Haberman wrote about it for the City Room blog.
Rohde was abducted, along with a translator and escort, Tahir Ludin, in November, outside Kabul, where he was researching a book. The story of how he and Ludin escaped — as their hope for survival was fading fast – is pretty incredible. It involved waiting until dark, scaling a wall, and high-tailing it to a nearby base in Pakistan. You can read about it here.
Rohde’s return to the newsroom, with his wife of only nine months at his side, was no less so.
He did not discuss details of his abduction or of his escape on June 19. But he allowed that Mr. Ludin had told the hostage takers that if they wanted to chop off Mr. Rohde’s head, they would have to chop off his own first. It was a chilling reminder of the dangers of reporting in Central Asia, where Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal was murdered and beheaded in 2002.
Mr. Rohde spoke of Mr. Ludin’s bravery and said he represented true Islam and not the “twisted” form of their captors, whose hard-line interpretation of religion, he said, made them less humane.
Rohde seems like a pretty self-effacing guy. He joked that wandering into a danger zone just a few weeks after getting married “cemented my position as the worst newlywed husband ever.”
Before leaving the newsroom, he offered some advice — a few words that I think pretty well put all the politics, all the petty things that distract us, in perspective:
“Over the next day,” he said, “hug your spouse, kiss your child, call your relatives, watch the sunset, watch the sunrise, thank your God and relish your life.”
Happy Fourth of July, everyone. And Shabbat Shalom. I’ll be back next week.
Tags: Daniel Pearl, David Rohde