In this segment, veteran BBC journalist Gavin Hewitt and his crew come close to getting killed in a Russian air strike outside of Gori, in Georgia. (Gori was the major regrouping point for the Georgian military when they were pushed out of South Ossetia).
You see the plane, an Su-25 attack jet, diving to hit some targets a couple of klicks away from the cameraman. Then the Sukhoi pulls up and over, seems to notice the journalists (the pilot probably just saw sunlight reflecting from their vehicles or maybe from the camera lens), and noses in towards the camera. Everyone, sensibly, runs for their lives.
The Sukhoi pickles off a couple of unguided rockets which land on the road just about where the cameraman had been standing a few seconds earlier. Blind luck that the jet missed, and blind luck that the pilot hadn’t decided to spray a full salvo of rockets to saturate the area, rather than just two or three.
In the next scene the journalists are driving frantically away in their car, panting with adrenalin from their narrow escape, and also fear - for they must also know that a moving vehicle is the easiest target to detect and kill from the air.
So someone please tell me why it is that when I see this footage, I regret, for the first time in a long time, having chosen a safe job in a big multinational, over a job that involves running for my life and panting in fear?
And damn it, but the Georgian separatist regions were the model I used for a major plotline of this book I've been trying to write for the last five years. It's not rational or even the least bit smart, but at the moment I really wonder what the fuck I'm doing sitting here in a hotel room in Portland, and why I'm not over there watching it all, recording it as it happens, and telling this story.
Posted by case at August 11, 2008 11:03 PM