Dear Friends,
David Kaplan was fatally shot by a sniper in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on August 13, 1992. At 45 years old, David was a veteran TV news producer for ABC, and a former colleague. Ever since I shared my Honor Your Intuition blog a few weeks ago, David has been on my mind.
On August 14, 1992, I was taking a leisurely stroll down Calle Calatrava in an old section of Madrid where I was living. I had started a new business called Más Pelotas Que Nadie after leaving my journalism position in London. (That’s a story for another week.) At the corner was a small market with a newspaper stand in front. It was my custom to pick up El País, one of the prominent newspapers in Spain, and go for my morning café con leche and Tortilla Española.
This morning, when I glanced into the clear plastic newspaper dispenser, I didn’t need to read the headline to know what had happened. There was a picture of David Kaplan on a stretcher and, somehow, I knew it was him and I knew he was dead. “Un periodista muere en el ataque contra la caravana de Panic en Sarajevo,” the headline read. (A journalist dies in an attack on Panic’s caravan in Sarajevo.) Milan Panic was the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia at the time.
I remember thinking that an American newspaper would never have shown that graphic picture of David. But even before that thought, a series of memories and decisions flashed through my mind. Less than a year before that, I was at a bar in Washington, D.C., after finishing up a story for Primetime Live. David and I were having a drink (probably more than one) and smoking cigarettes. I was smoking Marlboro Gold, the longer and “lighter” cigarette. David was smoking Marlboro Red, the hardcore version. David was a heavy smoker—four packs a day compared with my one pack—and I said to him, “You’ve got to cut back on smoking.” David replied, without missing a beat, “Cigarettes are not going to kill me.” It struck me at the time as being an unusual thing to say. He must have known. Somehow, he had known. And that’s what passed through my mind as I looked at his dead body on the cover of the newspaper that morning.
I also knew I was on that same path but had stepped off just in time. My mind flashed back to a moment in the Spring of 1991. I was lying ill, in a mud house in a tiny settlement on the Turkish/Iraqi border. I was covering the post-Gulf War Kurdish crisis, a distressing human disaster, with hundreds of fleeing Kurdish Iraqis dying of disease and getting blown up stepping on land mines. Death was in front of them and behind them. With no facilities, and limited water and electricity, bodies were piling up in the makeshift morgue, formerly a mosque. After a week of blood and death, from babies to old men and women, I was numb.
I got very sick myself, and was on the verge of being medevacked out, until I stabilized. It was the second close call I had had as a journalist—the first being nearly shot during the Romanian revolution—and I knew somehow that my allotment of lives would be up. I made the decision then to step out of war and revolution journalism, before it was too late.
Reading the news about David’s last tour was excruciating. The story he was covering in Bosnia was in my beat before I left ABC, and, very likely, I would have been in Sarajevo that day instead of him. David had a premonition about his death as I had had a premonition that, if I didn’t move on from that position at ABC, I might have been the one on the front page of El País that morning, instead of David.
It seems morbid to thank David, but that sentiment comes to mind. Two years ago, my husband Colin and I drove through the Balkans and Eastern Europe. I had never been to Sarajevo and wanted to see it. I recorded two videos while I was there. One from a hotel in Sarajevo, and the other while driving down Sniper Alley, where David was killed.
As I reflect back on the 26 years I’ve been given since 1992, I am grateful beyond words. And you can be assured that when I get that feeling in my heart or my gut that something isn’t right, or something is right, I follow it.
With gratitude, humility and a tribute to the life of David Kaplan,
Barbara
CEO, ROI Communication
Chief Catalyst, Living ROI
I created Living ROI as a passion, to share what I’ve learned and support others who want to live more authentic, joyful and fulfilling lives. If you’d like to get my weekly newsletter, you can subscribe here.
