Step Out on Nothing

by Byron Pitts

  Like a kid educated in Catholic school, I jumped to my feet and said, “Thank you, sir. I appreciate your honesty and your time.” On the inside I wanted to punch him in the nose. Then just before I turned for the door, I stopped, looked back at him, and said something I had never said to any human being before. “I respect what you’ve said and I respect your position, but please know this: When I’m on my knees praying in my room at night, not once have I ever called your name. My destiny is not in your hands, not now, not ever. Thank you for your time. I’ll see you down the road.”

  He cocked his head to one side and gave me a curious look. I walked out of his office and never appeared on his broadcast again. Perhaps he had won the day, but I was not defeated. Funny thing about God, He apparently has a great sense of humor. Less than one year later, the executive was no longer at the helm of the morning program. There’s an old Chinese proverb that I have always remembered. “If you stand by the river long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float by.” It was my intention to stand at the shoreline of CBS for many years to come.

  What I have lacked in talent, God has always made up for with His grace. He has fought my battles, protected me in good times and bad. He has given me an optimistic spirit. Optimism is a great gift. It can sustain you when everything around you is falling apart, and when you cannot read, when you are deemed a failure, or when you are considered second best. I have leaned on that optimism more than might have seemed reasonable, and it has always helped me. I needed every bit of my optimism on September 11, 2001.

  “Get down to the World Trade Center. There’s been an accident,” yelled Marty Gill. I had just moved to New York from the South and had never been to the World Trade Center. I had no idea where it was. But since Marty was not normally a yeller, I knew right away something serious had happened. Martin Gill worked the assignment desk for CBS News. For years he had been responsible for handing out assignments in the Southern region. When I was based in Miami and later Atlanta for CBS, Marty’s was often the voice on the other end of the phone sending me to hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other kind of spot news event. Probably just a few years older than me, he carried himself like a wise old man. Marty knew everything there was to know about satellite trucks and satellite truck drivers, feed points, which local stations had the best photographers, and where his people could get a steak in almost every city and small town in the South, Midwest, and along the eastern seaboard. Born and raised in Michigan, Marty brought Midwestern values and sensibilities to the New York office. He was not flashy or loud. He was just solid.

  That morning I could hear the excitement in Marty’s voice and see it in his eyes when he leaned into my office. “I need you down at the World Trade Center now, brother,” he said with an increasing sense of urgency. I had not moved the first time he called me.

  I had come to work early, before the crowds, intent on finishing up the script for another project. It was a profile of actor Harry Belafonte for the CBS broadcast Sunday Morning. I was not really up for chasing a spot news story.

  “What happened?” I asked, with sarcasm hanging from every word.

  “A plane hit the World Trade Center. You need to go,” Marty said as he stormed out of my office and back to the national desk. With that, I grabbed my work bag and suit coat and walked outside.

  “Can you get me to the World Trade Center?” I asked the yellow cab driver. Without turning around (New York cab drivers never do), he said, “Yeah! Did you hear what happened? A plane just hit one of the Twin Towers.”

  At this point, I was thinking that a novice pilot in a small plane must have gone off course and hit the building. But the closer we got, the more obvious it became that I was wrong. This was big. Fire trucks and ambulances rushed past the cab, and in the distance flames and billowing smoke were visible from both towers.

  We were both stunned at what we were seeing. “I can’t get you any closer. You gotta walk from here,” the cabbie said when we got about twenty blocks from the epicenter of the disaster. He never asked for the fare. I never offered to pay. I just got out of the cab and started walking. People were in the street, running away from the buildings. Police officers had already set up barricades and were directing emergency vehicles in. It was loud and chaotic. There wasn’t as much a sense of fear in the air as there was confusion. Word was spreading that it was two commercial planes that hit the buildings. Reality was sinking in. This was not an accident. This was terrorism. Any question of who did it and the why seemed irrelevant at the time. I finally was close enough to the buildings to talk with a group of police officers. One plainclothesman, the others in uniform. They were looking straight up.

  “What is that?” one of them yelled as he pointed. We all looked. It resembled a large sheet of paper floating to the ground. I thought maybe it was someone from one of the upper floors sending a message, à la the Columbine High School massacre. Perhaps it was someone pleading for help. As this object dropped faster and closer to us, we realized it wasn’t paper. It was a woman wearing a dress. She was falling. There were at least a handful of people falling. The officers and I watched in stunned silence.

  “Look up there,” another one of the officers yelled. High above, we saw what looked like two people standing on a window ledge. They took hands and jumped. They held on to each other for a short distance and then let go. We followed their fall. It was more horrifying than the first. One of the officers vomited. We all turned away.

  As I was trying to keep it together, and beginning to think about what part of the story I would work on, I spotted my colleague CBS News correspondent Mika Brzezinski. By this time every reporter in New York was dispatched to lower Manhattan. Not long after Mika and I exchanged hellos, the story was about to change.

