For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in.
—Matthew 25:35
WORKING FOR CBS NEWS has been a wonderful education. Veterans call it seeing the world on the company’s dime. I guess that’s true. As much as it’s taught me about the places I’ve been, it’s also taught me a few things about myself.
Fear was one of the biggest traits I carried from childhood into adulthood. Selfishness was another. All my life I have been blessed by people who had nothing to gain by helping me, but they did it anyway. I grew accustomed to receiving the help and support of my family, my network of mentors, and all those angels I’ve met along the way. In the current vernacular, it was all about me. I admit that I never spent much time putting myself in anyone else’s shoes. I never thought about the sacrifices Coach Mack made for me, or the time it took out of Dr. Lewes’s day to help me. I simply took their graciousness and kindness and used it to my advantage. I was a needy child, a needy adolescent, and still needy well into adulthood. I was still learning what it means to give and what giving meant to those who gave so much to me.
I certainly can’t fault my mother for failing to set an example. If ever there was a call for volunteers at our church, Clarice would volunteer not only her time but that of her children. If there was a family gathering at someone’s house, she expected the Pitts children to help set up chairs and tables and break them down afterward. “Helping hands please God,” she’d often say. Countless times she would make room for “one more” at our dinner table. Sometimes it was one of her clients from work; another time it would be a teenage mother or a homeless person. Like plenty of social workers and teachers, my mother saw her job as a calling that extended beyond the office or office hours. My mother always said that when we open our arms wide to give away the gifts we have, that only creates room for God to give us more. Serving others, she always taught us, is a valued virtue.
But in the midst of my own overwhelming needs, I lost the time and energy to extend compassion. I was too busy trying to fix my own flaws. It wasn’t until I witnessed extraordinary acts of kindness by my colleagues and by those we met, many of them in remote corners of the world, that I began to actually look back and appreciate the sacrifices people had made in my life. Most of what I’ve seen has only reinforced the lessons I learned as a boy. Most people are good. Whether it’s somewhere in the United States or some faraway place, there are always people willing to make a sacrifice for others. Countless acts of kindness go on every day somewhere on earth. Some of the most rewarding acts I witnessed came from people who didn’t really have the means or the time to help someone else, but they did it anyway. People who all had a willingness to step out beyond what might have been expected of them, and as a result they demonstrated amazing kindness. As I see it, they stepped out on a faith in something greater than themselves.
Our team saw many horrible and violent things in Afghanistan that fall of 2001. But we also saw the goodness that lives inside. As I traveled from northern Afghanistan toward Kabul with producer Larry Doyle and cameraman Mark Laganga, we met bandits and beggars and one remarkable family. We met them in Khoja Bahauddin in northern Afghanistan, where they were forced to flee after the Taliban took over their home city. The Nazir family, a husband and wife with two children, were almost like a typical American family. Always well groomed, they had an air of confidence that especially stood out in Afghanistan, where so many people walked around covered in dust, with rounded shoulders and heads bowed seemingly with the burdens of the world. (I met an Afghan man early on in my visit, who, before I spoke, sized me up and said, “You’re an American.” I smiled and asked what made him so certain, considering that I could be African or European. He said, “You walk like an American, with long strides and your head in the air.”) Every member of this family walked like Americans, especially the children. The parents were a hardworking, handsome couple whose primary goal was that universal desire to provide a better life for their kids.
Fahranaz, the mother, was a Soviet-trained electrical engineer, and so was her husband, Nazir. Their teenage son, Kambiz, had dark hair and teen-idol looks. He spoke English so well he became one of our interpreters. The daughter, Vida, who was probably about seven years old, was as precious as any child you could meet and always underfoot asking questions about the world beyond her own or toying with our television equipment. This one family in particular reminded all of us of our own families back in the States and the heavy toll war takes on loved ones caught in the midst of it.
