The (Not So Quiet American

What do you do if your interview subject goes What do you do if your interview subject goes beyond captivating your audience and actually beyond captivating your audience and actually captures you instead? Newly liberated New York Times captures you instead? Newly liberated New York Times reporter and maine native David Rohde wrestles reporter and maine native David Rohde wrestles with the shadow existence of being… with the shadow existence of being…

(Not So) (Not So) uiet merican QV The The uiet QmericanV by Donna StuaRt

On June 19, 2009, New York Times reporter David Rohde and Tahir Luddin, the Afghan journalist serving as his translator, escaped from the Taliban in Pakistan. It was 7 months, 9 days after they, along with their Afghan driver, Asad Mangal, had been kidnapped–and just 9 months, 13 days after Rohde had married his wife, Kristen, at St. Brendan’s Chapel in Biddeford Pool.

During this interval, the Times and the international media had kept quiet about the kidnapping out of concern for the three men’s safety while the newspaper, the U.S. government, and the captives’ families tried to negotiate their release. No ransom was ever paid, no rescue mission mounted. While their captors slept after a mentally exhausting checkah (a Pakistani version of parcheesi) marathon–shades of the Epic of Gilgamesh–with the captives, Rohde and Luddin simply slipped over a wall under cover of a rattling swamp cooler and walked to the safety of a nearby Pakistani military base, with only barking dogs taking note of their anticlimactic departure. and rigorous in its judgments.”

Rohde spent his formative years in Maine, graduating from Fryeburg Academy before attending Bates College for two years, then transferring to Brown University, where he graduated with a major in East Asian history. He tells us he’s loved Maine holidays in the past, so it’s easy to wonder if he’s up here with us now.

But what even he must still be wondering is, what elements of his psychological makeup inspired him to court acute journalistic and personal danger a second time around? And what has he learned about himself and our Starbucks culture that seems to demand such risks from him and his colleagues?

i enjoy journalism and exposing the truth. that is, i think, a by-product of growing up in Maine…where part of the culture is being a straight shooter and of [having] the focus on others, rather than on yourself.

Rohde was part of the Times team that won a Pulitzer for its 2008 coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was his second Pulitzer–and his second kidnapping. The first was in Bosnia in 1995 when, working for the Christian Science Monitor, Rohde played a pivotal role in exposing the ethnic cleansing of Muslims. He was released after 10 days, thanks to the efforts of his family, his editors, and American diplomats, most notably Richard Holbrooke, now the Obama Administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the aftermath, Rohde published a book about the massacre, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II, which one reviewer called “journalism at its committed best–painstaking, compassionate, full of telling detail,

In “Casting the Inevitable David Rohde Movie,” BlackBook Magazine’s Ben Barna says the obvious choice to play you is George Clooney, but says that you’re “kinda nerdy,” so he’d cast Casey Affleck, 20 pounds thinner and wearing glasses. He sees the British actor who played the lead hijacker in United 93, Khalid Abdalla, as Tahir Luddin and Naomi Watts as your wife. Do you agree–or do you have other choices?

If there’s a movie that will thoughtfully teach people more about the Taliban, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and why 885 American soldiers have died there, that’s a movie worth making.

After returning home around Labor Day, there were signs put up along Route 1 [as part of the Ogunquit-to-Portland Run for the Fallen] with photographs of [59] soldiers with ties to Maine who’d all died fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s much more dan-

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