A Captivating Tale
New York Times reporter David Rohde’s five-part series, “Held by the Taliban,” is one of the best pieces of journalism that I’ve ever read and serves as an important reminder that America still needs major newspapers like the New York Times and old-school reporters like Rohde to uncover truth in faraway lands.
Rohde, an Afghan journalist and their driver were kidnapped on Nov. 10, 2008, and held hostage for 7 months, 10 days by the Taliban.
The piece begins:
THE car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.
Another gunman in the passenger seat turned and stared at us as he gripped his Kalashnikov rifle. No one spoke. I glanced at the bleak landscape outside — reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye could see — and feared we would be dead within minutes.
Tim VanOrden drives for the finish line.
Runners/endurance athletes are known for being a bit crazy, but Tim VanOrden goes way above and beyond the norm, which is why I decided to profile him for the Bennington Banner in April 2008.
I went on an eight mile run with VanOrden on the vast trails behind his parents’ Bennington home, where he does most of his training. To this day, I’m not sure if I really understand VanOrden (what makes him tick?/what caused his drastic life change?), but I tried to present him as I saw him, with little judgment, in the story below and hopefully allowed readers to make their own conclusions.
This video also ran with the story. It was the Banner’s first original video shot by photographer Peter Crabtree.
BENNINGTON — Tim VanOrden will do whatever it takes today to get his body to the top of a 62-story skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles before hundreds of others.
But unlike his competitors, he is only fueled by fruits and vegetables, some nuts and some seeds, and he eats them only in their natural state: uncooked, unprocessed and unrefined. He is a raw vegan athlete and has been for the past three years.
That is when a mysterious illness caused him to quit his job and try something entirely new. That is when he started running up mountains, then buildings, now in snowshoes and on the track.