The Death of a Journalist
(Page 10 of 11)
September/October 1996
Lynda Schuster, Granta (www.granta.com)
After a while my companions fell into an intoxicated sleep. The sun hung just below the port window, the sky smeared an incandescent purple-pink. Al stirred suddenly, opened his eyes, and said, 'My God, it's my thirty-first wedding anniversary,' then went back to sleep. On and on we flew, hurtling through a dusk of matchless beauty: the glory of the heavens at my elbow, the pieces of my husband at my feet.
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I don't remember much of Dial's funeral. An exhaustion, a kind of emotional numbness, set in after we reached Los Angeles, as if all my strength were spent in that single act of retrieving his body. I do recall one thing vividly: On the morning of the funeral, I awoke to find I had my period. Oddly, this seemed more real than Dial's death. Here was something palpable, concrete, conclusive: I would never have a child with him.
I received hundreds of letters, telegrams, and telexes of condolence. They came from journalists in Atlanta, Beijing, Bonn, Boston, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, London, Manila, Moscow, Nairobi, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Tokyo, Washington; from the Foreign Correspondents' Associations in Hong Kong, Israel, El Salvador, Florida; from the U.S. ambassadors in Mexico and Honduras, the U.S. embassies in Nicaragua and Panama, the consulates of Australia, Britain, France, and Israel in Los Angeles; from senators, congressmen, and the vice president of Honduras; from bankers, businessmen, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith; from complete strangers who felt compelled to write. I read every one and cried over them all.
The comfort these rituals provided was tempered by the emerging political implications of Dial's death. The coroner in Los Angeles concluded that Dial's injuries could have been caused only by a massive upward explosion -- despite the Honduran government's claim, supposedly backed up by three witnesses, that Nicaraguan soldiers had fired a rocket from across the border. An American reporter and photographer went to the site of the attack, where they saw the land mines embedded in the road, the demolished car, the crater. They took pictures of everything and showed them to officials at the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa. Subsequently the Honduran government and the embassy decided the occupants of the white Toyota were indeed killed by an exploding land mine -- planted by Nicaraguan soldiers. But other military analysts, who saw the photographs, believe the charges were of a type used only by the Contras, the U.S.-supported guerrillas. I will probably never know the truth.
Not long after the funeral, Dial's death ceased to be news. Benigno Aquino, the Filipino political dissident, was shot dead on the tarmac at Manila airport by government soldiers. Two hundred and forty-three U.S. Marines were blown up in Beirut. American troops invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada. The world, in other words, moved on. And so, eventually, would I.
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