After careful discussion with Nazir, Fahranaz, and our producer Larry Doyle, it was agreed that the family would be relatively safe with us. This was a presumption based simply on one rule of war, that there is usually safety in numbers. So Larry put them on the payroll. They were worth every penny. Nazir was a gifted engineer, who kept our equipment in tiptop shape despite limited access to replacement parts and a steady source of electricity. Not to mention the dust and sand that would constantly get inside the equipment. Mishaps that would send the average engineer back in the States on an angry tirade just made Nazir smile more broadly. Fahranaz was also a tremendous resource. She often pointed us in the right direction for a story or contacts. She provided access into an underground network of women who desperately wanted their voices heard but who were forced to balance their taste for freedom with the day-to-day struggle of staying alive. Back in Kabul, Fahranaz had been active in women’s rights organizations before the Taliban took over. In Khoja Bahauddin, she was still doing activist work with women, running literacy programs and postnatal care seminars. Despite all the discourse about freedom from the Taliban in the north, the local warlords did not like Fahranaz teaching women about their rights. Soon there was the strong suggestion that some in the area wanted her dead.
To escape the threat, they traveled with our team for part of the trip south, but eventually the journey became too hectic and too dangerous for a family to keep up the pace. They stayed behind in a village where they would be safe. The Nazirs were always resourceful; they assured us they would be fine. When it reached the time to say good-bye, I thought that’s what it meant. On this trip, like so many others, we had met people, depended on one another, lived together, and enjoyed an intense but brief relationship. Especially with the local population, good-bye usually meant forever.
Yet despite our twenty-hour days and our own adventures on the road, Larry stayed in touch with the Nazir family, as did another one of my colleagues, correspondent Elizabeth Palmer. Elizabeth did several tours in Afghanistan and worked with the Nazir family. When she returned home to London, she stayed in contact. It was a relationship Larry and Elizabeth nurtured long distance by phone, fax machines, handwritten notes delivered by strangers from one village to the next, messages passed along by word of mouth, and by what remains the most reliable source of communication around the world—cash put in the right hands. More than a relationship, the family’s security had become a cause for Larry and Elizabeth. For more than a year they kept track of this one family with one goal in mind: to help them make a better life for their children.
In time, Larry and Elizabeth, with help from a network of friends and contacts around the world, managed to get Nazir and his wife and children out of Afghanistan. Today, they live in Canada. Their son is in medical school. Their daughter, as Elizabeth describes her, is a typical Canadian teenager. It says a great deal about Larry and Elizabeth. They helped a family they might have left behind. I asked them both why, and both agreed that it was because it needed to be done. They helped someone simply because it needed to be done.
Elizabeth added, “I liked them. I thought they were extraordinarily brave and honest. I think when such opportunities present themselves, it’s important to grab them.”
Few people inside CBS News ever knew what Larry and Elizabeth were up to. They spent their own time and their own money and sought nothing in return. It was not about winning an award, receiving special recognition, or even getting a story on the CBS Evening News. For them, it was more than that, it was about making a difference. They used their own gifts and gave them away. Who knows what a Canadian doctor born in Afghanistan will do someday? Look out, world, when Vida pursues her dreams.
Here’s a footnote to the story. It almost never happened. When Larry first approached Fahranaz about her son working as an interpreter for CBS, she said no. She was afraid it was a trick to get her son to fight for the Taliban. That kind of watchful paranoia keeps people safe in wartime. Larry and Elizabeth were able to do their good work because they refused to take no for an answer.
Just days after the U.S. military invaded Iraq in 2003, the nation was given a sense of hope that the war would be brief. Most Americans woke on April 9 to images of Iraqis celebrating in the streets of Baghdad, as many of their countrymen pulled down and kicked a statue of Saddam Hussein in the middle of the city. That impression did not last long. I was a few blocks away from the celebration, along with Mark Laganga. We were embedded with the U.S. Marine Corps Lima Company out of Twentynine Palms, California. The embed program was put in place by the Pentagon after lengthy discussion about the best way to give major news organizations (and their audiences) the fullest and most unfiltered access to the war. The program would be widely criticized later on. But in the early days and weeks of the war, it gave America a front-row seat to war.
On this particular morning, CBS News gave viewers a split screen of the war. On one side, there were the hopeful images from downtown Baghdad of the capital city of Iraq apparently under the control of U.S. forces. On the other side of the screen and a few blocks away, U.S. Marines were engaged in an all-out firefight.
