The believers who spend their lives in the war zone

Through the fog of early morning waking, the radio spat a few disjointed words at me - first there was foreign correspondent and, as I woke up, American, and then, Reuters.

I knew then that it was Kurt Schork. But somehow hearing the news reader actually say his name and announce his death stunned me. This wasn't supposed to happen to journalists like Kurt. He was too experienced, too sensible, too sober. A non-smoker, a non-drinker, a 5.30 a.m. riser. He was 53 but looked 40. I had been bumping into him since we both started this job 10 years ago and he was one of the most level-headed, hard-working and dedicated journalists I had known.

When we last met in East Timor he was being, as usual, non-committal about his private life. His girlfriend in Washington seemed to be putting up with his wanderings. Why Kurt Schork covered almost every single conflict in the last 10 years, in places as dangerous as Bosnia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, I don't know. Partly I think because it challenged him hugely and he needed a challenge.

I also suspect he was a believer. A believer that the job is important and journalists can make a difference. Miguel Moreno, the Spanish cameraman who died with him, certainly made a difference when he provided the world with the only pictures of the suffering of the people in Grozny, playing Russian roulette with his own life to get them.

In the last year or so I've met others like them. East Timor was a good place for believers. Max Staal, a freelance cameraman, stayed behind when the pack of journalists panicked and departed after a BBC correspondent was wounded. His pictures were the only ones coming out of the country and showed desperate, frightened people with their children fleeing into the mountains.

At the time when the United Nations in New York was considering abandoning East Timor to the fate of the Indonesian military (in the same way it had abandoned the city of Srebrenica five years earlier) Staal's pictures were very important.

The other believer in Timor was Marie Colvin, of the Sunday Times, who stayed on the UN compound in the capital, Dili, with thousands of women and children who had fled there. Her reports of plans to abandon those people helped bring military intervention to Timor and end the terror of the Indonesian army.

I asked her about it afterwards, about how hard it was to stay behind when all of her colleagues were bailing out, and she said: "I looked at those women and children there - and they were all looking up at me to see what I would do - and I just couldn't leave them."

Colvin and Staal survived Timor - but Sanders Thoenes, a reporter with the Financial Times, did not. His mutilated body was dumped down an alleyway after he ran into a crowd of hostile militia men. He had been in the country about three hours before he was murdered. At a rather sad memorial service in the garden of our hotel the next day, an Australian army chaplain couldn't pronounce his name properly and ended with a reminder about not putting toilet rolls down the loo.

I have a good friend who said once that there is a certain logic in thinking that if you keep doing this for long enough, you will get hurt. After the news of Kurt's death, I went for a long walk to think and ask myself the question why any of us do this.

The answer probably lies close to what one editor I know said after Veronica Guerin was murdered three years ago: "We are driven by ego, insecurity and sometimes a desire to do some bit of good."

The ego is self-explanatory - it's a cool enough job description. The insecurity, ditto, and he missed out mentioning the fun, the adventure and the camaraderie. But the desire "to do some bit of good", while it doesn't have to be trumpeted, should be recognised.

Miguel's pictures from Chechnya were the people of Grozny's only window to the world. The belated intervention in Bosnia happened because of international public pressure to put an end to what they were seeing night after night on the television.

Kurt was there through it all with Corinne Dufka, the Reuters photographer who was wounded by a landmine in Bosnia, and said once: "I feel it is my responsibility to work for change. If I were forced to do sports assignments I'd go back to being a social worker."

In Sierra Leone, the continued intervention of the British military is fuelled partly by press reports sent back that acknowledge it to be a good thing that a fine army is stopping killers who cut off the limbs of children.

At the end of my little walk, the words of Martha Gellhorn, the grande dame of war correspondents who died a few years ago in her 80s, came into my mind. In the conclusion to her book, The View From the Ground, a collection of her writing on everything from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and beyond, she writes:

"All my reporting life, I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don't need to worry about that. My responsibility was the effort. I belong to a global fellowship, men and women concerned with the welfare of the planet and its least-protected inhabitants. I plan to spend my remaining years applauding that fellowship, cheering from the sidelines, shouting: `Good for you, right on, that's the stuff, never give up. Never give up'. "

On Wednesday night, as Kurt and Miguel drove out of Freetown she, I'm sure, would have been cheering them. Now all that is left for us is to mourn them and the loss to our trade of men whose courage the world still desperately needs.