Two weeks ago I was asked by one of my oldest friends to relate a time in my life that I felt was extraordinary. Typically when faced with such questions on the spot I stutter and hesitate, replying with “I’ll get back to you.” Fortunately for the flow of our conversation, I had been prompted to evaluate my “personal template” for a class recently. The exercise forced me to look at the motivations in my past that have influenced the choices that I have made, with a specific mind for my path into journalism.
One of the readings that we did for this class was a letter from reporter David Halberstam to his daughter, published in Parade Magazine in 1982. Halberstam was one of the primary New York Times reporters during the Vietnam War, and within this letter to his then 2-year old daughter he writes of a feeling of homecoming he experienced when he landed in Saigon as a foreign correspondent.
I remember it as if it were yesterday, the ride in from Tan Son Nhut Airport, driving through the semi-rural outskirts of Saigon, sensing the rare combination of energy and beauty, yet aware as well of the dark shadow over the land, for there were already troops everywhere. Never as in that moment had life seemed so real to me, never had I felt so connected to a particular moment; it was as if, and I know this will sound odd and possibly arrogant to you, I had finally arrived at the place where I was always destined to go.
We were asked in class whether or not we had experienced a moment that resonated with us as this moment did for Halberstam. My first instinct was that I hadn’t, and the ensuing spiral of self-doubt that I was actually pursuing my passions was troubling. However, once I cleared my head and sat down to write on the formative experiences in my life, things started to stand out in my personal timeline. One of those moments occurred last November, in the late hours of the night that Barack Obama was elected president.
I was working on a semester-long photo and audio project on the election, and I found myself in a cluster of celebrants in the streets of downtown Austin, holding my audio recorder aloft in one hand while I shot feverishly with the other. The people around me started reciting the pledge of allegiance, and as I took part in a ritual I hadn’t performed since high school, I realized that I felt the weight of its words as never before. I was surrounded by democratic supporters, many of whom had been disillusioned with the previous administration, who were actively and publicly participating in an overtly patriotic ritual. The significance of the moment as I joined in with my own voice reminded me why I was still in school, working on a masters degree in photojournalism.
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