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It was a lazy Sunday morning in January, and I was laboring leisurely through the New York Times crossword at a Georgetown café when my youngest daughter tracked me down and breathlessly delivered the dreadful news. My friend Bob Woodruff — the kid brother I’d never had — had been wounded in Iraq.

“How bad?”

“I don’t know,” she said, then paused. “Pretty bad, I think.”

I left the papers on the table, paid for the coffee and, at the door, as we hurriedly left the restaurant, she added a postscript: “Oh, yeah, Dad, his cameraman, too.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Somehow, even without a name, I knew.

Always second billing, these folks with the cameras on their shoulders. Clearly, what they do is at the heart and soul of television news. Yet in nearly thirty years in the business, working alongside some of the most gifted cameramen and women in the world, I came to understand how rarely they’re appreciated by the masters of the network universe, how consistently undervalued their skills, their courage, and their willingness to put themselves at risk to get the pictures.

Yet without them and without the images they provide, it is — as the late Reuven Frank so aptly put it — only radio.

I’d first met Bob Woodruff when we were both posted to ABC’s London bureau, where he spent several years honing his skills as a reporter in some of the most dangerous and unpleasant places in the world. Our families grew close, and Bob and I became pals. After he returned to the states, as ABC continued its relentless reduction of its foreign staff, Bob found himself once again being parachuted into all sorts of overseas wars and natural disasters. It was a tough life for him, for his wife, and their four young children — but eventually, it had paid off. Last December, Woodruff was named co-anchor (along with Elizabeth Vargas) of ABC’s World News Tonight. Through his diligence and his willingness to take on the difficult assignments, he had become a prominent name on the network’s marquee, an integral component in its plans for the post-Peter Jennings future.

I don’t much like the description, but Woodruff had become a genuine star, and as such, on that Sunday in January, he was not just another reporter on assignment in Iraq. He was ABC’s franchise, which meant he would be assigned the very best cameraman the network could provide.

That would be Doug. I knew it before I was told.

Doug Vogt is a modest, soft-spoken Canadian with a flat Alberta accent and the chutzpah of a jewel thief. I’d worked with him too many times to count, in dangerous and noisy places from Sarajevo to the Gaza Strip, from Kosovo and Albania to East Africa and the West Bank — and over all the years and all the miles, he had become not only a treasured friend, but someone I could rely on no matter what.

We were together in Nablus, a city in the West Bank, a few years back, walking with some young Palestinians out toward the edge of town. Abruptly, as we headed past an olive grove beside a small stone shed, Israel Defense Forces snipers on a nearby hill opened fire on us. A couple of the kids were hit (one later died), and both Doug and I felt several rounds whiz past our ears. I had no idea then — or now — whether the Israelis were targeting us because they thought Doug’s camera was a weapon or whether they were just firing at anything that moved. I took cover in the shed, but when I peered cautiously around the doorway I saw that Doug was on his stomach, inching his way toward the corner for a clear shot of the snipers and of several more wounded Palestinians out in front of the olive grove. It was a long afternoon, but there he stayed — and in our story that night, there was no need to hedge my description of who was doing the shooting. With his lens, Doug had unmistakably identified them.

I thought about that day after my daughter told me the news about Bob and Doug. Having been in Iraq for both gulf wars, I knew the drill. The military would provide both men with the best treatment available there, then fly them to an American hospital at Landstuhl. I booked a flight to Germany, though I had no idea what I would do or could do there, or how I might be of some help to either man or to their families. But at that moment, caught in blind anxiety, it seemed necessary to be near them.

They come in all shapes and sizes, these cameramen and women.

For example, the midwesterner shooting a 1980 campaign interview with George H.W. Bush, then a presidential candidate, was so obese, he had trouble breathing. His labored wheezing was so clearly audible on the tape that neither my questions nor Bush’s answers could be used in the story.

On the other hand, Tony Hirashiki, a talented and enthusiastic Okinawan who first picked up a camera in Vietnam, is a diminutive fellow who merrily carries a ladder with him on every assignment, including combat. A ladder is not a piece of equipment ever needed by Fletcher Johnson. He’s a big guy — six-foot-six — with hands the size of catchers’ mitts. Once, in 1994, toward the end of a long and miserable day in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, after wading through thousands of dead and dying Rwandans who’d fled their country, Fletcher suddenly stowed his camera gear and told the rest of us to stop what we were doing and help him give assistance to four little boys who seemed to be on their last legs. It was the right thing to do, of course, but we needed reminding by someone like Fletcher, who has never allowed his work to interfere with his decency.

They come in all creeds and colors, these cameramen and women, as well as all levels of proficiency and competence. They usually have made judgments on which of the correspondents they like personally and respect professionally and those they don’t, and they can reward and punish accordingly with their best effort or perhaps just a little something less. It’s true. They know it and I know it.

