Cambodia was of the most dangerous places on Earth in 1970. That summer, 25 journalists were killed. A Cambodian Odyssey recounts those deadly days and the agonizing recovery effort.
This is a question that still bluntly assaults every reporter and cameraman covering war anywhere in the world. When to stop? Where to stop? Ever to stop? We lived with that challenge all during the war, yet so many of us felt invulnerable—was it innocence, arrogance, the intoxication of war? We were objective reporters, weren't we, not combat soldiers. We gave ourselves exemptions from death. We armored ourselves with naiveté.
In all, A Cambodian Odyssey is a tribute to all slain journalists who brought the war to your living room; some caught in a firefight, some shot out of the sky, some who vanished, some executed. Yet even while the shooting was going on, there was a war about the war, about whether the United States had misread history and the dying and killing was all a waste. Those post-mortems would come later, too late to end the killing.