Reality Czech
CNN’s Etzler on Afghan beat

Tomas Etzler

Editor’s note: Tomas Etzler is a master’s student at the School who left Boulder in 1999 to take a job with the CNN International Desk in Atlanta. Now an editor and producer there, he was one of the network’s field producers rotated into northern Afghanistan working 24-hour shifts to cover the fighting there.

Before he left, CNN gave Etzler a budget to purchase camping equipment because he would be sleeping in tents at the U.S. Marine base in Kandahar. He worked with CNN anchor Martin Savidge and correspondent Ben Wedeman.

Graduate student Vicky Sama, a former CNN producer who teaches broadcast news courses at the School, asked him to keep in touch and write down his experiences, which are recounted below.

Etzler, who is from the Czech Republic, recently signed a contract with a major Czech daily newspaper to write a weekly column titled “American Notebook with Tomas Etzler.”  

• Jan. 22 – Hello Vicky. There is a line for the computer behind me so I will be quick. I am now in Kandahar where I arrived on Monday (Jan. 21) afternoon local. The 6-hour journey from Quetta in Pakistan was unbelievable. Incredible desert scenery, refugee camps, border crossing, Al Qaida graves along the road, utter, utter poverty everywhere, bombed bridges, destroyed tanks and other machinery, Afghan militias ... everything was fascinating. I spent a night in the town – Kandahar is very depressing – and now am at the Kandahar airport, which is fortified and in hands of U.S. Marines and U.S. Army. FBI is also here. I already did quite a few live shots. It’s freezing here; we are sleeping on the floor of the terminal with most of the windows broken, but I love it!

• Feb. 6 – I am still at the U.S. military base at the Kandahar airport. Living and working conditions are unspeakable. We do not even have running cold water anymore and wash ourselves in bottles of Pakistani mineral water. Freezing weather, power outages, desert dust in our mouths, eyes, clothes, cameras, decks. The Army is very secretive; it is very hard to get any meaningful information from them. And of course no beer!  But everybody here – there are approximately 30-35 journalists including Peter Arnett – enjoys it. It is a great adventure and challenge not experienced every day.  I was looking for The Denver Post CU alumnus (Steve Lipsher ‘89, see page 7) but could not locate him. 

We have filed six packages from here so far and countless live shots.  Next week I am finally getting to the town of Kandahar and will be filing stories from there and from the surrounding areas. We will be hiring some local fighters as security.  I cannot wait. Martin Savidge and the entire crew (five of us) are fantastic people to work with. I feel very privileged to be part of this.

• After Etzler returned to the United States, he continued his diary:

I am still trying to digest the events and impressions of those nine and half weeks.

I learned about my assignment to be a producer for Martin Savidge in Kandahar in the afternoon on Jan. 16. I was leaving 48 hours later. I have never been in Asia or in a war zone, and the first couple of days were totally overwhelming.  I was producing live shots on the very first day of my arrival to Kandahar.

We remained in Kandahar for seven weeks producing countless live shots, approximately four packages a week and 30-minute shows “Live from Afghanistan.”  Our “Live from Afghanistan” got very high ratings, and we went from one show a week to three. We were working 16-18 hours a day without a break in a desert environment, sleeping in sleeping bags, often without running water, with constant power outages. We were freezing at night, baking during the day.

The culmination of our trip was  Operation Anaconda, the biggest air assault and the biggest ground battle involving U.S. armed forces since the Gulf War. Operation Anaconda was launched from the Bagram airbase 25 miles north from Kabul.

After five weeks of intense negotiations with the Pentagon and the Central Command in Florida, we were the only TV crew accompanying the U.S. forces when they stormed the Al Qaida and Taliban in the Shah-e-Kot valley in eastern Afghanistan on March 3.

Martin Savidge and cameraman Scott McWhinnie spent eight unforgettable days with the soldiers in the mountains. The material they brought back was then described by retired generals, including Wesley Clark, as some of the best war-reporting footage ever shot.

Martin and Scottie left the country on March 20. I remained one more week to maintain CNN’s editorial presence at Bagram.  I left the country on Tuesday, March 26.  Besides military operations, I managed to research a story on the early years of Mullah Omar and the rise of the Taliban movement in Kandahar and surrounding villages. The package was later filed by Nic Robertson.

We also shot a package in destroyed villages on the Shamali plains north of Kabul. Before I left, I helped to coordinate a couple of live shots with Walter Rodgers from Kabul, and while in Kabul, I experienced the earthquake that devastated villages 200 kilometers to the north.

The biggest challenge, besides our living and working conditions, was dealing with the Army.  I am not talking about regular soldiers and officers who are terrific and for whom I have a great deal of respect. I am talking about public affairs officers, who often did not seem to understand what our jobs are and treated us almost like Taliban spies.

For weeks I tried to explain to them that this war, which costs over one billion dollars a day, is not their private war, that it is a conflict paid by American taxpayers and that the American public has right to know what is going on.  It took involvement of Admiral Quigley, the spokesman of the Central Command to break the stalemate.

After the breakthrough marked by Operation Anaconda, the working relations between the Army PAOs and media dramatically improved.

Afghanistan is a beautiful country with fascinating deserts in the south and beautiful mountains and valleys in the north.  It is also a completely destroyed country with demolished cities and villages, without any infrastructure, polluted by land mines and other unexploded ordnance.

The 23 years of war were apparent everywhere I went, from bombed houses to burnt orchards, from hundreds of graves along roads to a three-legged camel that had stepped on a mine.

Further, the country has been devastated by drought that in some regions has lasted for five years.

The most uplifting experience was the Afghan people.  They are among the poorest and least educated populations in the world and at the bottom of every social indicator. But yet they are friendly, generous and cautiously optimistic. I made some great friends among locals. If you ever have an opportunity to travel to Afghanistan, don’t miss it.  It is an experience like no other.