Profile in Courage

By Richard Stengel, Managing Editor

In journalism, courage takes many forms. There is the courage of speaking truth to power, of taking the road less traveled, of taking exception to the conventional wisdom. But sometimes, for certain kinds of reporters, the courage demanded is the old-fashioned kind: to risk your life by venturing into harm's way, to be scared but not deterred, to put other people's safety ahead of your own. Our senior correspondent Michael Weisskopf has displayed both kinds of courage--which you will see in this week's extraordinary cover.

Reporters are taught to keep themselves out of the story, but sometimes the story gives you no choice. Michael went to Baghdad in 2003 to work on our Person of the Year package about the American soldier, where he joined writer Romesh Ratnesar, correspondent Brian Bennett and photographer Jim Nachtwey. Jim Kelly, my predecessor as managing editor, had asked for volunteers for the job and was pleased and relieved that a pro like Michael had signed up for duty. When a grenade landed in the back of his humvee on a routine patrol in Baghdad and Michael grabbed it and tried to throw it away, he became a part of the story he had been covering--and a part of the lives of the men whose lives he saved. Michael lost his hand, and Jim suffered shrapnel wounds to his abdomen and legs. For Michael it had been meant to be a four-week job, but it turned out to be a lifetime assignment.

Michael showed instinctive courage in that instant in the back of the humvee, but I think you'll agree that the courage he showed in the weeks and months afterward is even more profound. The honesty that he displays in looking at his life is sometimes painful but always brave. He saw the same courage in the young soldiers he befriended in rehabilitation, and he writes movingly about them in his new book, Blood Brothers. Michael is the first to say his own suffering barely compares with that of the soldiers he came to know on Ward 57 of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As he notes in the story, he lost his hand, but the soldiers lost their youth, and much more.

Michael's injury had another effect: it spurred us to do more stories about the risks American soldiers were taking, about the kinds of injuries they were suffering and the new therapies the Army medical corps had developed to cope with them. Indeed, one of the differences about the Iraq conflict is that because of advances in battlefield medicine and body armor, a much greater ratio of the wounded are surviving in this war than in previous conflicts. Those are the soldiers we have written about again and again and the soldiers whom Blood Brothers is dedicated to.

Just as Michael has shrugged off the idea that he is a hero, he would also probably brush aside the notion that he was doing a service for the American people. Truth, the saying goes, is the first casualty of war, but that glib phrase demeans the skill and dedication not only of those who fight but also of those who report on the fighting. The role Michael played--and the role the Constitution assigned to the press--is to make sure you have the information you need to make decisions about the most momentous issues of the time. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and if that consent is not based on reliable information and on our best effort to ferret out the truth, then our democracy is on shaky ground. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, "it expects what never was and never will be."

Richard Stengel, Managing Editor