There are liberals and conservatives among them; intellectuals, too, as well as plodders and diligent yeomen — and yet without exception, despite their distinct idiosyncrasies, what cameramen and women all have in common is that they know for an undisputed fact that whether anyone says so or not, they are not merely important, they are absolutely essential, and because they clearly understand that, there is about every single one I’ve ever known a muscular sense of self, of dignity and pride in themselves and their work. Individually, they’re very much like the seasoned platoon sergeant who knows that although the lieutenant is ostensibly in charge, he is indispensable. It is his skill and his experience, not the lieutenant’s, that will see the unit through the tough times.

They’re also among the most independent cusses on earth. Vinnie Gaito, a dapper fellow with a penchant for ascots and pranks, not to mention dirty jokes, took me aside soon after I’d joined ABC News and immediately after I’d introduced him as my cameraman and gently explained that while he was a cameraman, he was not mine. “I know you don’t mean anything demeaning, and personally I don’t mind it so much,” he said, “but others will.” It was a valuable lesson.

Jane Hartney, the daughter of a big Irish Catholic family in upstate New York, taught me another. Once, in Bosnia, just outside Gradačac, the two of us were ankle-deep in mud in a front-line trench, literally within shouting (and shooting) distance of Serbs whose weapons were pointed in our direction. We were taping what’s known in the business as an on-camera, that moment in the story when the correspondent appears on the screen, continuing the narration face to face with the viewer. It had been a relatively quiet morning with only a bit of small-arms fire now and then. Suddenly, in the middle of my spiel, all hell broke loose: heavy machine guns, mortars, artillery, all laid on in the direction and vicinity of the Bosnian soldiers with whom we were sharing the long trench. It frightened me, jolted me, left me utterly speechless. Yet, quite calmly, in between explosions, without taking cover or her eye from the viewfinder, Hartney said, “Take two.” Inspired or humbled by her equanimity, not to mention the urge to get out of there in a hurry, I managed the second effort just fine, or maybe it was the third. That evening, screening the videotape she had shot that day, I noticed that when the shelling had begun and all through its duration, Jane’s perfectly focused camera had wavered not one millimeter. Not a shudder, not the tiniest reaction.

They’re not all as easy to get along with as Jane is. Take my old colleague, Fabrice Moussus, a Frenchman born in Morocco, whose richly abundant talents have made him a preeminent member of the profession, but whose monumental ego, which no doubt befits an artist of his caliber, can sometimes make him a pain in the ass. Fortunately, such moments pass quickly, and he is redeemed not only by the sunnier side of his personality — his wry wit and his bonhomie — but by his pictures, which include those memorable and haunting images of Anwar Sadat’s assassination during a military parade outside Cairo in 1981. When the firing began, Fabrice moved immediately toward the reviewing stand where the assassins, with automatic weapons, were finishing off the Egyptian president. He recorded five uninterrupted minutes of gruesome but historic pictures that required no editing for broadcast. It was absolutely remarkable work, though not at all unusual for Fabrice. “I assumed they weren’t shooting at me,” he cockily explained.

Sometimes, when their instincts outweigh their judgment, it’s hard to keep good cameramen and women from taking risks. One eerily quiet night in the Bosnian city of Tuzla, where Alex Bruckner and I were assigned during the 1993 siege of nearby Srebrenica, Serb artillery on a nearby mountainside suddenly began pounding the downtown area, targeting a Bosnian army headquarters next door to our hotel. While the shells were screaming in and exploding just outside, and while the rest of us hurriedly donned our flak vests and cowered in the corridors, Bruckner — a big, rugged lumberjack of an Austrian — went missing. I searched for him rather frantically and finally found him leaning out a fourth-floor window, his camera on his shoulder.

“Get the hell out of there,” I yelled at him from the doorway.

“Not yet,” he growled, turning his lens in the other direction. “Great boom-boom. Terrific pictures. Wait’ll you see them!”

He was right, of course. And ten years later, when Ted Koppel rode with the Third Infantry Division, broadcasting nightly on its dangerous race from Kuwait north to Baghdad, the ABC cameraman he chose to accompany him was Alex Bruckner. Great boom-boom. Terrific pictures.

There is in many of them, including Bruckner, a certain joie de vivre about the work, as though a risky assignment, like Bosnia or Iraq, were nothing more challenging than a walk in the Bois de Boulogne. Patrick Etcheverry — a Basque who, like Moussus, lives in France — maintains the demeanor of a bon vivant no matter what the situation. One afternoon as we took a break from the action inside Iraq, on a road just outside the city of Arbil, an A-6 Intruder, an American attack plane, came screaming toward us from the south, no more than fifty or sixty feet above the highway. Patrick, camera instantly on his shoulder, was up and running, filming its approach. We shouted at him to put it down, to step away from it, but to no avail. As the plane thundered over us, the exhaust from its roaring engines creating a sandstorm, Patrick turned his lens to follow and record its rapid departure. Afterward, reminded of how easily the camera could be mistaken for a weapon, he smiled with his characteristically superior air and said in his jaunty Inspector Clouseau accent: Of course, I am well aware of zat, but come now, Jeem. Do you not theenk a great American pilot knows zee difference between zee Ikegami [his camera] and zee Stinger?

