“Do you want to try on my flak jacket?” I was sitting in Donatella Lorch’s Washington, DC house, looking at the books on her shelves, the dagger collection on her walls, and the framed photographs of her and her friends snapped in far-flung locales: the mountains of Afghanistan, a beach in Somalia, a small village in Kosovo. Though no one had ever asked me such a question before—and probably never will again—it wasn’t entirely surprising. Months earlier when I’d interviewed Donatella by phone for a book I was writing, she had described what it feels like to wear a bulletproof vest while working as a war correspondent in a conflict zone. Although the vests save lives, they are also heavy, hot, and viewed as a barrier between a reporter and her subject.
We went down to her basement, where Donatella searched through boxes until she found an item that looked like a navy blue life vest. Shimmying into it, I gasped. Lead weights had been draped around my shoulders. I tried to imagine the effects of a blazing sun, sweat accumulating around my breastbone under the plastic cover. Donatella watched me carefully, and then smiled. It was not a “told-you-so” smile. Rather it conveyed empathy and humor, the hallmarks that have helped her survive some of the most brutal conflicts of the late-twentieth century with her sanity intact. “You get used to it,” she said, taking the jacket off my shoulders.
At that time, Donatella was working for Newsweek covering the Pentagon. Previously, she had been with NBC News and the New York Times. The Times had hired her after she had displayed incredible moxie by going to Afghanistan right out of graduate school and publishing stories about the Mujaheddin. She worked for the paper for nearly a decade, including a stint as the youngest East Africa Bureau Chief. It was during that time that she covered the famine and civil war in Somalia, traveled with rebels in Southern Sudan, and interviewed leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Most harrowing of all was her experience in Rwanda during the genocide. She was just one of several reporters to drive into Kigali a few days after the massacre began. For a year, she doggedly followed the people of Rwanda as they grappled with their horror.
Meeting Donatella for the first time in her apartment, it was hard not to be awed by her accomplishments.