Earlier in the day, the Marines of Lima Company were assigned to clear the Iraqi Ministry of Oil building. They were cautioned to be on the lookout for snipers. Mark and I tagged along, actually hoping to see what was commonly referred to as “bang bang,” American troops engaging the enemy. The early minutes of the mission were tense but uneventful. The Marines methodically went floor by floor looking for snipers or Iraqi fighters. Mark and I followed. We had been together for nearly six months by this time. We started our duty in Kuwait, where the buildup to the war began. By now Mark and I knew almost instinctively the other’s movements and thought process. We could communicate without ever exchanging a word. So we split up that morning in order to cover more ground. Mark with his large network camera and me with a small digital video variety, the kind you would take to Disney World. It was one of the few days of my life I hated being over six feet tall. Besides being the oldest person with the group of Marines, I was just about the tallest. My fear was that I was an easy target, and at age forty-two I had the disadvantage of being a bit slow, alongside the twenty-something Marines. But it appeared that all of my anxiety was for naught. The building was safe.
An hour or so after storming the Oil Ministry, the Marines gathered on the front steps to catch their breath. Some rested. A few pulled out cigars. The day was almost over, and no one had fired a weapon. Our reverie ended with the crackle of gunfire and falling debris. In a war zone, the sound of gunfire begins to blend in with the background. We realized there was a problem only when plaster from the building overhead was starting to falling on our heads. “Holy shit,” a Marine yelled. Someone was shooting at us. Everyone scrambled for cover. For weeks leading up to this moment, Mark and I had trained and studied with the Marines on how to respond to a chemical weapons attack, an air raid, trench warfare, and first aid. I do not recall a lesson on what to do in a firefight on the concrete in downtown Baghdad, so I got as low to the ground as I could and tried to keep up with the Marines in front of me.
While Mark videotaped the action, I placed a call to the New York office on our satellite phone to offer a live report. The first time I dialed in, a young person answered the phone. Sounded like one of the recent grads assigned to work the early shift back in New York. The person yelled into the phone, “I can’t hear you; there’s too much noise in the background.” And they hung up. I looked at the satellite phone in disbelief. I wanted to curse, but there was no time. The Marines were about to change position. It was time to run. I was teamed up with a corporal and one of the company’s staff sergeants. The corporal was young, thin, and athletic. The sergeant was just a bit younger than I, barrel-chested, with the classic Marine Corps tough-guy demeanor. I felt safe in his presence. The goal was to cross the outdoor mall beside the Ministry of Oil and make it to the wall surrounding the building. Run, stay low, then run again was the basic strategy. If cover was a necessity, there were cement tables scattered about. I imagined that workers in more peaceful times at the ministry might have sat outside at one of the tables enjoying their lunch. At the moment we would use the tables as temporary shelters. Somehow, the three of us—the corporal, the sergeant, and I—eyed the same cement table. The corporal got there first and the sergeant was a close second. I had the least amount of gear (flak jacket, helmet, small camera, satellite phone, and a notebook) but moved the slowest. With no place safe to land, I dove on the sergeant’s back—not intentionally—but I wasn’t planning on moving right away either.
With gunfire above our heads, I buried my face in the back of the sergeant’s neck, like a schoolgirl at her first horror movie. I wasn’t particularly scared, mind you, but the sergeant was my security blanket and I was determined to stay wrapped up as long as I could. It was only a few seconds I’m certain, but it felt like much longer. As the gunfire temporarily subsided, the sergeant twisted his neck toward me. If not for our helmets, we would have been cheek to cheek.
In a calm voice inconsistent with the panic I was feeling, he asked me, “Are you okay? Are you bleeding? Any wet spots?”
I quickly did a hand check and fired back, “No, sir, sergeant! I’m fine.”
In that same calm voice, he answered, “Are you sure?”
I answered, “Yes, sir, I’m fine.”
Then, after a brief pause, perhaps for effect, the sergeant cleared his throat and in a very matter-of-fact tone said, “Okay, then fuck me or get off of me. But you can’t just lay there.”
