Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Journalism in wartime is a difficult endeavour -- and it's a particularly dangerous one if you happen to be a reporter working from the actual battlefields. Many great writers and newspeople have achieved their greatness through their work during wartime, people like Bill Mauldin, Walter Cronkite, and Eric Severeid; and some journalists have died in the course of their reportage -- most famously, Ernie Pyle, who was killed during the opening days of the American campaign to take Okinawa in WWII.

War is no less dangerous for the journalists today than it was back then. Today, two journalists were killed in separate incidents: Michael Kelly (American, editor-at-large for The Atlantic Monthly) and Kaveh Golestan (Iranian, photo-journalist and 1980 Pulitzer Prize winner). The willingness to go into harm's way is admirable, whether it is a soldier who does it because he's ordered to do it or a reporter who does it so that we, at home, can understand why and how. I admire these people, and I grieve at their deaths.