Buying the Night Flight (57 page)

During that same fall of 1995, we had a memorable gathering -- a "War Correspondents' Day," which started with a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery, where several years ago, and with military support, of course, we had erected a little monument to the war correspondent. With what joy we had greeted our old friends, our old "companions of the road" who are said by the great travelers to often become even more dear than family, because you share the road, and thus the risks. I looked out at all those bright, weathered faces, and I kept wondering: "Why did we all love each other so much? What on earth moved us all to live such lives?" Of course, being foreign correspondents, we ended this day of memories with a lot of eating, drinking, hugging and utterly outrageously inflated storytelling.

When I spoke that morning in honor of our colleagues who had died in our odd service, I noted that "Once again, now on the peripheries of Europe, diplomats are preening, dictators are falsifying, and men of power are ignoring the victims. And once again, it is only the correspondents on the ground -- those lone sentinels, those courageous souls -- who are bringing us the little, and sometimes the big, truths of politics and warfare, of ambition and human pride...."

Then
The New York Times'
Vietnam era's David Halberstam, who moderated the memorial service, introduced me, saying that "In a world where, sadly, journalistic fame has less and less to do with journalistic accomplishment, she remains a beacon of the real thing, a reporter's reporter, intelligent, tough-minded, brave, admired by the toughest jury of all: her peers."

Perhaps I was so deeply touched by David's unexpected words because, at least momentarily, it confirmed some of my decisions. You see, like so many women -- and men as well -- I did not know an awful lot of things in my life, and I did not experience many important ones. I never got married, never had children, never knew those special gifts of the supposedly "normal" life. I missed some stories and failed to understand others until too late. Because of the possibilities of American journalism and its great professional family, however, I was privileged to have nearly unlimited access to the centers of human talent and of the human spirit. I knew the best men in the world, and many of them even loved me as much as I loved them. My family blessed me with a real capacity to take a tremendous joy in living; and I had a small gift of writing that, combined with an insane curiosity and a Teutonic stubbornness, allowed me to do exactly what I wanted to do, and with very little wasted time.

Above all, I knew what I loved most and I followed it, and so, in the end, I had that special blessing of the wise St. Augustine, who told us poor mortals that we would only begin to know happiness through "knowing the order of the loves."

I knew what I had to do first --- and that, I did.

Georgie Anne Geyer was the first woman foreign correspondent in our times. She broke all the rules, as a young twenty-seven-year-old from the south side of Chicago, by going to Latin America for the old
Chicago Daily News
. Along the way, she interviewed just about every president, revolutionary and rascal, learned five languages and explored myriad cultures. Now, as a syndicated columnist for more than twenty-five years, she writes three columns a week for more than 120 newspapers in the United States and Latin America. She is author of seven books, including
Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro, Waiting for Winter to End: An Extraordinary Journey Through Soviet Central Asia
, and
Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship
. She is a regular panelist on PBS's
Washington Week in Review
and other programs.

Geyer's many awards include the Maria Moors Cabot Award and the Overseas Press Club Award. She was one of the questioners in the 1994 presidential debates. She has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress and the Chatauqua Institution, and has served as announcer at the annual Gridiron Show in 1994. Her life was the subject of an unauthorized television series, Hearts Afire, in 1993, and her Castro biography has been made into a miniseries by Showtime and Hallmark Entertainment, Inc. She insists, however, that her greatest honor was being an answer in a
New York Times
crossword puzzle. On her gravestone she wants the words: "My God, it was fun!"