If I had been eating, I would have spit out my food. He had detected tension in my voice and wanted to both reassure me and ease the mood. It worked. I sheepishly apologized, rolled to the side, and the three of us got up and ran to safety behind a wall. By now I had reconnected with the CBS office and was filing minute-by-minute reports to the control room for broadcast in New York. We did not have live pictures, only the sound of my voice describing the action, punctuated by bursts of gunfire and the shouting voices of the Marines around me. The gunfire aimed in our direction had not abated. The enemy was still an invisible target. In the midst of all the chaos came a moment I will remember the rest of my life. It was minor in the scheme of things, but it spoke volumes to me about the character of most of the men and women the American government sent into harm’s way.
Lima Company was led by Captain George Schreffler from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had the temperament of Tom Hanks in the movie Saving Private Ryan. His demeanor was often more professorial than warrior. Captain Schreffler was as calm as the quarterback in a church league flag football game, coolly calling out plays. Surrounded by a few of his Marines, including his radioman, he directed the movement of his unit and coordinated the call for support. A Marine corporal rushed over to tell the captain that his men had located the source of the gunfire. The corporal answered that he was certain of the location but could not confirm the identity of those firing. I for one was relieved by the news, but Captain Schreffler did not seem impressed. He instructed the Marine that no one was allowed to fire at the position in question until the threat was properly identified. I felt deflated by his strict instructions. We were getting pounded by gunfire, and I did not understand why he was reluctant to take out the target. But we soon realized that Captain Schreffler had made the correct call. He had been patient and protective of both his men and the potential enemy. It turned out that objects moving in the distance, once identified earlier as the source of the incoming fire, were actually members of an Iraqi family caught in the crossfire. If Captain Schreffler had given permission to shoot, that family would almost certainly have been killed.
Here’s how I described those hours that night.
The CBS Evening News, April 9, 2003
This morning the U.S. Marines rolled into downtown Baghdad . . . locked and loaded for a fight . . . when a party broke out.
Iraqi citizens chanting and screaming as they tore down this life-size statue of Saddam Hussein . . . on the steps of the Iraqi Oil Ministry . . . as the Marines were clearing this thirteen-story building. It was one of the last remaining symbols of Saddam’s regime.
Iraqi citizen: “We hate Saddam! Thank you USA!”
Staff Sergeant, USMC: “I wish it was him they were tearing down, but the statue is nice.”
Lieutenant, USMC: “You know we’ve been fighting for days and to see this let’s us know the Iraqi people are glad we’re here, and maybe we’re going home.”
But suddenly the celebration stopped with the crackle of gunfire. The party ended when these Marines were ambushed from three sides.
This wasn’t warfare. This was a street fight. U.S. Marines . . . average age nineteen to twenty-two . . . each with an M-16 . . . versus Saddam’s Fedayen paramilitary . . . also young men . . . with AK 47s.
Nearly two hours of small-arms fire . . . and rocket-propelled grenade launches. These Marines from Lima Company . . . based in Twentynine Palms, California, are flanked on three sides by sniper fire . . . when a corporal spots three heads bobbing behind a wall. He pleads with Lima Company’s commanding officer to take the shot. But Captain George Schreffler from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, orders his man to stand down. Wait until he can see a weapon. The captain made the right call. Those three heads were an Iraqi family—a husband, his wife, and daughter.
In the end, there were two Iraqi snipers dead . . . a third escaped. No American casualties. And a platoon of young Marines learned a valuable lesson: America is winning this war, but she cannot end it, at least not yet. Byron Pitts, CBS News, Baghdad.
It was the most “bang, bang” I would see for quite a while. That night I unwound for a few hours with Mark and the captain. He walked us through the day’s events. I was both curious and amazed by his calmness and clarity earlier in the day when so much was going on. “It’s what I was trained to do,” he said, without even a hint of arrogance or bravado. “I’m here to do a job. I’m not here to kill anyone I don’t have to kill,” he added.
Before we said our good nights, Captain Schreffler added, “I love my family, the Marine Corps, and my country. I would never do anything to dishonor them.”
There were plenty of well-publicized low moments during the war in Iraq, moments that deserved the attention they received. I only wish moments like the one I witnessed the day Baghdad fell would have gotten more attention.
Acts of courage, decency, and humility often go unnoticed, and not just on the battlefield.
