War reporter draws the line after five tours of duty

N&O reporter Jay Price has been to Iraq and Afghanistan five times to cover the wars there.

He's not going back.

The rush of war adrenaline is addictive, Price says, and some reporters live for it and keep living for it. Unless they die.

Since March 2003, 127 journalists have been killed on duty in Iraq, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

"If you have a family, you have to ask yourself, where is the line?" Price said last week to an audience at UNC-Chapel Hill's journalism school. He and his wife have a 10-year-old daughter.

Price and North Carolina Public Radio's Dick Gordon, who also has reported from Iraq and Afghanistan, described reporting from a war zone.

Price, 46, is a reporter's reporter. He can report and write any kind of story and do it well.

He also has The N&O in his blood. He's worked here for 12 years and before that worked for our sister paper, The Cary News.

He grew up in Raleigh and Pitt County. His grandfather, Woodrow Price, was managing editor from 1957 to 1972, and his uncle, Dudley Price, has been a reporter for The Raleigh Times and The N&O since 1973.

Jay Price covers the military for us. When reporting from war zones, sometimes he has been embedded with a unit, such as Fort Bragg's 82nd Airborne Division.

Other times, he has been based in Baghdad, where our parent company operates a news bureau out of a hotel.

When Price and other McClatchy reporters wanted to talk with Iraqi citizens, they were escorted by security contractors who would take them out in armored cars. They might say: "You have 15 minutes to interview this person. Then we must move."

Price blended in. He dressed like an Iraqi and dyed his hair black. "We try to essentially sneak around," he said.

Price likes to report up close.

Last fall, on his fourth trip to Iraq, he didn't trust the Iraqi fatality reports he was getting.

To determine whether the increase in U.S. troops was cutting deaths, he visited what is believed to be the world's largest cemetery, in Najaf, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried. He found that burials were down by at least one-third.

N&O photojournalist Chuck Liddy worked with Price on two trips to Iraq and the one to Afghanistan.

"He's like the Everyman Reporter," Liddy said. "He's a trench guy. He can talk to a general in charge of 30,000 troops, but also he can talk to the private with latrine duty. He shows the same respect for both. He's not faking. That's real. His subjects know that."

Price brings the same empathy to his subjects in the Triangle. Now that he's back home, he focuses on the war's impact on North Carolina.

He recently wrote about the death of N.C. National Guard Staff Sgt. Emanuel Pickett of Duplin County by honoring his life.

In civilian life, Pickett, 34, was a captain for the Wallace Police Department and had deep roots in his home county.

Rarely, I'll read a story so powerful that I have to stop for a moment and take a breath.

This was one of them.

"Inside an RDU hangar, Kemely Pickett bent until his chest rested on the American flag covering his brother's casket and lay there," Price wrote. "For long minutes, everyone else stood frozen around the chartered business jet that flew the body in. ... Then Kemely Pickett straightened and, helped by a friend, walked away."

Kemely Pickett, a Sampson County Sheriff's Office major, told me that Price captured his brother in that story.

"He was great," Pickett said of Price. "He was easy to deal with. Good guy. Very, very impressive."

Emanuel Pickett's service to his community and his country was exemplary. His story needed to be told. And Jay Price, a trench guy rooted in North Carolina, was the right person to tell it.