Phil Caputo - Out On A Ledge

 

I'm going to take you back in time to Chicago, 1969. It was a young reporter's paradise. Four Daily Newspapers were running day and night, covering a big, rough, corrupt city that pretty much made New Jersey look like Switzerland. [audience laughter] Well, there I was in the city room of the Chicago Tribune, a young reporter. There was enough cigarette smoke back in those days to give you instant lung cancer. Phones jangling, typewriters clattering, deskmen yelling, "Boy, copy!" We didn't have any copy girls back then. And I loved it and I wanted to prove that I could run with the big dogs. One night I heard Don Agrella, the night city editor, yell, "Caputo, hat and coat."

 

Now, Agrella was an old-timer who went back to the days when reporters wore hats, [audience chuckles] when all men wore hats, and hat and coat meant that I was getting an assignment. About 20 minutes later, I found myself on the 18th floor of the Palmer House, where two young Japanese women had been found murdered in their room. They were with a delegation of Japanese students who were visiting Chicago. And the Palmer House was kind of the Waldorf of the city, the poshest hotel in town. In other words, it was a reporter's red meat. It was a sensational story and a big embarrassment for Mayor Richard J. Daley. 

 

A whole crowd of newsmen and photographers filled the hall at the 18th-floor elevators. There were four cops who looked like the starting line for the Chicago Bears, blocking the corridor that led to the victim's room, and a police spokesman who was throwing up an informational stone wall to match the meat and muscle behind him. So, I called the night city editor, Agrella, and I said, "I can't get anything. Nobody can." And he says, "You got to get something. Get something that the competition doesn't have." I said, "What?" He said, "Get a description of the room, of the crime scene." I said, "How? Guy isn't talking." He said, "The Palmer House has fire escapes, and fire escapes have catwalks."

 

Now, I am utterly terrified of heights, [audience chuckles] but my eagerness to run with the big dogs overcame my fear, and I went up a short flight of stairs to the fire-escape door, went out it, and pretty soon found myself sidling along this catwalk, 200 feet above the pavement, peeking into one room after another, like some high-altitude pervert. [audience laughter] Well, eventually, I came to the right room and the drapes were open and I saw everything-- the bodies, the blood, the evidence techs dusting for fingerprints, taking pictures. I made note of every relevant and irrelevant detail that I could, even the pattern of the wallpaper. And then, I sidled on back, went through the fire-escape door, ran down those stairs, ran to the phones, no cell phones back then, and I called rewrite.

 

 While I was talking to rewrite, I saw this 6’3” reporter from the Chicago Daily News, who was one of our competitors, leaning toward me, listening in. I gave him a butt-out look, but he'd heard enough to figure out what I'd done. While I was finishing up with rewrite, I saw him go through the fire-escape door. And I said, “Ugh.” Anyway, I finished up with rewrite. I remembered one thing. There was one rule that prevailed in Chicago journalism, and it was, do whatever you have to do to get the story before anybody else. If you've got to play a few dirty tricks, do it. 

 

Well, that fire-escape door was pretty much like these doors over here. It had a big brass handle that went right across it like that. And to lock the door, you pull that handle up. And to unlock it, you push it down. So, I pulled it up. About five minutes later, I heard this frantic banging at the door. I heard the guy from the Daily News screaming, "Let me in. Let me in." But I just stood there, because I knew that he had about two minutes left before his deadline passed. I waited till that deadline went by, and then I flipped the lock open, and I ran and disappeared into the crowd of newsmen. [audience chuckles] 

 

When I took a look over as he was at the phones calling, I could see by the expression on his face that he'd missed the deadline. He spotted me there in the crowd, and he came over to me, towering way over me, and he said, "You little bastard." I looked at him and I pretended not to know why he was questioning the legitimacy of my birth. [audience laughter] I went back to the city room, and I accepted from Don Agrella, a big attaboy. All right, so, I proved I could run with the big dogs. About three years later, I was made a foreign correspondent. And for the next three years, I covered wars all over the world. That's mostly what I did. I covered wars in the Middle East and on Cyprus, in Africa, and back in Vietnam, where about seven or eight years before, I had served a tour of duty with the Marine Corps.

