Journalist Michael Kelly killed in Humvee accident in Iraq This is shocking news. Kelly was reporting for The Washington Post and The Atlantic, and was one of the embedded columnists I was following regularly. He's the first embedded journalist from the U.S. to die during this war. I admired Kelly for leaving the comfort of a desk job to join the troops. I like to think I would have done the same thing, if given the opportunity.
Today's story on the Post website describes Kelly as "a caustic conservative who was merciless in his criticism of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and was generally supportive of President Bush." His last dispatch, dated April 3, began this way:
EAST OF THE EUPHRATES RIVER, Iraq -- Near the crest of the bridge across the Euphrates that Task Force 3-69 Armor of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division seized yesterday afternoon was a body that lay twisted from its fall. He had been an old man -- poor, not a regular soldier -- judging from his clothes. He was lying on his back, not far from one of several burning skeletons of the small trucks that Saddam Hussein's willing and unwilling irregulars employed. The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the U.S. Army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on.