Posted on 08/03/2005 7:05:09 PM PDT by kddid
NEW YORK (AP) - An American freelance journalist who was killed while reporting in Iraq had traveled without security as he toured the country writing about ordinary people struggling with the U.S. military presence.
Steven Vincent, 49, had planned to return home by mid-August after completing reporting for a new book on the port city of Basra. He was abducted in that city on Tuesday and was found dead off a highway with gunshot wounds to his head.
Vincent left for Iraq in the fall of 2003 to investigate the terror of daily life there. He paid his own way, traveling without bodyguards and staying for two months at a time.
Vincent "liked being on the edge of intense experience," said friend Steven Mumford, a New Yorker who had been Vincent's roommate in Baghdad last year.
Vincent wrote a book last year titled "In The Red Zone: A Journey into the Soul of Iraq." Major bookstores took interest in the work, which was filled with searing portraits of ordinary Iraqis and their ambivalence about the American presence.
Last February, Vincent walked into the New York offices of Harper's magazine, his arms filled with religious posters from the walls of Baghdad and Basra. He had brought them back to prove how strong Shiite Islamic fundamentalism was just after the U.S.-organized elections.
"He looked like he was walking off the streets in Iraq," remembers Ben Austin, a Harper's editor. "He had a bandanna on. He was very intense and serious. He laid out these wild posters across our conference room, covering most of the floor. It was an editor's dream."
Vincent had apparently feared for his safety, telling Mumford last month in an e-mail that he "had a lot of information which, if published in a major venue, he could get killed for it," Mumford said.
Vincent was raised in California and had just graduated from Berkeley in 1980 with a degree in English "when, heeding the siren call of the big city - and my dream to become the next Jack Kerouac," he hitchhiked to New York, the journalist wrote about himself in a biography submitted to his publisher. After arriving in New York, he met his wife, Lisa Ramaci.
"I did just about every job under the sun: waiter, bartender, actor, stagehand on a soap opera, nighttime cab driver (the equivalent of my military experience), long-distance truck driver, editor of a local newspaper, political activist, office temp and administrator in an insurance firm," he said in the bio.
Vincent had exposed himself to more danger than most journalists, said Michael Rubin, an Iraq expert for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who separately traveled some of the same Iraqi routes as Vincent and reviewed his book.
Instead of sending assistants into dangerous territory to speak to people, Vincent was there himself, for months on end.
"Steven would learn far more from sitting in a tea house or going to art galleries than someone interviewing the prime minister," Rubin said.
Rubin believes Vincent was killed for his opinions: "He angered people by telling it like it is."
On the Net:
Vincent's Iraq blog: redzoneblog.com
Oh, I agree. His book was great, and his blog and op-ed pieces were equally strong.
Like the death of Michael Kelly in combat a few years ago, we've really lost a giant of journalism -- at a time when we have very few giants of journalism.
Another idiot lib bites the dust in the never ending quest to hate America first. Did he ever think to go to Iraq in 2000 to write about the terror and suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam's rule? I think not!
My father admired Jack Kerouac.
He lived near by me.
"All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land."
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac had his demons ...but the man was a Christian ( I know he flirted with the Buddah ) , and was pro-American when just about all the other Beats were not ( Ginsberg , Burroughs , Snyder ...) ...Despite all his failings , he is one of my heros as well ...When passing through Mass. back in 1991 , my family and I stopped off at Lowell to pay our respects at Edson Cemetary ...Such a humble grave , I walked by it several times before I saw the stone marker ( no headstone ) in the ground with his name on it ...
Better that this individual would have aspired to be another Ernie Pyle.....
" My father admired Jack Kerouac.
He lived near by me. "
Are you from Lowell or Northport , LI ?
Words of wisdom, from Steven Vincent, in an interview from FrontPageMag:
Words matter. Words convey moral clarity. Without moral clarity, we will not succeed in Iraq. That is why the terms the press uses to cover this conflict are so vital. For example, take the word “guerillas.” As you noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms “insurgents” or “guerillas” to describe the Sunni Triangle gunmen, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liberation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase “paramilitary death squads.” Same murderers, different designations. Yet of the two, “insurgents”—and especially “guerillas”—has a claim on our sympathies that “paramilitaries” lacks. This is not semantics: imagine if the media routinely called the Sunni Triangle gunmen “right wing paramilitary death squads.” Not only would the description be more accurate, but it would offer the American public a clear idea of the enemy in Iraq. And that, in turn, would bolster public attitudes toward the war.
Supporters of the conflict in Iraq bear much blame for allowing the terminology—and, by extension, the narrative—of events to slip from our grasp and into the hands of the anti-war camp. Words and ideas matter. Instead of saying that the Coalition “invaded” Iraq and “occupies” it today, we could more precisely claim that the allies liberated the country and are currently reconstructing it. More than cosmetic changes, these definitions reflect the nobility of our effort in Iraq, and steal rhetorical ammunition from the left.
The most despicable misuse of terminology, however, occurs when Leftists call the Saddamites and foreign jihadists “the resistance.” What an example of moral inversion! For the fact is, paramilitary death squads are attacking the Iraqi people. And those who oppose the killers--the Iraqi police and National Guardsmen, members of the Allawi government, people like Nour—they are the “resistance.” They are preventing Islamofascists from seizing Iraq, they are resisting evil men from turning the entire nation into a mass slaughterhouse like we saw in re-liberated Falluja. Anyone who cares about success in our struggle against Islamofascism—or upholds principles of moral clarity and lucid thought—should combat such Orwellian distortions of our language…
One of the good ones passes.
I'm very sorry to loose him.
But if you and Vincent have good feelings about Kerouac then I'm glad to take your word for it, and perhaps I'll learn more about him sone day.
Uh, he was hardly a Lib... he was a columnist for NRO...
It would be tough to hit that combination again. The guy is probably as gifted with verbosity, but the circumstances don't come around often.
He was a lib - just one of the good ones.
Michael Yon is this century's Ernie Pyle.
He wasn't there to hate America first. Quite the opposite.
A man of singular courage and integrity.
And his translator, "Layla", also shot, was a woman of the same qualities. Read his stories.
If Hollywood ever gets its act together, his story, with "Layla", would be an epic tragedy.
Caveboy speaks.
"Another idiot lib bites the dust in the never ending quest to hate America first."
I was just reading up on this at DU. Of course the majority opinion by the DUmmies over there is that he was taken out by the administration using their highly trained military assasins.
The reality is that terrorists took him out. Love him or hate him, he certainly did not desreve to die for his writing
Everything in this article screams liberal. I'm very suspicious of someone going into a dangerous situation on their own. If he went there looking for positive stories, he would welcome the protection of the military. I don't want to read stories about Iraqui ambivalence. This type of journalist is looking for that one big story to make his name on, probably looking for a terrorist to come out from under a rock and spout crap about the USA so he can be the one to come back and say Bush was wrong. What's with these independent reporters? Do they wear a badge that says, "Don't shoot, I'm your friend". They are so intelligent and yet so stupid. I'm not a harsh person, but I've had it with stories like this. My sympathy has long gone.
It sounds like you're not familiar with the work of Stephen Vincent.
There are a lot of bad journalists out there, and lots more mediocre ones. Vincent was one of the very rare gems -- the best of the best -- and I'm really going to miss his work for a number of reasons.
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