New York Times reporter David Rohde, shown in 1995, escaped from the Taliban.

Norman Boucher
Brown Alumni Magazine

"I found a leg! I found a leg!"

With those words, shouted into a Belgrade telephone to his editor in 1995, David Rohde let the world know that he had found a mass grave in Srebrenica, a site that was eventually found to contain the remains of 7,000 Muslim, mostly civilian, men during the Bosnian War.

Rohde, who last Friday night ended seven months of Taliban captivity by climbing over a wall with an Afghan colleague, eventually won a Pulitzer for his work on the Serbian massacres of Bosnian Muslims. In the process he began a career marked by unusual bravery, focus, modesty, and integrity.

While so many observers seem almost gleeful over the decline of the traditional journalism, Rohde is a reminder of what journalism at its best is still capable of. In an era of self-promoters, Rohde never ever wants the story to be about him. As a result, he's the best reporter you've never heard of.

I was fortunate to spend a day with Rohde in the fall of 1997 for a profile in the Brown Alumni Magazine (he is a 1990 graduate of Brown). His excellent book about Bosnia, "Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II," had just been published, and he had recently left the Christian Science Monitor for the New York Times. We took a cab to Queens that day so he could report a story for the paper's metro section.

At the Times, a Pulitzer did not exempt him from the beginner's stint at metro, and in 1997 Rohde was doing night cops: every half hour from 7 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. his job was to call the police department's public-information officer and ask if anything had happened. If something had, he went out and covered the story.

On the day we spent together, he was using his off time to check out other stories. He seemed to have no life outside journalism. He looked at commonplace things and saw stories. While traveling around the city, he began to notice an unusual number of young people hanging around neighborhood streets in wheelchairs.

These, he discovered, were victims of street violence, and in Queens he had an appointment to interview a young woman paralyzed from the waist down from a stray bullet that had found her head. Rohde was quiet, unassuming, empathetic, and the woman began to open up to him. After the shooting, she told Rohde, "I was angry for four-and-a-half years." Then she realized, "I'm injured, not dead."

As we hung out that day, I asked Rohde dozens of questions about Bosnia, and he provided me with enough detail for a long profile. As was evidenced later in Afghanistan, Rohde is the kind of reporter who's willing to take grave risks for a story. On one of his clandestine visits into Serbia looking for more mass graves, he was captured by the Serbs and held for 10 days.

As a history major at Brown, he had a knack for taking the longer view of his actions. At one point he interrupted our conversation to say, "Please don't make too much of what I did in Bosnia. I think it would have been more dangerous to be looking for a grave in Mississippi in 1960 than in Bosnia in 1995."

He even cautioned me about ascribing noble intentions to his work. He took risks in part because he wanted the story all to himself, he said. After learning of his plan to sneak into Serbia, his roommate in Bosnia, a New York Times reporter, said, "It's crazy to go alone. Let me come. I won't do any stories." Rohde, who worked for the Christian Science Monitor at the time, refused the offer. "I knew," he told me later, "that even if our stories came out at the same time, the news would be that the New York Times found the graves."

There's a temptation to romanticize Rohde's accomplishments, but the Rohde I knew that day in New York did not. His career so far has focused on the victims of violence and war, on getting readers to understand the forgotten, out-of-the-way stories that can get us closer to the truth than the endless debates over politics and policy.

Rhode believes in a journalism that can effect change. And like all good reporters he wants to get the story first.