BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen on the mindset journalists must cultivate if they want to function in war zones.

From the BBC (posted June 16):

If, as a journalist in a dangerous place, you worry that you are getting dressed for the last time every morning before you go to work, then you are probably in the wrong business.

You need to know the risks, and to take precautions, but to be calm about them too, and even to deny them.

That cannot be done without believing that you will make it through the day, and that if you have some close calls you will be able to make jokes about them when you are having dinner.

You need to be able to deal with danger, to have had some training and done some planning if you are going to function in the realm of time and fear that James Fenton describes so brilliantly in the poem that was commissioned to go with the new memorial.

You have to believe that you will stay alive because you are being careful, or because your experience will see you through, and it helps too if you are young and feel indestructible and the sun is shining and you just know it could not possibly happen to you.

When journalists no longer feel at least some of that, they tend to stop covering wars.