Mother Jones; Maher Attar/Sygma/Getty; AP; New York Times

Beirut was the place to be if you were an action-junkie journalist in the 1980s. Civil War. Militias, the PLO, an Israeli invasion, the occupation of Lebanon. Car Bombings. Truck bombings. And more.

It was an exotic city with an ancient corniche winding along the Mediterranean to the snow-capped Shouf mountains some 30 miles away. Driving through the cedars of Lebanon was glorious. But behind the postcard facade, it was deadly, and dangerous, and cruel.

Everything that was happening there had been festering for centuries, sometimes exploding into bloodshed. Journalists like Terry Anderson, who died over the weekend, were drawn to it, addicted to the action of it, and would not have been anywhere else.

Anderson was no stranger to action. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and experienced combat in Vietnam. He went to journalism school after that and was a veteran Associated Press correspondent when he was kidnapped in March of 1985 by Hezbollah. He was finally released more than six years later. He was not the first nor the last hostage taken by Islamic militants during that time. But he became a global figure, a pawn in a nasty game, and a symbol and hero for many journalists and others. And he suffered.

I reported out of Beirut from 1982 to 1984. At that time, I was the Africa correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer. After a US-brokered truce between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization collapsed in June 1982, I was sent from Nairobi to Lebanon. I had recently survived my own ordeal as a prisoner the month before. I was reporting on a rampage by the Ugandan army and the slaughter of thousands of Ugandan civilians following the ouster of the dictator Idi Amin. The overthrow of his regime led to a civil war. The army did not........

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