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On the side of a road we came upon five bodies. They were lying in a row, partially hidden in a field of grass. For a moment, I thought maybe they were only resting, a family that had stopped to nap on their way to market. They were dead, of course. Exposed to the elements, they seemed to have shrunk, their skin stretched over their bones like leather. There was a little girl. I could just make out tufts of hair on her withered scalp. Next to her was a woman in a dirty white blouse. Her hand rested on the man she lay next to. At first I thought she was wearing a glove. It seemed partially removed. Then I realized that it was her skin. Hardened by the sun, it had peeled off. So had the soles of her feet. I’d never seen anything like it. Her face had decomposed as well. Her teeth were visible still attached to her jaw. She appeared to be smiling.

No one said anything. We stood listening to the buzzing of flies and the cries of a vulture circling overhead, waiting for us to leave.

“Bastards,” my producer muttered, as he looked over the scene.

I remember thinking how strange it was that he said that. He was cursing the people who had done this, I knew that, but I thought it odd that he was taking it so personally. I didn’t realize that I was the odd one for not doing so.

I stepped over the bodies, bent down, took out my cheap instamatic camera, and took close-up pictures of the woman’s hand. Click. Click. Weeks later, when I got the photos developed, the clerk in the drugstore looked at me, disgusted. When I saw the photos, I understood why. I’d crossed some marker, stepped over a line. The corpses were mixed in with pictures of smiling soldiers and of my camera crew, souvenir snapshots I’d taken for my scrapbook. At the time I’d seen nothing inappropriate about this. But later I realized that it was time to stop, time to seek out other kinds of assignments.

In Somalia, when I’d started my career two years before, each body came as a shock. I used to imagine the lives they’d led. The father coming home from work, perhaps a teacher. The mother raising the children. I pictured them alive, around a table, talking about their day. That, for me, was always the saddest part. The fact that no one would remember their passing. Their history, their squabbles, the joys they’d experienced—all of it just dissolved with their bodies on the side of a road. They’d simply disappeared.

In Rwanda, however, I no longer thought about who these people were. I was transfixed by the details of their death. Fascinated with the stages of decay, the surprise of rigor mortis, I’d forgotten what I was really looking at.

The more you’ve seen, the more it takes to make you see. The more it takes to affect you. That is why you’re there, after all—to be affected. To be changed. In Somalia, I’d started off searching for feeling. In Rwanda, I ended up losing it again.

“My heart is too full,” I told my boss soon after I got back. I didn’t want to see any more death. I think he thought I wanted more money, but the truth was, I’d simply had enough. Months later my contract with Channel One expired, and I decided to leave. I got an offer from ABC News. I was incredibly flattered, but I also thought it was funny. I hadn’t been able to get an entry-level job at ABC in 1992. Just three years later, they were asking me to become a correspondent. They told me I’d be working mainly in the United States, which was fine by me. I needed to stop searching the world for feeling. I needed to find it closer to home.

Katrina

FACING THE STORM

IT BEGINS AS a breeze, barely noticed, brushing the land where man was born. A bush pilot flying out of Kisangani might have found himself buffeted by a surprisingly strong current of air, or a farmer on a rocky Rwandan slope stretching his back as he stood could have felt the cool wind on his face. But it’s not until the third week of August 2005 that meteorologists take note of a powerful tropical wave of wind and