Here’s a moving piece by Ted Rall, a cartoonist and writer covering the war in Afghanistan for The Village Voice and KFI Radio in Los Angeles:


Running the Odds When Nobody Cares.

No one gave a damn about our security. The Northern Alliance never assigned guards for our houses or for journalist convoys, which were constantly getting ambushed. And neither the U.S. nor the Alliance would send a chopper for you if you got shot.

The next morning, Nov. 27, I ran into Pedro, a Portugese radio correspondent who lived a few houses away. I asked him if anyone had pounded on his door the night before. “As a matter of fact, yes,” he replied.

A few hours later, the news spread that Ulf Stromberg, a 42-year-old Swedish cameraman who’d been living three doors away from me, had answered the door that night to find three or four young men pointing Kalishnikovs at him. When he shouted to alert his roommates, they shot him. The killers robbed the others and fled into the night.

Forty-five journalists had come to Taloqan in my convoy. Stromberg was the third one killed for his money.

I conducted an informal poll of the writers and TV people gathering at the tiny Foreign Ministry. All had been awakened the night before by knocks at their doors. Only Stromberg had answered. The killers had known where all of us lived. If we had all answered our doors, we all would have been killed for our carefully concealed $100 bills and whatever possessions intrigued them.

“I don’t mind dying in battle to get a story,” a writer for the French daily Le Monde told me. “Getting killed in a stupid street crime is something else altogether.”