  “It’s coming down,” someone yelled. Chunks of the World Trade Center’s south tower were falling to the ground. In that moment, any sense of confusion turned to sheer panic. Every person was running, and that included Mika and me. Mika quickly kicked off her shoes and grabbed them; I grasped her hand and we ran as fast as we could. We made it to an elementary school that was being evacuated. The students were all but gone. We crowded inside with police, firefighters, and every other straggler who sprinted in. Chased up the street by thick black smoke, we all waited inside in dead silence. There was a rumbling that sounded like an earthquake. As suddenly as it started, it stopped. One of the firefighters walked out first, and then a few more were joined by police officers. Mika and I had found a phone in the school and managed to contact the national desk. All the networks were live on the air. Mika and I agreed that she would give the first account by phone while I walked outside to get more information. The air was so thick with dust and debris that it was difficult to breathe. I have long carried a handkerchief in my pocket for no good reason. I finally had a good reason. It felt like I was wandering around the surface of the moon. Everything was covered in white. A powdery soft dust covered the ground, cars, buildings, and most of the people.

  I would later describe the day on the air this way: “Except for a few sirens, I have never heard New York City this quiet. Graveyard quiet.” That is what it felt like those early moments after the first tower fell. It felt like I was standing in a graveyard or on the moon. Minutes later, the second tower collapsed, and once again everyone who could ran for cover. During the next hours I would see acts of bravery and kindness we do not spend enough time talking about in our country. Most people were so dusty it was hard to tell a person’s race or even sometimes their sex. People of all description were helping the injured reach safety. I watched business people in suits and dresses tearing at their clothing to make a bandage or a brace. I watched one man kneel and pray in the middle of the street.

  We interviewed a firefighter covered in dust from head to toe. He had brown eyes. I could see only a streak of his skin, revealed as tears rolled down from his eyes. “I lost my men,” he told me. How many, I asked. “All of them,” he said. With that, he
turned away and walked back toward the pile. Within a few days, ordinary New Yorkers had formed a gauntlet down the West Side highway. At night they would applaud the emergency teams and construction workers as they changed shifts. People brought their children, and they carried food and water. This was rough, tough New York City, and for those first few days after the towers fell, I never heard a single word of profanity. There was a sense of peace and purpose and strength at Ground Zero that is hard to fathom except for those of us who were there.

  The world was upside down. I had witnessed the end of a life more than a few times in my career—a man put to death in Virginia’s electric chair, a stabbing victim who bled to death in an Atlanta hospital. None of that prepared me for what I was seeing. But there wasn’t much time to dwell on it or mourn. On September 11, 2001, and on many days like it, I found it best to hide behind my job. Reporters are supposed to keep some detachment from the people and the subjects in their reporting. It was that professional distance that kept me grounded in the notion that I was placed in this moment to cover history not get caught up in it. It was not about me or particularly what I was feeling, it was about the people around me and reporting on their experiences, their emotions, and not my own.

  History will recall the horrors of that time, and there were many. As an optimist, I choose to also remember the good and decent people of that day.

  TEN

  Valley of the Shadow

  of Death

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. . . .

  —Psalm 23:4

  DO YOU KNOW ALL the people you love most in the world?”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” I answered with a kind of awkward do-I-or-don’t-I-smile expression one often wears in the boss’s office. The boss in this case was CBS News anchorman Dan Rather. We were sitting in his office on the second floor above the newsroom, Dan in his leather chair and me in a straightbacked, stiff, wooden chair in front of his massive desk, discussing my upcoming trip to cover the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan. It was fairly standard practice that a difficult overseas assignment would merit a warmup pep talk from Dan.

  “Okay, then write each of them a letter, tell them exactly how important they are to you. Address the letters, seal them up, and leave them in your desk drawer so someone will find them in case you don’t come home,” he said. Then he just let the words hang in the air for a while. If he was trying to get a reaction out of me, he didn’t. I kept my expression calm. Inside, I was wondering how this conversation was supposed to help me. I was hoping to be encouraged, not frightened.

  Since there was no natural light in the office, the cavelike darkness often made it difficult to make out all of Dan’s features. In dramatic fashion, it was slightly reminiscent of a scene from The Godfather, dim light, dark wood, an imposing figure behind the desk, and a much-worn trench coat hanging on the door. Instead of a gun or cigar box, however, he kept a Bible on his desk, which left a comparable impression.

  “When you go to a place like Afghanistan,” he continued, “you might not come back. That may sound harsh, but it’s true. If you can’t handle that truth, then you shouldn’t go. If you can, go with God’s speed. And remember three more things about Afghanistan. Don’t eat the meat, don’t drink the water, and never look at the women,” Rather said, with a smile growing on the edges of his lips.

  “I’m glad you’re going,” Rather said. “Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and reporters gotta go.”

  “Reporters gotta go.” I certainly lived by that creed. By 2001 I had established myself as a network fireman, volunteering for every major story, both domestic and foreign. I had worked in both the Miami and Atlanta bureaus covering the 2000 election recount in Florida, the tug of war over Cuba’s Elian Gonzalez, and numerous natural disasters. I had traveled abroad to Iraq, Central and South America, and Haiti. But less than two months after September 11, when the network was seeking volunteers for coverage in Afghanistan, I had hesitated. For the first time in my professional life, I had to ask myself whether the job was simply too dangerous for me, whether I really needed to be in a place actively involved in bloodletting, like Afghanistan in 2001. Without trying to sound morbid, there are reasons to die, causes worth dying for, like family or one’s faith. But did my career ambition require that I take this risk with my life?

