Rod Nordland, 75, dies; war reporter who also wrote of his own struggle

Boston Globe

5 days ago

With a toughness rooted in his wayward childhood and the brashness of a self-made man, Mr. Nordland was from an era before 'journalism became a prestige career for a bunch of Ivy Leaguers,' as he wrote in his memoir.
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When he set out to become a reporter in the early 1970s, urban daily newspapers often had the money to support overseas bureaus, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, which sent him to Southeast Asia in 1979.
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He did not move back to the United States for 40 years, until he was compelled to do so by his illness.
His reporting gained reach and impact, and his life gained glamour, when he was poached by Newsweek in the mid-1980s. The perks of the job included an unlimited travel budget. He was on the scene and frequently running a news bureau during the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, the Lebanese Civil War, the Salvadoran Civil War, the Persian Gulf War, the war in Kosovo, the Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan, among other conflicts.
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He initially joined the Times in its Baghdad bureau, and he took over responsibility for the Kabul bureau in 2013. His international reporting earned him multiple George Polk and Overseas Press Club awards.
His specialties were recounting violence in unflinching prose; attending to the most vulnerable people in a conflict, often women and children; and narrating everyday dramas of war zones in epic terms.
In 1999, he described for Newsweek what it was like for a 36-year-old mother to survive a mass murder surrounded by her children and relatives in a restaurant in a small town of southern Kosovo.
In Afghanistan, he repeatedly wrote about the danger and brutality young couples faced when marrying without family approval. One of those stories -- about an 18-year-old young woman and 21-year-old man who had never been alone in a room together but nevertheless publicly proclaimed their love for each other, provoking death threats from relatives -- became a book called 'The Lovers: Afghanistan's Romeo and Juliet' (2016).
A critical review in the Times called his efforts to help the couple with money and sanctuary while also making them into major media figures a form of dubious 'Western saviordom.'
In a 2016 interview with The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Mr. Nordland responded, 'What is a savior complex?' he asked. 'The notion that it would be better for me not to get involved in their case so that they could be killed, and that would be the more ethically responsible course? I don't have a right to intervene and save their lives?'
In 'Waiting for the Monsoon,' he reports that the couple moved to New Haven, where the man, Mohammad Ali, has worked as a handyman and driver.
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Mr. Nordland (left) interviewed a martyr's relative, in Kobani cemetery, Syria, in 2018.
MAURICIO LIMA/NYT
Rodney Lee Nordland was born on July 17, 1949, in Philadelphia. His father, Ronald, he wrote in his memoir, was a mechanic who beat Rod, his five siblings, and his mother, Lorine Myers. Later in life, he learned that his father was 'repeatedly arrested and often convicted of sexual assaults on children, both boys and girls,' which he said explained why the family moved so frequently from one small Southern California town to another.
Around 1960, his mother left his father and took the children to her family's home in Jenkintown, a suburb of Philadelphia. She worked a series of clerical jobs and relied on welfare to help feed her children, though they still sometimes went hungry.
Beginning at age 13, Rod worked multiple jobs to support the family, including as a movie theater usher, newspaper delivery boy, dishwasher, country club caddie, semipro boxer, poker player, pool hustler, and occasional burglar. Around the age of 15, he and his best friend ran away to Miami, where they were caught shoplifting and spent two weeks in the county jail.
He discovered a new, productive outlet for his inner turmoil as a senior in high school after his brother Gary got into an argument with a police officer, who subsequently beat him with a billy club. Rod wrote a furious letter about the episode to The Times-Chronicle, Jenkintown's local paper. Not long after, the police officer was suspended and apologized to Gary.
The experience was a 'revelation,' Mr. Nordland wrote in his memoir.
'I could write my rage,' he wrote. 'Not only that, but doing so could result in some kind of change for the better. I could find the people who were like me, cowering from my father as a kid, or like my brother, smacked around by an irresponsible cop, or like my mother, abused by a violent husband and tormented by aggressive bill collectors.'
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He attended Penn State on a full scholarship and graduated in 1972 with a bachelor's degree in journalism. He was immediately hired by The Inquirer. He had an important role on the team that won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting for coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
After he became a foreign correspondent, wars came to so define his life that he associated each of his children with a different conflict, he wrote in his memoir: 'Lorine, a child of the Bosnian conflict, was born in 1992; Johanna, a child of the Iraq War, in 1995; and Jake, a child of the war in Afghanistan, in 1998.'
Still, he credited his terminal illness with giving him a new perspective.
Laid low in the hospital, 'I could see clearly, finally, all the mistakes I had made,' he wrote. A 'volatile temper, 'arrogance' and 'certitude that dominated my every action' had 'helped make me a successful foreign correspondent and bureau chief but denied me the opportunity of becoming so much more.'
His first marriage ended in divorce. He met Segal in 2016, whom he leaves along with his three children.
Segal said that Mr. Nordland had been given only 14 months to live when he received his diagnosis, but with experimental treatments, led by Dr. Eric T. Wong of the Life Cancer Institute at Rhode Island Hospital, he survived for six years.
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In his memoir, he connected his sense of the purpose of journalism to his memories of growing up.
'That my father's treatment of all of us, especially Mommy, was hidden from public view, that he managed to continue his life of criminal abuse relatively unscathed, at least within our family, enraged me,' he wrote. 'What was the point of being a journalist if you didn't make hidden injustices visible?'
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