Wounded reporter relives brush with death

Time and again Kathy Gannon has relived the decisions that led to her close friend's death - and almost her own - in Afghanistan.

Gannon, a veteran Associated Press correspondent, and Anja Niedringhaus, an award-winning AP photographer from Germany, negotiated through many stories and many dangers together for five years. But on April 4, as they prepared to cover the presidential election in Afghanistan the next day, an Afghan police commander opened fire on them.

She keeps asking herself if she could have prevented the tragedy. And the answer is always "No".

"We weren't careless or cavalier about the security arrangements," Gannon said in New York last week, in her first interview since the attack. "We really made sure that we had a safe place to stay, we knew whom we were traveling with, we knew the area in which we were going. Honestly, I've thought it through so many times - I know neither Anja nor I would have done anything differently."

The two women were accompanying a convoy transporting ballots from the city of Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, to an outlying Taliban stronghold, under the protection of Afghan security forces. As they sat in their vehicle in a well-guarded compound, one of the men supposedly ensuring their safety, walked up and yelled "Allahu akbar!" He fired on them with his AK-47 and then dropped his emptied weapon and surrendered.

Niedringhaus, 48, died instantly. Gannon, 61, took six bullets through her left arm, left shoulder and right hand.

"I remember saying, 'Oh my God, this time we're finished'," Gannon said. "One minute we were sitting in the car laughing, and the next, our shoulders were pressed hard against each other as if one was trying to hold the other up. The shooting ended. I looked toward Anja. I didn't know."

As the driver sped their bullet-riddled car to the nearest hospital, 45 minutes away, the translator told Gannon, "Kathy, don't leave us." She was sure she was dying.

"That time was very much about really making peace," Gannon said. "I was so trying to just breathe and just go peacefully."

At the hospital, Gannon was sedated in the operating room. When she woke up, she had been airlifted back to the capital Kabul where, still half-conscious, she realized her friend was dead.

The months of recovery and therapy since have been grueling. Gannon's left arm was reconstructed with bone, fat and muscle from her left leg, attaching nerves and arteries where there was once a 15-centimeter hole.

Gannon still can't move the fingers on her left hand. But when she recovers, she is determined to return to Afghanistan. While her relatives in Canada and Pakistan worry, they understand her decision.

"Neither Anja nor I would ever accept to be forced out by some crazy gunman," Gannon said.

Gannon has established a strong bond with the people of Afghanistan during three decades of covering one war after another. As she put it, "There's history still to be told there."

(China Daily 10/16/2014 page10)