MEMOIR
This foreign correspondent’s last war isn’t on a distant battlefield, but fighting for his life at home
NEAR MISS
Thai soldiers threatened to execute a group of journalists including Nordland (left, in 1979 at a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border) when they were covering the fall of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla fighters, pictured here.
Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Rod Nordland has covered global conflicts for almost five decades for the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, NEWSWEEK and THE NEW YORK TIMES. Reporting on wars and government upheavals in over 150 countries from Nicaragua to Cambodia, Bosnia and Afghanistan, he confronted death on a regular basis. Yet his diagnosis of glioblastoma multiforme grade 4 in 2019 led him to confront another, much more personal battle. Glioblastoma, with about 12,000 newly diagnosed cases in the United States each year, is one of the most aggressive forms of brain tumors. It has a five-year survival rate of only about 6 percent, and it’s what killed President Joe Biden’s son Beau and Senator John McCain. In the midst of it all, Nordland did what he does best—write. Below is an excerpt from his book, waiting FOR THE MONSOON—a personal story of fighting cancer and of his experiences as a reporter seen through the lens of his own mortality.
ONE OF THE DANGERS OF BEING A FOREIGN correspondent, or perhaps just an unintended consequence, is becoming an old bore, mired in past wars and spewing vivid but dated anecdotes. I don’t want to be that person, and this book is about the very different combat zone in which I now find myself—it’s not just about the previous ones. But as I look back, as I ponder mortality and the certainty that I now have more yesterdays than tomorrows, I can’t help but reflect on some of my extraordinary near misses when I was young, physically strong and confident of my invulnerability.
One of those events took place when I was in Thailand for the Philadelphia Inquirer. One night, a small group of colleagues and I sat playing gin rummy as we waited to be executed the next morning. We had torn pages from our notebooks and made a crude deck of cards, but the soldiers who were guarding us indignantly confiscated them, pronouncing card games illegal.
“Oh, but extrajudicial killings are OK, is that it?” I asked, in my bad but serviceable Thai.
“Hubpak,” one of the soldiers said—which, in rough translation, means “Shut the f *** up.”
This was in 1980, when the army from Vietnam had invaded Cambodia and was destroying the Hun Sen and Khmer Rouge regime. The enormous Khao-i-Dang refugee camp had been hastily created in Thailand for Cambodians fleeing after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Hundreds of thousands gathered there. A group of Thai
