Forced empathy

This first-person(s) story of the four NY Times journalists captured in Libya could have veered off in to self-absorption territory. I mean, it is gripping and remarkably revealing, but you don't become a war correspondent if you don't crave that kind of adrenaline rush. But then there are a couple of examples of real self-reflection that makes you feel these four people are just that -- people:

From the pickup, Lynsey saw a body outstretched next to our car, one arm outstretched. We still don’t know whether that was Mohammed. We fear it was, though his body has yet to be found.

If he died, we will have to bear the burden for the rest of our lives that an innocent man died because of us, because of wrong choices that we made, for an article that was never worth dying for.

No article is, but we were too blind to admit that.

[...]

We felt like trophies of war, and at a dozen checkpoints, we could hear militiamen running to the car to administer another beating.

“Dirty dogs,” men shouted out at each stop.

Over the years, all of us had seen men detained, blindfolded and handcuffed at places like Abu Ghraib, or corralled after some operation in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now we were the faceless we had covered perhaps too dispassionately. For the first time, we felt what it was like to be disoriented by a blindfold, to have plastic cuffs dig into your wrists, for hands to go numb.

It's because of journalists like these that I continue to pay a subscription to the New York Times.