 

And then, in 1975, I found myself in Beirut, Lebanon, covering the Lebanese civil war, which of all those conflicts was the worst one I had ever seen. An absolutely pitiless, savage conflict that pitted Muslims against Christians and many factions of both fighting each other and fighting among each other. I honestly think that Baghdad or Kabul today are not as brutal or as dangerous, as unpredictable as Beirut was back then. I didn't know it then, but something had happened to me. It might have started back when I was in the Marines in Vietnam, but covering all of that pointless carnage all over the world had done something to me.

 

It had cloaked my heart in an emotional flak jacket, so I could look at the most tragic, the most horrible sights, and not really feel much of anything except a contempt for human folly and, yes, sometimes even contempt for victims. I remember once during that Lebanese civil war that 13 Muslim women, during a lull in the fighting, came out of their houses, lined up in front of a bakery to buy bread for their families. A Christian spotter saw them and fired a mortar shell right into the street where they were lined up and killed all 13 of them. All I could think of was how dumb of them to bunch up like that. 

 

Well, one day the telex in my office clattered. And the message from the foreign desk said, "The Scoop magazine"-- Fictitious name, obviously. "Scoop magazine has exclusive interview with PLO commander Abu Rashid. Where are yours?" Where are mine? I thought, “The foreign editor is crazy?” Of all the dangerous places you could go in Beirut in those days, the most dangerous were the neighborhoods and the refugee camps that were controlled by the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Those of you old enough to remember will remember those guys in the checkered keffiyehs with the AK-47s. Well, to go into one of those places would have been a suicide mission. I couldn't figure out how Scoop magazine had done it. 

 

Now, we correspondents, in contrast to that sort of hyper-competitiveness back in Chicago, used to cooperate with each other. We watched out for each other. And Scoop's two correspondents, and I'm going to call them Larry and Rick, were good friends of mine. So, I went over to their offices and I told them about the telex I'd gotten. And I said, "Can you guys help me get an interview with this Abu Rashid?" And they both laughed. And then, Rick sat back in his chair, and he looked at me, and he said, "Go ahead." I looked at him, baffled. And then, Larry said, "Rick is Abu Rashid." [audience laughter] 

 

So, it turned out that Rick and Larry had been getting messages from their foreign editor, who I guess was as clueless as mine about what was going on over there, that they had to get an interview with a PLO commander. They had replied, also by telex-- Telexes were the tweeting of their day. [audience laughter] They replied that why don't you ask us to swallow some cyanide? But the editor insisted. And so, to avoid dying for a story, they invented Abu Rashid. Well, as I said before, there were a lot of things that you were supposed to do to go get a story, anything to get a story, but there was one thing you were never supposed to do, and I did it. I interviewed Rick. [audience laughter]

 

 

Aka Abu Rashid. I'll say in my own defense, a lot of other correspondents did the same thing [audience laughter] in the ensuing days. The fabulous Mr. Rashid became the most quoted PLO commander [audience laughter] in the entire Middle East. Well, actually, I'm glad you're laughing at that, because [chuckles] as far as journalistic ethics go, it was pretty shocking. You weren't supposed to do a thing like that. And I have to say that I felt pretty much ashamed of myself.

 

So, four months passed and I got another telex. And this one said that the LA Times had Scooped me this time. Their correspondent had filed a story that the Muslims, for the first time during the war, had actually invaded a Christian neighborhood, were actually trying to seize territory from the Christian factions. I was told that I had to go out. And if the story was true, I was to match it. And if the story was not true, I was to knock it down. Well, I was still feeling pretty guilty, kind of ashamed about what I'd done four months before. So, I said, "Okay, I'll play it straight this time." I went out into the streets.

