It’s not easy competing against John Burns, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his overseas reporting. I learned this the hard way, when he was based in Sarajevo for The New York Times in the early 1990s and I was working there for The Washington Post. We nearly got into a fistfight, at a crummy hotel in the Bosnian Serb capital of Pale, over who would sleep on a scarce bed and who would sleep on the unclean floor. Amid the combat among Serbs, Croats and Muslims, it would have been particularly surreal for the representatives of America’s two most influential newspapers to engage in their own brawl—or, in the way that everything was twisted in Bosnia at the time, it might have been appropriate.
Nearly a decade later, all was forgotten. Last year I worked in Pakistan and Afghanistan for The New York Times Magazine, alongside Burns, who was the focal point of the Times’ coverage of the Afghan war. He could not have been more considerate or engaging. I mention this because Burns was interviewed at length on Fresh Air today. If you want to know what it was like to be in tumultuous Iraq in recent weeks—when Saddam Hussein won 100 percent of the vote in a referendum to extend his rule, then released all prisoners from his jails, which prompted a regime-shaking protest by relatives of prisoners who had disappeared—you should listen to Burns, who knows his stuff better than anyone else. One of a kind.
