Listening to Don North over the phone, one is reminded of the slow, measured speech of Edward R. Murrow, mixed with a dash of Humphrey Bogart-era Hollywood.
His voice was too “American” for the BBC, but it suits the war reporter who’s covered conflicts for radio, television and print for more than half a century.
North isn’t American. He’s from Delta — Ladner, to be specific. He grew up admiring Edgar Dunning, then-editor of the Delta Optimist. And he wanted to be a war correspondent.
Why?
“Well, that’s a good question, coming from a peaceful little town like Ladner,” he said. “Maybe I was bored or something.”
Perhaps it was boredom that pushed him to move to Hong Kong; perhaps it was the feeling that reporting the news from CBC’s Vancouver office wasn’t “real journalism.” Whatever the reason, North got himself overseas, working for the Hong Kong China Mail newspaper in the early 1960s.
For a young man eager to make his mark as a journalist, it was the perfect opportunity.
Nearby, North Borneo was under attack, part of a guerrilla war stemming from Indonesia’s opposition to the creation of Malaysia. North was sent on assignment.
“There’s no doubt about it, it was an adventure,” he said. He was surprised by the intensity of the war, the danger and the loss of life. But, he said, “it was a job that I felt competent to do, to report and write about the situations I was seeing.”
It instilled in North the confidence that he could be a war reporter, and with good timing. About a thousand kilometres away, a war was heating up in Vietnam.
In 1964, 23-year-old North took his 20-pound tape recorder, his 16mm film video camera, two 35mm Nikons, a pen and his notepad, and set off to cover the war: a one-man media outlet, freelancing for everyone and anyone.
It wasn’t easy.
“There was a time after I experienced … the first really tough combat … that I was reluctant to go back into the field again,” he said. “Because I had seen friends of mine be killed and injured, and it haunted me that that would be my fate.”
For several weeks, North stayed in Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City), writing radio reports and staying “away from the mud and the combat of the army.”
“Finally, after a few weeks, I got better again and continued [working in the field].”
Vietnam wasn’t the same adventure North Borneo had been — he found some of the intense combat and its effect on civilians particularly disturbing, like when he visited local hospitals where children had been burned by napalm.
“That was difficult to see and experience,” North said. “And to document. I felt I had an obligation to tell that story and shine some light on some of the terrible things that war makes people do.”
“I always felt the work I was doing was contributing to an understanding of the war that would, I hoped, eventually turn people against it,” he continued. “I was disappointed that it didn’t happen that way.”
But he kept going, reporting on the deepening conflict that ultimately led the Americans to withdraw in 1973.
“Hope springs eternal that the next story is going to be very revealing and educational and cause a lot of people to see that the Vietnam War was a senseless slaughter,” he said.
But North’s career didn’t end in Vietnam. From his early 20s into his 70s, North covered 15 different theatres of war, somehow escaping un-wounded from each of them. But he’s had many close calls with death.
Five years ago, North was covering the conflict in Afghanistan, working with Canadian soldiers. He was set to go on an Canadian Air Force flight from Cairo into Syria to pick up the bodies of six Canadian soldiers who had died in Syria.
Global News, his employer at the time, decided he had been overseas long enough. North was told to not get on the flight, and to come back to Toronto instead.
Half an hour after the Air Force plane left the base, the commander called him over. The plane had been shot down by a missile.
“I would consider that a close call,” North said about the flight.
At 76-years-old, North doesn’t head out to cover wars anymore. “Not like I used to,” he said.
“I’m very tempted. I sometimes talk about going over to Iraq or Syria, and next thing I know my wife has hidden my glasses and my passport,” he laughed, “and discouraged me from that.”
But just because he’s not in the field doesn’t mean he’s not reporting. In a couple of weeks, North will be travelling to Spain to report on the Caledonian independence movement.
“That has interested me, and we’ll check that out,” he said. “But it’s not exactly a shooting war anymore.”