On October 29, 1998, category five Hurricane Mitch with 180-mile-an-hour winds hit the Central American countries of Honduras and Nicaragua. Over the next six days, the hurricane dumped a record seventy-five inches of rain, causing catastrophic flooding, killing nearly 11,000 people; another 11,000 were missing, and 2.7 million were left homeless. The damage was estimated at $5 billion. It was the second deadliest Atlantic hurricane in history. Those statistics provide the wide shot. For the closeup CBS News dispatched nearly the entire Miami bureau. That meant producer Larry Doyle, cameraman Manny Alvarez, soundman Craig Anderson, and me. We were a small office staff with eighty-two years of network experience combined. I provided the last two years. Manny is a Cuban-American who has the best sense of humor of anyone I have ever worked with. He can mix humor and sarcasm better than Larry can mix a drink. Larry had his rules for the road, and so did Manny. Never stand when you can sit. Never sit when you can lie down, and never just lie down when you can sleep. And a favorite of many a profession: eat when you can, as often as you can, because you never know when you will get your next meal. And then there is Craig Anderson. Built like a tank with the patience of Job, he has one of the best B.S. meters in television. Nothing got by Craig, and no one got one over on him.
Like many of these assignments, there was no road map. The assignment was to get on the ground as soon as we could and start sending in reports. We filed our first report along the Choluteca River in the city of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. The grim statistics that sent us to Honduras in the first place were mere echoes to the horror stories we heard on the ground. Survivors had poured into Tegucigalpa from villages miles away, with just the clothes on their backs. Many told of losing their entire families. Some set up makeshift tent cities along the river. Children were swimming and women washing clothes along one stretch of the river, while men, women, and children were relieving themselves along another portion. The place was rife with disease.
A few days into our trip, we traveled by small propeller plane and then by boat to remote parts of northern Honduras. We almost became part of the story. Never a big fan of flying, I was particularly uncomfortable in small planes. In a developing country after a major natural disaster, cash can get you only so much, so Larry rented the only plane available. It was a small twin-engine plane that could hold six people, including pilot and co-pilot. Larry, Manny, Craig, and I made four. After exaggerating about the weight of our gear and two additional Benjamin Franklins, the crew agreed to take us to a remote part of Honduras. We all assumed our usual positions: Manny in his own world, fussing over his gear; Craig and I talking about anything other than work; and Larry asleep in the back of the plane. As Manny was videotaping out the window of the plane and Craig and I were enjoying the view, we heard a loud noise. It sounded like flesh smashing together. We looked forward to see the co-pilot slapping the pilot for the second time. Neither Manny, Craig, or I had ever flown a plane, but we knew enough to figure out something was wrong. The pilot and co-pilot were screaming at each other in Spanish. Manny quickly filled in the gaps. The pilot was watching Manny videotaping, instead of watching his instruments. We were heading directly into the side of a mountain. The co-pilot slapped the pilot to gain his attention. The pilot pulled hard on the control, and the nose of the plane pointed skyward. Now we were all screaming, except for Larry who was still sound asleep. We barely cleared the mountain. When we landed, Manny, Craig, and I were still shaking and were soaked in sweat. Larry asked what was wrong. When we explained, he smiled and said, “Glad you didn’t wake me.”
There was plenty of death to be seen in the days that followed. Whole towns had vanished beneath the mud. We saw survivors living in trees and on slivers of land barely above water. In one place called Waller, we met Vicenta Lopez and her four children. She was twenty-eight but looked nearly fifty. Her oldest child was twelve, and the baby was barely old enough to walk. The family was practically homeless, except for a thin tin roof leaning against a stack of fallen trees, beneath which they slept and ate. She and her children were poor before the storm, but Hurricane Mitch had taken what little they had. Inside their makeshift home were three small stools, which the children used as chairs, a small table not much larger than a manhole cover, a few plastic bowls, cups, spoons, and one wooden spoon. A few days earlier an international charity working in the area provided Miss Lopez with rice and a large container of fresh water. She had a small fire burning just outside. Dinner that night for her and her children would consist of plain white rice.
Manny spoke to her in Spanish and asked her permission to videotape her preparation for dinner and the children sitting down to eat. She smiled and nodded yes. But then she did something that surprised us all. “Por favor [please],” she said in Spanish, “eat with us.” She invited us to sit down with her family for dinner. Actually, she insisted. In a translated back and forth, we begged for them to eat without us. We were four healthy grown men who twenty-four hours earlier had slept in a hotel and had had three hot meals. Besides that, in about a week we would be back in our comfortable homes and comfortable lives.
