Gunfight in Kashmir

One thing I will always remember about being in this place at this exact time is how hard my heart was pumping. But as is always the case with me, when panic-inducing events happen, I seem to have this sort of delayed reaction and then my heart starts racing. In this case, I guess my failure to react right away was an advantage--the shrapnel that ended up hitting Mitch just flew over my head. But despite the shock Mitch and I felt after the explosion, everyone else around us--local Kashmiris--had this eerie sense of calm about them that seemed indicative of what life has been like in this placed for nearly two decades.

In this age of huge public mistrust of the media, one of Vanguard's missions is to strive for a greater transparency in what we do--so you get a sense that what we're showing you is as close as we could get it to what really happened. In this piece, Tracey Chang--the correspondent, although she's not listed in the write-up--and I tried to not only tell you another sad story about Kashmir in the 18th year of its Islamic insurgency, but to give you an honest look at how we report things... After over a week in the booming cities of Mumbai and Bangalore, Tracey and I flew into Srinigar, Kashmir's capital, where we were met by the fixer and driver that Tracey had found from our office in Los Angeles. They told us that there was an "encounter," the local euphemism for shoot-out, between some militants and the security forces in a nice suburb a couple of miles from our palatial hotel--it used to be a maharajah's palace. So after dumping our bags at the Intercontinental, we drove out to see... And you can see the result, as best we could render it.... One note on risk. As a long time veteran of this business, I always tell my young colleagues when we're going anywhere potentially hazardous: Don't be afraid to be cowardly. In this encounter, you'll see from the footage on my camera, when everyone started to run, I ran the fastest and furthest. But one of the things that makes risk risky is that you can't predict it. In running so far, I inadvertently made a kind of triangle with the explosive device, with the shortest leg between me an it, which is how the shrapnel got over the wall to where I had taken refuge... I still have the shirt that I was wearing--it's perfectly good except for the hole in the sleeve. Throwing it out seems like a repudiation of my good fortune at my narrow escape that day, but the idea of wearing it creeps me out...