When a reporter is dodging gunfire in a war zone, self-reflection is not the first thing on his or her mind.

"There's no room for introspection on the playing field," says News & Observer reporter Jay Price. "When you're playing soccer, you're not thinking about the philosophy of why you're involved in the sport."

That's one reason Price welcomes the opportunity to share experiences as a war reporter with WUNC's Dick Gordon on Wednesday.

Gordon and Price are kicking off Alumni Conversations, an alumni-sponsored series of informal dialogues at UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

"We'd like it to be really informal and conversational," says Benji Cauthren, director of alumni affairs. "We just want Dick and Jay to kind of feed off each other, and talk about their experiences covering military conflict, and have audience members jump in with questions and comments as they see fit."

Gordon, the host of American Public Media's "The Story With Dick Gordon," expects to talk mostly about his experiences as a foreign correspondent during the 1980s and '90s.

"I covered a fair amount of the nastiness in the Soviet Union when it was coming undone," he recalls. "And Sarajevo, and Sri Lanka, Afghanistan in '91 and '93 and '96, the first Gulf War, and back for this one in 2003."

Gordon took his old radio show "The Connection" to Baghdad for a month of live broadcasts in April 2003, just as Baghdad fell. He went back that November when the insurgency was under way and hasn't been back since.

"It was becoming increasingly clear that the zone was a place for reporters like Jay Price, not a place for a radio host to do a live broadcast on what was happening in terms of reconstruction, or any of those stories," he says. "It was very much a dangerous place. We weren't successful doing what we hoped to do when we went back at that time, just because of the way the story had changed."

"The Story" regularly checks in with Baghdad audio diarist Ahmed Abdullah, and Gordon will likely discuss his interviews with Iraq vets about their experiences immediately after they returned home.

As for tales from the war zone, Gordon says he looks forward to hearing Price.

"I'm not going to try to bigfoot him on that one," Gordon says. "That's his story to tell."

Price, who has done four stints in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, has some stories to tell that include narrowly escaping death by sniper fire.

Still, as many times as he's talked about those experiences to radio interviewers and friends, Price says he welcomes the opportunity to interact with an audience that could steer him away from seeing things through his own prism.

"It bores people more than you would think," he admits.

Gordon says he also looks forward to feedback.

"I have the most fun when people ask me questions -- hard ones, questions that I haven't answered about the kinds of work that I've done," he says.

Price says he may reopen one old unresolved question he got during a radio interview with Frank Stasio, the host of WUNC's "The State of Things."

Stasio wanted to know if Price ever worries that he's glorifying war through his writing.

The truth is, Price says now, there are stories of heroism every day in Iraq. But he's also seen how news stories can serve to attract young people, here and throughout the world, into signing up to prove themselves.

"Should you try to craft it in a way that it's not overly glorified -- that it doesn't have this kind of glow of victory, and glory coming off of it?" he says. "You just want to report what's going on. You don't want to be kind of a part of the mechanism for driving more conflict in the world."

Price says he'll also be interested to know how Gordon drew the line between necessary and unnecessary danger when getting a story, something that's given both men some sobering thoughts after they got back home.

"I could never make sense of that at the time," Gordon says. "You always end up thinking that, 50 yards further ahead, the story's going to get a little bit better."