Larry tried to seize control. “Let’s go,” he said, and the four of us backed up. “No! No! No!” she shot back as she moved to block our way. Wearing a worn apron around her waist, she used the edges to dust off the small table. She waved for her children to make room. With gap-toothed smiles and their almond-shaped eyes focused on us, they moved their small stools closer together to make room for their guests. Larry, Manny, Craig, and I all had tears in our eyes. I knew Larry was easy to tear up. Manny is passionate about most things, but Craig isn’t. He was always the coolest member of our team. But the moment had even gotten to him. “Damn,” Craig muttered under his breath. “I thought these things weren’t supposed to get to us,” as he wiped his eyes. This family had as close to nothing as almost any family you could imagine, and they desperately wanted to share. We were the American journalists who had come to this faraway place to tell the world of a horrific natural disaster and perhaps in some way help families like the Lopezes. And this poor woman with not even enough to properly feed herself and her children was offering to share with us. Finally, she relented and the family began to eat, a fistful of rice apiece. The gesture alone left our whole team emotionally spent for the rest of the day. We tried offering her some of our bottled water and some supplies, but she declined, though Manny did convince her to take our empty plastic water bottles so she could use them later to transport water back to her children. There must be a place reserved in heaven for people like Vicenta Lopez.
It’s been my great joy to meet people with Vicenta’s same spirit right here at home in the United States.
Some of the most remarkable things I have witnessed occurred in what some might describe as less than memorable or significant occasions. I guess it is all about perspective.
Meaux, Louisiana, is a spit of a town along the Louisiana coast. It is a speck on the map twenty miles southwest of Lafayette. In fact, you likely will not find it on most maps. It’s like my mother’s hometown of Friendship, North Carolina. You normally go there for one of two reasons. Either you are visiting family or you’re lost. I was traveling with CBS News producer Betty Chin on October 3, 2002, when Hurricane Lili hit the Gulf Coast. It was supposed to have been a major hurricane, but fortunately the winds died down, and Lili made landfall as a category one hurricane. To the bosses in New York, it was no big deal. When the morning began, Betty and I had the lead story in the broadcast. By lunchtime, our executive producer pulled the plug. Betty and I were given permission to head home, and most days that would have been the end of it. Hurricane duty usually means long days, little sleep, and bad food on top of the awful weather conditions and the sad stories you come across. Without the lead story, Betty and I were heading toward New Orleans for a decent meal, a nice hotel, and a good night’s sleep before flying out the next day. We just happened to drive through Meaux. We were lost. Betty and I have probably logged more miles lost than almost any other correspondent and producer team at the network. My fault. Fortunately, Betty is incredibly good-natured, and we have always made the best of it. We weren’t looking for a story in Meaux; the story found us. We had been in the car for hours and had not seen much storm damage when we saw a man standing in an open field littered with trash and a pile of debris on Abshire Road in Meaux. His arms were full of garbage, and he had a big smile on his face. He looked out of place. We wondered why this man looked so cheery when the weather was so lousy. Betty and I decided to stop and ask. We also thought he might direct us to the nearest gas station or at least get us back to the highway.
“Hi ya’ll doin” is the way Jim Williams greeted us. He looked to be in his late twenties, an athletic young man with a cheery disposition. Come to find out he was a lieutenant in the National Guard. His unit had been assigned to help with storm rescue and cleanup. Since there was more cleanup than rescue needed, his commanding officer let him slip away for a bit to check on his own home. It was gone. That open field was Jim’s yard. The trash and pile of debris scattered about was all that was left of his house. By history’s high standard, hurricane Lili was a lightweight. But it was enough to destroy Jim Williams’s home and leave him, his wife, and his three children homeless. Fortunately, Jim’s family had gone to stay with relatives while he was assigned Guard duty. I asked him what he thought might have happened if they had all been at home when the storm hit.
“Boy, just looking at it, I’d be at the hospital or at the morgue right now, one or the other,” he said, still smiling and with sweat gathering at the bottom of his chin.