Yet it isn’t merely the quirks of the cameramen’s personalities that are memorable in the end, but the pictures they provide. The images are the lasting stuff of their legacy.

In Doug Vogt’s case, ironically, it isn’t a series of action images that remains in my mind as his quintessential shot, but rather a single, frozen frame of video he recorded when we were together during NATO’s bombing of the Serbs in Kosovo. All through one somber day we watched the planes flying north and the river of Muslim refugees flowing south into Albania: tractors and wagons piled high with seven or eight families and the stuff they’d brought with them, elderly couples limping across the no-man’s-land to the immigration kiosks, an ancient woman muttering insanely to herself as she was pushed along in an old wheelbarrow. As usual, I was watching what Doug was shooting and taking brief notes for the story that night — but I didn’t see him focus on a lovely little girl standing all alone on a rise, looking back over into Kosovo, probably for a glimpse of her missing family. When I saw the shot roll past that evening as we screened our tape, I was in awe of its simple, classic composition, its stark beauty, the obvious pain and the clear desperation in the little girl’s eyes. She did not move and Doug did nothing with his camera other than hold it steady on her. As a result, it much resembled a still photograph, and yet it was a moving portrait that captured the unvarnished reality of the day.

The same journalistic eye was operating on a road through a scabrous city just north of Baghdad in January as he perched on the edge of the rear hatch of an Iraqi armored personnel carrier filming the dun-colored landscape rolling past. Woodruff was standing in an adjacent hatch. Both were wearing Kevlar vests and helmets, but neither was wearing ballistic glasses. The IED was detonated in the middle of the road, just next to the personnel carrier, which was leading a convoy of several American Humvees and a second personnel carrier. It was an ambush. The insurgents responsible for the blast opened fire with small arms from three directions.

This is what Doug told me he recalls:

I was blown flat on my back on the APC with my knees still inside. I knew there was a hell of a lot of firing back and forth and I knew my camera was gone and I knew I should be trying to get down, inside the vehicle but I couldn’t move. I just couldn’t move. Not my hands, not my legs, not my arms, not my fingers, not my head. Nothing. Nothing was working.

Then someone [Vinnie Malhotra, the producer] was pulling me by my boots down through the hatch and into the APC. Bob was already inside, yelling, screaming, pulling at his gear. I could see he was hurt. He was bleeding from his face and I could feel my own blood wet on my own forehead, but I still couldn’t move anything for, Jeez, I don’t know how long. I was conscious and I could hear the gunfire outside the APC, but I was inside and I was gradually moving again. My arms and hands first, I think. I just don’t know. I had no idea whether I was hurt bad or not.

The American troops quickly suppressed the insurgents’ gunfire and brought up a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Doug and Bob were lifted out of the Iraqi APC hatch and carefully lowered to the ground. With some assistance, Doug walked to the Bradley (Woodruff was carried), which immediately took them to a helicopter. They were flown first to the Green Zone in Baghdad, where they received initial treatment from medics. Then, a chopper took them on to Balad, a fully equipped field hospital north of the city, far beyond the point of their ambush.

As surgeons began working on them, the Iraqi dusk turned to night — and by then, both their wives had been notified by the network that their husbands had been wounded. Vivianne Vogt would come from their home in Aix-en-Provence to the American hospital in Germany, while Lee Woodruff would be flown from Florida (she and her children were at Disney World that weekend). That afternoon, I managed to reach Lee as she was packing. “Don’t come to Germany,” she said. “Just stand by in Washington because that’s where they’ll be eventually — and I’ll need you there more than in Europe.” And so that was the decision.

A couple of days later, at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, I saw them both. Bob was in the intensive care unit, heavily sedated. He was in such bad shape I lost all hope for his recovery. Yet a few weeks later he was walking and talking, and is now undergoing rehabilitation. Somehow, despite their proximity to each other when the blast occurred, Doug had miraculously avoided the level of injuries sustained by Bob. He’d been flown from Iraq to Germany to Washington without any clothes — they’d been cut away and were later returned to him — and I found him sitting up in bed in an orange Marine Corps T-shirt. Vivianne prepared tea. We swapped reminiscences, talked about our children. It almost seemed as though we were just taking a break together as we had so often in so many places in the world — except for the long row of stitches and staples curving across his slightly balding skull. It had been a narrow escape for Doug. It had also, perhaps, been an inevitable injury. After all, in the previous year, he had been in Iraq more than 150 days. I asked him why. “It’s what I do,” he said.

Doug only deepened my admiration for these men and women who are as much journalists as anyone with a notepad or a microphone and who, with the cameras on their shoulders — leading the way, walking point, recording the images without which there is no television news — are often at risk.

To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.

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