Bangor native safe after stay in Afghanistan

For a war correspondent, survival is largely a matter of weighing risks each day and knowing just how far to venture into harm’s way while pursuing a story. But in a lawless, forbidding place like Afghanistan, where the normal rules of engagement can be as elusive as a cave-dwelling terrorist, it’s luck that gets you home in one piece.

Bert Rudman, a 47-year-old Bangor native and ABC News producer who spent more than a month covering the war in Afghanistan, was lucky several times.

“All of the journalists who have been killed there so far did nothing more risky than we did,” Rudman said from his office in New York. “They just weren’t as lucky as we were.”

Rudman, the son of Gerald and Judy Rudman, was raised in a family of prominent Bangor lawyers. He had been a segment producer for ABC’s “Prime Time” for three years when he got the opportunity to experience combat for the first time. Sebastian Junger, the celebrated author of “The Perfect Storm,” showed up at ABC one day with an irresistible offer. While doing research for a book about the anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Junger had made valuable contacts within the northern alliance that he would share with the network. ABC would have exclusive access to the northern alliance forces while Junger went along to do a story for Vanity Fair magazine.

“ABC saw it as a unique opportunity,” said Rudman, whose first news job after film school in New York was at WGAM in Presque Isle in 1980. “That’s when I got involved.”

On Oct. 11, Rudman, Junger and a cameraman went to Moscow, where they were joined by a former Time and Newsweek photographer. The crew then traveled to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan on the Afghanistan border, to do a story on Massoud’s murder.

“Dushanbe is where the families of the northern alliance leaders have stayed for the last four or five years,” Rudman said. “We had access to Massoud’s son, his bodyguard and [a cameraman] who was in the room where the assassination took place. Two men, terrorists, had posed as journalists to interview Massoud. One had a bomb strapped to his waist. The cameraman who survived the assassination told us that when the dust cleared the terrorist was in two pieces on the ground.”

From there, the crew flew by northern alliance helicopter into the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan, and then on to Jabul O Saraj, just north of Kabul. They rented a mud-and-straw hut and slept on the floor. They were charged $150 a day for the hut, which served as the crew’s primitive newsroom. The owner eventually demanded even more in rent as compensation for parking spaces and for what he considered the journalists’ excessive output of human waste.

“I’m not making that up,” Rudman said with a laugh.

While awaiting the push into Taliban-held Kabul, the crew produced a “Prime Time” story about the network of caves in which Osama bin Laden might be holed up and another about the soldiers in the northern alliance camps.

“That’s when we got caught in the crossfire,” Rudman said. “It was my first taste of haphazard combat. It was all new to me. Everything can seem so peaceful at one moment, but it’s very deceptive because suddenly all hell breaks loose.”

Threatened with World War II-vintage weapons and AK-47s in the hands of boy soldiers with little training, Rudman learned that day why luck is often a journalist’s only defense against the true perils of the war in Afghanistan.

“If you’re going to get hit,” he

said, “it’s not because some soldier is aiming at you but because someone is shooting in your general direction and you just happen to be in the way.”

A few days later, while interviewing soldiers on the front line, the crew got caught in a tank and mortar attack – an even more terrifying crossfire because they could hear each approaching round for a little more than two seconds before it hit.

“We had no idea where to run,” he said. “On top of that, the U.S. military’s B-52s are carpet-bombing the Taliban forces 50 yards from you, so friendly fire is a real consideration. When you’ve got bombs dropping out of the sky and children soldiers lobbing mortars in your direction, the chances of getting hit by accident are very good.”

The film crew accompanied the northern alliance forces as they swept into Kabul. Thousands of residents streamed down the highway north of the capital to greet their liberators. The journalists were embarrassed to be hailed as saviors simply because their skin was the same color as the pilots who dropped the bombs.

“All they knew was that after five years of oppression, their oppressors had left town,” Rudman said. “It was interesting to see people dancing in the streets where no one had been allowed to dance for so long, to hear the music playing and see the women without burqas across their faces. Although I had never been to Kabul before, I could see a pall lifting from the city. For that moment, the people of Kabul experienced a breath of fresh air called freedom, and I was glad to have witnessed it.”

Although the journalists reported from Kabul a while longer, filing segments for “Prime Time,” “Nightline” and “Good Morning America,” the story they had come for was reaching its natural conclusion. Rudman had lost 20 pounds and had been sick twice during his stay. After four weeks in Afghanistan, they began to devise an exit strategy. Each prospective route home promised to be long and arduous, involving cars, helicopters and possibly even donkeys.

On the advice of a 35-year-old “fixer” named Abdullah, who knew the safest passage out, the crew traveled for five days back to the Panjshir Valley and then to Dushanbe. Along the route they did not take, four other journalists whose luck suddenly ran out were pulled from their cars and shot dead.

Rudman got home the day before Thanksgiving and spent the holiday in Philadelphia with his parents and a brother.

“Oh, yes, I gave thanks,” he said.