Jeff B. Harmon At War

As a 19-year-old cameraman for UPITN, covering the devastating effects of the 1972 earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua, I am completely green. It is my first assignment as a journalist. Many of the other reporters are a good twenty years older.

On a lonely stretch of highway, my jeep stalls. Two bandits with machetes approach and order me out of the jeep. I shift the vehicle into first gear, knocking them to the side of the road. Later that night, a veteran reporter from the Los Angeles Times tells me, “Good move. They would have cut off your head.”