Betty and I, along with our crew, helped him find a few valuables buried in what used to be the master bedroom. He found a few pictures and the family Bible. He seemed satisfied, like a man who had just eaten a good meal or finished building a bookcase by hand. Why appear so hopeful? I asked him.
“I have faith—that’s just all it is. I can’t attribute it to anything else but just saying, All right, God’s not going to give you anything you can’t handle, so, you know, I just wish He didn’t trust me so much, you know,” and his smile even broadened.
We spent about an hour with Jim Williams. The only time his spirits appeared to falter was when he talked about his children. “It makes you want to cry when your four-year-old goes to your wife, her mom, and says, ‘Mama, why are you crying,’ ” he said.
I have covered plenty of disasters, and you can always tell when someone has been crying. It did not appear that Jim Williams ever shed a tear. He thanked us for our help, and then said he had to leave soon. He was going back to his National Guard unit. “There are people who fared far worse than us, and they need our help,” he said.
In reality, the Williams family had lost nearly as much as any family in Meaux. That did not seem to matter to Jim because he had a job to do. He cheerfully put the needs of others ahead of his own. As we pulled out of his driveway, Jim Williams was smiling and waving. He looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. We thought we had found a something story in this nothing storm. We pleaded with the executives in New York, and about an hour before the broadcast, they dropped another story and made room. Betty and I told the world about Jim Williams on the CBS Evening News that night. Funny, the wonderful golden nuggets God can lead you to when you are lost, with open eyes and outstretched arms.
Dr. Regina Benjamin is one of the most beloved physicians in southern Alabama, partly because, for the longest time, she was one of the few. Dr. Benjamin runs a medical clinic in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. She was just one of the many people I profiled for the CBS Evening News in stories about the recovery underway along the Gulf Coast after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. When I met her, she had 4,000 patients. You read right, 4,000 patients. And she made house calls. She drove an average of 300 miles per week across rural Alabama’s shrimp country. She pulled fish hooks out of patients, delivered babies, and stabilized weak hearts. She had long days before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Her days got even longer in the months afterward. By some estimates, nearly 6,000 physicians were displaced from the region after Katrina. The hurricane flooded Dr. Benjamin’s clinic. The following New Year’s Day, the clinic caught fire and burned down. She stayed and rebuilt it. I asked her why not just close up shop and leave. She was a highly trained physician, a minority, and could practically name her price someplace else. She had a quick answer.
“This is my place. This is my price,” she said without an ounce of regret, in fact, with a bit of an edge. Most people are fond of their primary-care physician. Dr. Benjamin’s patients said they loved her. Everyone I spoke with used that word, love. Stan White, the mayor of Bayou La Batre, called her “the lifeblood of our community,” adding, “I don’t think we could survive without her.” Certainly any number of people in the area would not have access to health care without her. Her clinic charged seven dollars per visit. Any treatments not covered by Medicare or Medicaid, Dr. Benjamin paid out of her own pocket or with federal grant money. She even dispensed hugs, as did her nurse. The patients affectionately refer to Nurse Nell Stoddard as Granny. She described the clinic this way: “We’re a hugging office. We hug everybody. We’ll hug you if you want to be hugged.” And she did. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been hugged on a story in twenty-five years of reporting.
Dr. Benjamin talked a great deal about the character of her patients, especially the ones who could not afford to pay even the seven dollars. They lack money not pride, she said. They pay what they can when they can. More than just taking care of their health needs, it seemed that Dr. Benjamin was in the business of restoring her patients’ dignity. She insisted she was well compensated.
“To know you made a difference, when a mother smiles after you tell her her baby is going to be okay. There’s nothing like it,” she said, smiling herself. “I’ve got the greatest job in the world,” she said.
I agree with Dr. Benjamin. I feel the same about my job. It’s allowed me to see my share of evil around the world, but it has also brought focus to the compassionate and caring spirit of so many. I can’t look at my life now without recognizing that I too was once one of the “least of us” to whom so many reached out their hands. I won’t live long enough to either repay those who’ve given so much to me or pay it forward. But it will keep me busy and always grateful. As for Regina Benjamin, in 2009, President Obama nominated the hug doctor to be surgeon general of the United States.