Throwback Thursday: Getting the hell out of Dodge

I will spend the rest of my life slurping congee from a cracked bowl in a secret prison...

(Me, With Statue of Liberty replica in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, 1989)

We’re coming up on June 4th, an anniversary I never fail to remember, even if I don’t mention it out loud.

It is the date of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a bloody horror that left hundreds, perhaps thousands, dead.

Today’s Throwback Thursday retread, first published as a 5 a.m. Story three years ago, offers up some very personal memories of a night when many of my reporter and photographer colleagues put themselves at great risk when the tanks rolled in.

I was in the Reuters Beijing Bureau, some five miles from the bloodshed, a perfect setup for my all-time favorite foreign correspondent story about myself. You can read that account here, in Getting the hell out of Dodge.

I’m not going to spoil the punchline, but I think the anecdote still holds up, 37 years after it happened.

I will be reminiscing in person with the two other key players this Sunday, and you may be certain the anecdote will be retold over drinks.

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