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with incredible determination, refusing to succumb to the diseases that spread like fire. More victims pour into the overwhelmed treatment centers every day. This is where we find Mahmoud and the other wounded Afghan children. We are here for three days, rushing to complete our filming in the camps and main refugee hospital before we fly home. In all, we have been gone less than a month, but it feels like a lifetime.

    Mahmoud in Refugee Hospital, Pakistan, 1986.

    Back in Boston, we air a series of reports entitled “Afghanistan, the Untold Story.” I knew this was powerful stuff, but I never dreamed the response would be so overwhelming. Viewers throughout New England rally to the cause. Schoolchildren launch class projects, draw pictures for the children in the camps, and mail them with bags of coins from their piggy banks. Viewers form groups to collect donations of food, clothing, and medical supplies, which Brockunier ships directly to the refugee hospital where we found Mahmoud. New England hospitals offer their facilities, time, and services. Airlines agree to fly in dozens of war-wounded children for world-class medical treatment. Our viewers open their homes to family members accompanying the Afghan children as they arrive in Boston for eye surgery, prosthetic devices, and burn treatments. Mahmoud is on the very first flight and will soon be cared for at the Shriner’s Burn Institute. I cover it all, with a new story almost every night. More than ever before, it makes me feel like what I do for a living is making a difference in the world.
    Over the next few months, I’m periodically sent on the road to other major stations of Group W, which owns WBZ, and I broadcast the reports from Philadelphia to San Francisco, appearing on talk shows and giving public speeches. One morning, shortly after I return to Boston, Stan calls me into his office to tell me our work has been given a Columbia-DuPont Award. I don’t even know what the award is until he explains it’s the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.
    This is big news for my career. That’s not lost on me. But as I say when I accept the award at a ceremony in New York, it’s hard to accept such a prestigious honor for documenting such tremendous suffering. As I sit in a suit and tie with Stan and Dennis for a sumptuous awards dinner complete with champagne, I feel humbled as well as a little embarrassed and out of place. I’d rather be back in the field, unwashed, hungry, and exhausted, pushing forward to bring another story of human suffering and injustice into the light of day.
    In fact, all I can think about is where to go next.

CHAPTER 2
    Beginnings
    I WAS BORN IN LOS ANGELES IN 1949. The city was already well on its way to becoming a madhouse. When I turned five, we moved to the nearby countryside. A bucolic place called West Covina. It was paradise: rolling hills, creeks, pastures, farms, orchards, and walnut groves perfect for all-day hide-and-seek and the building of secret forts. But soon the developers arrived, and the landscape was leveled, scraped, and sterilized for suburban housing tracts and strip malls. As I watched all my favorite haunts being destroyed, it felt like they were bulldozing my childhood into oblivion.
    Like so many other Americans of their era, my parents and their friends were prejudiced. From my earliest years I heard countless pejorative terms for people who weren’t white and conservative. Even as a little boy, something deep inside me recoiled every time they spoke like this. It was incredibly painful and made me feel like I had been born into a family to which I didn’t belong. Then came the sixties. The Civil Rights Movement. Vietnam War. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It felt like someone had hijacked my country. Like so many others of my generation, I was consumed with youthful outrage. I marched in protests. I got roughed up by