Is it better to burn out or to fade away? So the question goes. Is there another choice?

I recently attended a reading celebrating the life of Michael Kelly, the award-winning reporter, war correspondent, columnist, and editor killed in Iraq last spring. Kelly’s colleagues and friends — William Langewiesche, Samantha Power, P.J. O’Rourke, Tom Ashbrook, and Mark Bowden — came together in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to commemorate his life and a new compilation of his writings, Things Worth Fighting For.  

The Michael Kelly described by the readers jumped to life in the imagination: dedicated reporter motivated by boundless curiosity; sidesplitting raconteur; devoted husband, father, and friend; a man who appeared, miraculously, to share everyone’s interests. The readers, momentarily lost in the memories they related, seemed bemused by Kelly’s death, by the death of anyone so full of life and liveliness, a flame whose after-image quivers on the inside of one’s eyelids long after it has been reduced to smoke. Even I, who knew of him but never met him, half expected the wide white doors of the church to swing open and an enhaloed figure to stride up to the podium and deliver one last war story.

They believed that he had died, of course, these diverse men and woman, they accepted it — Kelly would become no Elvis to be glimpsed in the flesh, sliding through parted glass doors, only to dissolve into sunlight. But true reporters’ faith in the power of the written word can be eclipsed only by their need to witness, to see the scene played out before their own eyes. And death, for the reporter, is the ultimate velvet rope beyond which they cannot pass, at least not to return with the scoop.

Kelly’s death, like that of so many others who meet at the crossroads of war, was indiscriminate, even more so because he came to report and not to fight. The distinction, however, between soldier and journalist must have dimmed over time — if it were ever universally acknowledged in the first place. Even the title of Kelly’s book, Things Worth Fighting For, casts into shadow the once illuminated figure of the journalist: citizens of the world empowered by their profession to step outside the borders of their own identities, pushing through the curtains of nationality, class, and gender to hear and tell the stories of all whom they encountered, to look at the world through God’s eyes.  

But this dream did not need Michael Kelly’s death to awaken. This dream had lain awake sleepless ever since the Pakistani police confirmed the murder and dismemberment of The Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl on February 21, 2002. Struggling to uncover the story behind “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and the network of militant extremists out of which he emerged, Pearl caught the attention of Omar Saeed Sheik, a terrorist with a predilection for abductions. His killers would later claim that they believed Pearl to have been a spy for the CIA or Indian intelligence. Sheik and his helpers stalked Pearl, lured him, trapped him, then beheaded him on-camera — a journalist, or anyone, who seeks to “witness” Pearl’s death need only turn to Google to see his filmed execution.

The tragedy of Pearl’s death needs little explanation. When he died, he was only 38 years old and his first child had not yet been born. His one opportunity to say good-bye to his wife, family, and friends came on a home video that no mother would ever want to watch. But the meaning of Pearl’s death reaches beyond the suffering of those who knew and loved him to the reporters who walk in his footsteps and the readers who depend on them to seek out and bring back stories from the other side — everyone, in other words.

But what if there is no other side? Or what if it is unreachable, unrecordable, unimaginable? Coverage of ongoing fighting in Afghanistan has slid from the front page to the back, if it appears at all, and coverage of the Iraqi war too often resembles a skewed picture snapped by a reporter peering over the shoulder of a Marine. It seems unnecessary to even mention those events that receive little or no coverage in American media or whose coverage fails to illuminate the event in a way that can be grasped, in context, by readers — genocide in Sudan, civil war in Algeria, unrest in Haiti.

The title of Michael Kelly’s first book may be even more telling than that of the second: Martyr’s Day. Is that what journalists will have to be willing to become? Christ figures who, in order to bear witness to the sufferers, must join their ranks? Pedestrians run over at tricky intersections, their legacy a long-requested stop sign or traffic light? I can see it now, The Martyr’s Handbook: “Carry a tape recorder with you wherever you go. You never know when you’ll have a chance to record those last words and even a car crash may provide some usable ambient sound for radio.” But no. Kelly’s and Pearl’s true legacies leave little room for cynicism. The ominous implications of their deaths have not extinguished the enduring force of their lives. They will neither burn out nor fade away. We need them too much.

Sierra Prasada Millman