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Sept. 28 A Death In The Family

Tonight, many of the English-speaking reporters in Baghdad got together at the Washington Post house to say, basically, that we loved Mark Fineman. (Some newspapers are working out of hotels here, and others out of rented houses.)

If you have followed even a little the world's wars and disasters of the past 20 years, you probably have read Mark's stories either in his paper, the Los Angeles Times, or reprinted by many other U.S. papers. Last week, standing in line in the heat to get into the headquarters of the U.S. occupation authority here, Mark had a heart attack. He was 51.

Mark was a tall guy with a face deeply creased in the spots where smiling makes wrinkles. He was assiduously unpretentious. (The first time I ever saw him in a tie was in the photo that accompanies his obituary this week on the LA Times website. I suspect he borrowed it.) He was never far from a supply of whiskey or cigarettes.

We foreign correspondents rely heavily on our friends. Covering wars and the atrocities they produce can be a logistical nightmare and, at times, dangerous. In Sarajevo or Grozny or Baghdad, you want to be working beside someone who you know will be smart, not take stupid chances, and who will be cool and calm if you get in trouble.

When the days and nights get long, you also would rather be with someone who tells great stories.

This was Mark. From the time I first met Mark (in 1985, he and other colleagues coached me through my first posting as a foreign correspondent, in New Delhi), he was immediately, automatically generous. When an Afghan driver we were using during one or another battle for Kabul got his windshield smashed (by bullets, I thinkI can't immediately remember), Mark was the first one with a $100 bill out of his pocket to make sure the guy wouldn't suffer because he had agreed to drive a bunch of foreign hacks around in the middle of a war.

At the Washington Post house, our colleagues from the L.A. Times brought over a bunch of miniature whiskey bottles and handed them out. Mark's stock, and a final round of drinks on him for his friends.

I avoid cigarette smoke whenever I can, and I'm not much of a whiskey drinker. But this is a glass that I'll raise for a friend.