 

And pretty soon, I fell into the unfriendly arms of a band of Muslim militiamen, about 8 or 10 of them, all armed with AK-47s. They grabbed me and they said, "Who are you? What are you doing here?" And I replied in Arabic, “Sahafi Amerikay,” which means I was an American press, American correspondent. And one of them said, "Let's see your press credentials." I showed him this laminated card that the Ministry of Information in Lebanon gave all of us correspondents. And that card, by the way, could save your life in Beirut in those days. This guy took out a straight razor and started to cut it in half. And without thinking, I reached up and I grabbed his wrist and I said, "Give that back to me." 

 

I was stunned by my own temerity and what I would say was actually stupidity. I was even more stunned when he did give it back to me. He menacingly pointed the rifle at me, but gave it back to me. But with these words, he said in accented English, [beep sound] "President Ford." [audience laughter] I thought, “Yeah, okay, [beep sound] him.” [audience laughter] I turned around, and I just started to walk away in the direction they were pointing in. I think I'd gone about half a block when all of a sudden, I heard this rattle of automatic-weapons fire from behind me. And in moments like this, things really do go into slow motion. I saw these two guys running down the street after me, firing their AK-47s on full automatic, just firing wildly like that. Next thing I knew, bits of pavement and bullet fragments hit me in the back of the head and in the back.

 

Well, I ran like hell. Once again looked back, and I saw one of them kneel down to shoot some more. And then, I kept running zigzag, John Wayne fashion, like you see in the war movies, right up until a bullet smashed right into my left ankle and dropped me. By the purest of luck, I rolled into an intersection that divided the Christian from the Muslim sectors. And my assailants were afraid to pursue me, to finish me off, this is what I assume, because they might get shot themselves. And then, by the purest of luck, I managed to crawl into the courtyard of an apartment building where a vascular surgeon happened to live. [audience chuckles]

 

He came out and he patched me up as best as he could, but he told me he had to get me to his hospital, otherwise I was going to lose my left ankle, my left foot, and maybe everything from my knee down on my left leg. He got me to his hospital. But now the bad-luck part came in, is his hospital was right in the middle of the worst of the fighting. It was under fire and filled with casualties, so many casualties that the hospital had run out of anesthetic. But the doctor said, “That's no matter.” He said, "Your blood pressure has fallen so low.” He said, “I can't put you under. If I do, you're going to stay there." 

 

So, he stretched me out on the operating table in 19th-century fashion. Two burly male nurses held me down. A third one put a rubber bar between my teeth, so I wouldn't bite my tongue off, and the bullets and the bullet fragments were taken out. I can tell you that that pain was like nothing I had ever experienced before. It was utterly scalding. It was as if my left leg and then my entire body were being dipped into boiling oil. Well, anyway, my leg was saved and I was eventually evacuated back to the United States. I spent about the next year either in a wheelchair or on crutches. Sometimes the pain would come back and was almost as severe as it had been on the operating table. I quite often would ask myself, why? Why was I wounded like this? Why did this happen to me? That's quite natural. 

 

I played by the rules. I went out there to get the story, and I got shot. Why? Well, the heavens were silent. I realized that if I was going to find some meaning, some answer to this, I was going to have to impose it myself. I thought back to that time that those 13 Muslim women had lined up in front of that bakery merely to feed their families, and how I had so callously and cynically dismissed their deaths. I started to see myself as a man who had violated another kind of rule. Or, maybe it's not a rule. Maybe it's a requirement, that all of us have to share in each other's sufferings or risk losing our humanity.

 

I started seeing myself as a man who was maybe not too far from the altered psychological or moral state of the gunman who had shot me for no reason whatever. Why? Why was I wounded? Why, indeed? And what I concluded was that I had been wounded, so I would learn what suffering really meant. And I had been made to learn suffering, so I would know compassion once again.