The Foreign Correspondent.

• Author: Brouwer, Joel

kneels in red dust to unpack his camera. Swarms of children, bellies swollen with air, poke his ridiculous pale skin. The dead are piled at the edge of town, awaiting the Red Cross backhoe. Someone's thrown a dog on top of the heap. The correspondent focuses on a woman's slack face. Her earrings glare, and he stoops to remove them. He once believed his job was only to see, to be a third eye for those of us hungry for more than a meager pair can provide. He would haunt the world, its cardboard slums and firefights, its brambled clearings where hooded men dump bones on moonless nights, snapping fact after fact for our review. But he soon learned the ropes: skip the fill-flash and the starving man's eyes sink back into poignant shadow. The beggar with one coin in his cup has more punch than the cripple with ten. If the earrings glare, unhook them. Years...