Courage Struggling With Fear

"I just got back from Afghanistan a couple of months ago, and I'm working on a trip to Mali. I'm going back to Iraq to do a story about al-Qaeda, hopefully for next season. I haven't ventured back to Egypt, because I haven't really felt a need. I haven't ventured into Syria. I mean, there's part of me that would give anything to be living in Afghanistan now and reporting from there all the time. At the same time I've kind of progressed past that and now they expect and want me to be doing a lot more different, diverse things.
"So, really, the only conscious decision as a result of Egypt was that I missed the boat on Syria. If you are familiar at all with what it takes to cover these kinds of places well, being in there early and building relationships and knowing the place from the ground up is so critical to staying alive, and it ensures your durability on a story like that. And I don't have that in Syria.
"Now I have two small children, which makes life difficult, you know, to take those kinds of risks. I have a husband who -- I mean, I was (detained in Egypt) one week, and one week later I was nearly dead. So for him, he's a little sensitive about these issues.
"At the same time, the reason that we go to those places and do those kinds of stories with a serious intent and purpose is because it's really part of who we are, and what we believe in. So I don't think 'll ever entirely stop doing that."

Lara Logan, correspondent, 60 Minutes

Gen. John Allen talks with Lara Logan in Afghanistan about the deadly insider attacks on U.S. troops by the very Afghan soldiers they train and support.  Photograph by: CBS , Postmedia News

This is a woman who became a dedicated reporter, fully immersed in her work. Like the men who enter the dark and dangerous hot-spots of the world, women too have made their reputations as intrepidly fearless correspondents, compelled to extract the details of world events, bringing them under their by-lines to the notice of interested consumers of news media, for there is always so much happening globally of huge moment.

For Ms. Logan, born in Durban, South Africa, who recounted one of her life-affirming experiences as being back on African soil to witness South African lion researchers in the wetlands of Botswana's Okavango Delta representing a high point in her reporting career, it was a balming exposure. One she described as a near-miraculous experience, surrounded by lions in their native habitat. She is moved by the fact that lions' existence is seriously being threatened by extinction in the wild.

She had experienced, almost two earlier, another near-miraculous event, when she was in Egypt, in Tahrir Square, covering the Egyptian version of the Arab Spring. The miracle is that she survived what turned out to be an unexpectedly horrible, life-threatening ordeal. One she felt she would never survive, becoming personally extinct, surrounded by human beings as wild and savage, and more murderous than the lions she so admires.

"I was dying in that square. I never thought I would see my children again. After I got home, for weeks I couldn't believe I was alive. You don't realize until it happens to you that you have a choice not to fall apart", she explained during an interview. "I think that anything that happens to you on this scale stays with you forever. Am I traumatized? Do I have bad dreams? No."


And that, in and of itself, represents a miracle. A long period of hospitalization and recovery in Britain followed the horrific attack on this woman who entrusts herself to her own experience and diligence in taking all due precautions to ensure she returns alive from her many and dangerous assignments. In February of 2011 she was in Tahrir Square during the celebrations over the resignation of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

With her was a bodyguard, a British former marine. Who found himself so overwhelmed by the mob of 200 men that surrounded the woman he was tasked with guarding, that he was incapable of responding, while she was attacked. She was groped, beaten, sexually assaulted, her clothing torn away to completely reveal her naked vulnerability. The shame was not hers on being naked before a mob of men, but theirs for their inhumanity in violating her.

Egyptian security forces were there, witnessing what occurred, doing nothing. It was not they who came to her rescue, even while she believed her life was ending, then and there, at the hands of a madly ravening mob of predators, but a group of elderly Egyptian women, who shamed the men so they finally wandered off, leaving Lara Logan to the sympathetic ministrations of the Egyptian women, and her hope to remain alive was restored.

She spoke about her dreadful ordeal months later, in May 2011, on 60 Minutes. She spoke candidly and publicly, she explained, because she felt she owed it to the women of Egypt. Not only the women who had the courage to confront those violently vicious thugs, but because of the prevalence of sexual violence in Egypt against its women.

And because she felt it was the right thing to do; to point to the fact of the dangers that women reporters face in the fields of combat they cover as professional correspondents, sharing that danger with other women who, during wars, invasions and all types of conflicts face the prospect of violence and rape, irrespective of their station in life, their health, their stage in life.