  I was afraid. Have you ever been afraid? So afraid you couldn’t move? Have you ever been shaken by the kind of fear that makes your eyes water and your nose run? When I was a child, fear would usually take me by the hand and lead me away from danger and difficult situations. Fear, just like anger, was a friend of mine. Now in my early forties I had done a pretty good job of keeping my fears at a distance. Journalists at this stage don’t talk much about being afraid. One of the things that drew me to this profession in the first place was the bravery associated with it. I remembered seeing and reading about reporters who endured threats during the civil rights protest era or those who went on countless patrols alongside soldiers in Vietnam. Those were the risky datelines of their generation, and America was better because of their courage. Now history was calling on my generation. Being a journalist in wartime does not compare to the hardships and risks facing America’s sons and daughters in the U.S. military or the demands heaped upon their families. Theirs is a special calling, but reporting from dangerous places carries its own risks, and a number of journalists around the world have given their full measure in search of truth. So after some soul searching, prayer, and a few intense conversations with family, I put my name on the list of those who would go to Afghanistan.

  And after Dan’s “pep talk,” I wrote the letters to my loved ones as he recommended. (They are still in my office desk, and I pray I get to turn those letters into paper planes with my grandchildren someday.) Normally I was excited to go away on big assignments, looked forward to packing my bags, and enjoyed the process of counting out batteries and socks and maps. This time I felt more like I was packing to go to a funeral. I wasn’t excited. I was too nervous to be excited. In the past, my foreign assignments would have been dangerous only by accident. In covering the war in Afghanistan, death wasn’t an accident; it was a consequence. But before my fears got the best of me, I did what I was raised to do: I prayed.

  Days later, I left for Russia and traveled from there to the capital of Tajikistan for the long car ride to the Afghanistan border. I met up with a few journalists from other news organizations, and we took a short ride on a raft across the Amu Darya River. It felt a bit like traveling backward in a time machine: thirty-six hours earlier I had been in a fine Russian hotel near Red Square and then aboard a jetliner from Moscow. Suddenly I was floating across a fairly deep river, with strangers, on a motorized raft. No one said a word, which is unusual for a group of journalists. Usually there is at least one person in these groups who wants to share how much they know about the place we’re going to. But except for the two Russian guides who spoke no English, no one on the raft had ever been to Afghanistan before. It’s one thing to be scared. It’s another to see it in the eyes of everyone around you. I had been to the developing world before, but as we floated to the shoreline, Afghanistan looked like a place struggling to reach developing-world status. I could see mud huts and decades-old vehicles. A stench of burning charcoal was in the air, and men huddled around small campfires were cooking what appeared to be goat.

  My only instructions were that an Afghani would meet me on the shore to take me to the CBS compound. I walked up the riverbank carrying my own gear and dragging two cases of equipment for the crews. At this point I was more of a packmule than a journalist, bringing in fresh supplies. I guess I was expecting the kind of welcome greeting I would have gotten at an airport, a nice man holding a sign with my name on it. What I got was a thickly built bearded Afghan man with a Kalashnikov rifle on his shoulder, carrying a CBS mailbag. He looked like he was in a bad mood. I put my right hand to my heart and said, “Hello, si
r, I’m Byron Pitts.” His expression didn’t change. He didn’t move, just looked right through me. I stepped forward and extended my hand and repeated, “Hello, sir, I’m Byron Pitts from CBS News.” That got his attention. He took two steps forward and pushed my chest with both hands. I hadn’t come across that greeting in all the books I had read about Afghanistan. More than surprised, I was puzzled as to why this man was touching me. About that time, he took another step and pushed me again. I looked around and saw other Afghan men standing and looking at us. The other journalists had filtered away. Then I looked down and realized that I was standing on the edge of the riverbank. If he pushed me again, I would fall into the water. When he reached up to push me one more time, I grabbed his hands and pushed him back hard. I was half expecting him to raise his weapons. Instead, he smiled. I guess I passed the test. He turned and gestured toward his ancient Russian pickup truck. As I got into his truck, I thought about how unfamiliar this environment was, how aggressive this culture was, and how careful I would need to be.

  CBS News had a base camp in northern Afghanistan, in an empty stretch of windswept land masquerading as a village called Khoja Bahauddin (we pronounced it Hoja-Baha-Who-Dean). The region looked like one of those planets from an early episode of Lost in Space or the way the Old West might have looked long before it was settled. Living was hard: the place was dry and dusty, with most of its people living at different rungs of desperation. On windy days some of us would joke about the time and money Westerners spent on exfoliates and such to clear up their skin. Spend a brief time in Khoja Bahauddin, and the mixture of desert sand and Mother Nature would buff your skin to a baby-soft shine. Spend too much time, and you could age dramatically. We would meet men in their thirties, windblown and sunburned, who looked to be in their seventies. We were indeed foreigners in a foreign land. Language seemed the least of our barriers.