Mark Warren of Esquire considers C.J. Chivers the best war reporter in a generation:
The forces of Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi had been firing high-explosive ordnance into the city of Misurata for weeks — they’d been shooting tank rounds and they’d been firing rockets. Barrage after barrage. And lots of mortars. And among the 120mm mortars they had been firing were Spanish-made rounds that were a clustering munition that had never been seen in combat before. This was a serious problem, because we now know that the Spaniards had sold the mortars to the Qaddafi government just as Spain was preparing to join the international convention that banned them.
We know this because of the work of C.?J. Chivers of The New York Times, also a frequent contributor to Esquire, whose expertise in ballistics and battlefield tactics — and nearly unprecedented experience reporting from war zones — has made him the most important war correspondent of his time. Chivers suspected that Qaddafi was using the Spanish mortars, and it was when he went to prove it that a NATO jet on a bombing run tried to kill him.
There’s much more, including these nuggets:
Chivers is disciplined about when and why he won’t wear his gear. Besides his desire to live, he also feels ethically bound to protect himself because being wounded meant that, as he says, a doctor or a bunch of nurses and an ambulance driver were all helping you instead of helping someone else. It is a rule when you’re covering a war zone, you try to not go into the casualty stream and further clog it up.
Another rule is that if you’re with someone who wants to leave, then you leave. If you’re with another journalist and you’re getting shot at, and he feels in his gut that it’s time to get out of there, you go.