For Kate Webb

A friend kindly forwarded a piece from today's New York Times Magazine -- an article from its annual remembrances of those who passed on during the year. The story was on Kate Webb, a war reporter whom both of us first met in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. This unforgettable New Zealander, with her long, brunette hair, her voice raspy from the years of cigarettes and whiskey, was one of the two or three best and most fearless reporters I encountered in eighteen years abroad.

It almost didn't matter how many consecutive nights you sat down with Kate for a beer. She had another hair-raising memory to recount, the type of story that -- if it alone had happened to anyone else, why he or she would have dined off of it for the rest of their lives. Not Kate. She was just passing the time with friends.

Like her first experience with journalists in Indonesia in the mid-1960s. Suharto had gone on his murderous rampage in Java, in which his forces were said to have killed about a million people. Kate, at the time about 22 years old, happened to be visiting the island, and hid out in a hut or something as the killing went on, all the time fearful that she would be next. When she got back to Jakarta and told correspondent acquaintances what she had witnessed, no one believed her. It was six months later before conclusive evidence came out, and Kate's legend began.

Or the time in 1971 when, now Saigon bureau chief for United Press International, she was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers. She emerged three weeks later, delirious and malarial, to the gaping jaws of her friends -- Kate had been reported dead; the Times was among those who published an obituary.

Or the time that an Afghan warlord pulled Kate away from the telex machine in the Kabul Hotel by her hair. Kate escaped. But the bald spot on her skull showed what she had to leave behind to manage it.

Kate was often to be found at that telex machine, filing her stories to Paris. Once, she had typed in the code to the Paris operator, and received a message back from her editors indicating a live connection, but other correspondents were at other telex machines in other capitals, waiting in line ahead of her to send their stories. She was told to stand by. Just then, a rocket landed just outside the hotel, shattering the plate-glass window and sending shards across the lobby behind her, details that Kate now urgently relayed to the Paris operator in an effort to get him to hurry up so she could get to safety. "C'est la guerre" -- Such is war -- came back the reply.

And so it was, Kate would say.

Kate died in May at the age of 64. She had retired in 2001, feeling she was too old to be in her default position at the front lines. She was a mentor and generous friend. Rest in peace, Kate.

Photo: Ohio Today