Firsthand Account

Schanberg stayed in Neak Luong a day and night, interviewing villagers and taking pictures. When local authorities learned he had been gathering material, they put him in confinement overnight. But he managed to send his story to his newspaper. Here is how Schanberg's story begins:

The destruction in this town from the accidental bombing on Monday is extensive.

Big chunks of the center of town have been demolished, including two-story concrete buildings reinforced with steel. Clusters of wood and thatch huts where soldiers lived with their families have been erased, so that the compounds where they once stood look like empty fields strewn with rubble.

Schanberg quotes the air attaché at the Embassy as saying, "I saw one stick of bombs go through the town, but it was no great disaster." Schanberg then goes on to point out that there were almost 400 casualties, and he takes the reader through the village:

The atmosphere in Neak Luong, on the east bank of the Mekong River 38 miles southeast of Phnom Penh, is silent and sad—bewildered at being bombed by an ally. Everyone has lost either relatives or friends; in some cases entire large families were wiped out.

Yesterday afternoon a soldier could be seen sobbing uncontrollably on the riverbank. "All my family is dead! Take my picture, take my picture! Let the Americans see me!"

His name is Ken Chan, and his wife and 10 of his children were killed. All he has left is the youngest—an 8-month-old son. The 48-year-old soldier escaped death because he was on sentry duty a few miles away when the bombs fell.

The bombs went down right in the middle of this town from north to south as it lay sleeping shortly after 4:30 a.m. Over 30 craters can be seen on a line nearly a mile long, and people reported others in jungle areas outside the town that this correspondent could not reach.

The story states that a third of the village hospital was demolished and then quotes the Air Force spokesman as saying there was a "little bit of damage to the northeast corner of the hospital" and some "structural cracks" in a wall. In his story, Schanberg is like a bulldog that refuses to let his quarry go.

Although the attaché had described a compound for Cambodian Marines that had been destroyed as consisting of "hootches," the Times reporter points out that the Cambodians lived with their families in these shacks.

A woman's scalp sways on a clump of tall grass. A bloody pillow here, a shred of a sarong caught on a barbed wire there. A large bloodstain on the brown earth. A pair of infant's rubber sandals among some unexploded military shells.

The colonel is quoted as saying about the reactions of the townspeople, "They were sad, but they understand that this is war and that in war these things happen." Then Schanberg writes:

"I do not understand why it happens," said Chea Salan, a 21-year-old soldier who lost relatives and army buddies. "Before, every time we saw the planes coming we were happy because we knew the planes came to help us. Now I have lost heart."

His Purpose

Schanberg said, "My goal always, when I was overseas was to say to myself, ‘Now, try to put the reader where you were today. Make the reader feel and smell and hear what you felt and smelled and heard.' Get the reader engaged. That's your challenge, and when you can do that, draw them into your experience. If you witness something awesome or awful, then you want the awfulness to come out. (I think that emotion belongs in stories, too.) That was my purpose every day, to bring people where I was."

Effective Reporting = Effective Writing

Schanberg's reporting demonstrates how our guidelines for reliable copy can be used with consummate craftsmanship:

• Verification: Assertions are checked against the reporter's observations.
• Dramatization: Interviews with those involved personalize the event.
• Conviction: The detailed and specific observations give a reader the sense of the relationship of the report to truth.
• Balance: Both views, the military's and that of the victims, are presented.

Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize and a Sigma Delta Chi Award for his coverage of Cambodia.