I interviewed Osama bin Laden’s doctor. My Mom wasn't happy.

My late-mother always worried about me taking foolish risks as an itinerant journalist. And in 2004, she solicited from me a solemn promise. 

I was never, under any circumstances whatsoever, to ever go to Baghdad. 

She had watched the evening news religiously, witnessing the terrible human toll taken by the Iraq war — among civilians, soldiers and even journalists.

She said she didn’t want to lose a son to such madness.

For me, making the pledge was easy.  

Most reporters are drawn to conflict. War is a narcotic that can establish a journalist’s reputation (ie. Ernie Pyle, Ernest Hemingway, Michael Herr), and separate them from the also-rans left back home to cover city council meetings, attend rock concerts, and write feature stories. 

During those early war years, my newspaper used a revolving cast to staff our tiny bureau in the Green Zone, and editors solicited temporary volunteers from other sections of the paper. 

People raised their hands. 

But the last place I wanted to be was on some foreign battlefield, risking life and limb for bragging rights — exotic datelines and hollow attaboys from editors back home. 

I knew one reporter who’d lost the use of an eye in a Baghdad bomb explosion, only to be laid off a few years later. Another was told she was being let go after returning from a dangerous assignment sweeping roadsides for IEDs with U.S. soldiers.

She called me, livid. "I just got laid off," she hissed. "What would they have said had I been injured by an IED? 'Sorry stumpy, but we're gonna have to let you go?'"

Newspapers are fickle bedmates; I wasn’t willing to die for one.

And then there was that promise to my mother.

Mind you, nobody had put a gun to my head. At my paper, there were few stories a reporter could flatly refuse to cover. One was witnessing an execution, the other was going to war.

At the time, I was angling for a prized post as a correspondent on the foreign staff. The line was long and everyone knew the score.

All roads to the foreign desk led through Baghdad.

I’d hit a career-ending barricade, but what could I do? 

In 2005, I finally got my shot at some foreign reporting that didn’t involve counting bodies in the Iraqi desert. 

Instead, the body count was in Pakistan. 

On the morning of Saturday, Oct. 8, a powerful 7.9 magnitude earthquake had leveled Kashmir, the disputed territory between India and Pakistan. Some 85,000 people were dead, and another four million left homeless. Thirty-two thousand buildings collapsed. The region was in ruins.

I was at a friend's house in Berkeley when I heard and news and instinctively called the foreign desk, offering to hop on a plane. With so many correspondents busy covering wars, I figured that editors probably could use a hand.

Within hours, to my surprise, someone emailed me back. 

Go. 

I called my mother. She wasn't happy — it wasn’t Iraq, but it was still perilous. I insisted it would be fine. Earthquakes, I assured her, don’t carry semiautomatic weapons. 

Still, I had a feeling of unease as I flew into Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital city. Most jet-setting journalists on risky assignments don’t worry about getting hurt or killed.

Instead, they fear they’re going to somehow miss the story. 

I fretted over both.

All around the city, I endured the narrowed glares of men in the national uniform: baggy shalwar kameez and pakol, or pancake hat. Women dressed in black burquas — their eyesight reduced to slits through the fabric — averted my gaze, as I did theirs.

I made eye-contact with no one.

I was white. I was Western. I was a threat.

Even though I had grown a scraggly red beard in a lame attempt to fit in, I have never felt so vulnerable as I did during those weeks — knowing the end could come by street gunman, kidnapper or even deadly aftershock. 

My preparations for the long journey from Islamabad into the earthquake zone included a journalistic handoff of sorts.

Paul Watson, the newspaper’s Jakarta bureau chief, had spent days covering the quake and was soon heading home to Indonesia. We met in his suite at the elegant Serena Hotel, where security guards routinely poked mirrors beneath the undercarriages of cars and trucks to check for explosives. 

For me, Paul was the real deal, a correspondent who’d spanned the globe, covering every kind of story: political coups, natural disasters and, yes, war.

Working for the Toronto Star in Somalia, Paul won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his breaking news photograph of the body of the Black Hawk Down pilot being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by an angry mob. 

There was another impressive thing about Paul: he had only one hand.

It was a birth defect and, without scar tissue, he deftly used the stub that was his left wrist as well as any legitimate appendage. 

Paul was somewhat of a loner, but he was also a cracking-good journalist. He could venture off into the wilds of Waziristan for days on end — out of contact with worried editors back home — and return with award-winning stories and photos. 

As we sat in his suite at the Serena, Paul briefed me on the task ahead.

But first, I wanted to hear tales of adventure and intrigue. 

I wanted real war stories. 

And he obliged. 

Paul was one of the first journalists on the ground when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, forced do to something no reporter wants to do.

He hired his support staff as strangers, off the street. 

Journalists covering disasters abroad usually require a driver who knows the roads and a translator and bureaucracy-breaker, known as a fixer. 

Good ones are highly-prized and hard to come by. 

Paul headed off across the desert from Kabul to Jalalabad in the company of two Afghan men he’d only just met. Somewhere along the way, the trio’s SUV blew a tire and, while the driver stooped to replace it, Paul stepped away to take a leak. 

When he returned, the vehicle was ready and the three want on their way. 

Fast forward eight months. 

After that initial trip, Paul never again hired the driver, but the fixer had become his regular assistant. 

One night over dinner, the fixer leveled Paul in his gaze.

“I don’t know whether I should tell you this,” he began, “but do you remember that first trip we took together to Jalalabad?”

Paul vaguely recalled the trip, which now seemed like another life. 

“The one,” he said, “where we had the flat tire in the middle of nowhere.”

“Well, remember when you walked off into the desert?” the fixer continued. “As soon as you’d gone, the driver said, ‘Let’s kill this guy. We can bring his head to a Mullah I know. He’ll pay us good money.’”

The fixer declined, and the driver shrugged his shoulders and went back to work.

The story stuck with me. 

Paul had come a whisker away from being beheaded in some foreign desert by a man who didn’t give a damn one way or another. 

Was I really cut out for this line of work? 

Paul willed me the services of his regular driver in Pakistan, a man named Aleem. I hired a fixer whose name I now forget but whom I will call Ali.

Together, we three headed off into the earthquake zone.

With most hotels and restaurants in rubble, we brought tent, sleeping bags and our own food, for days dozing fitfully on the ground before heading back to Islamabad to file.

Over the coming days, we chronicled a region in shock. There were parents who could see the bodies of their children in the wreckage of a collapsed school, but could not wrest them free.

And two intrepid deejays in the devastated town of Muzaffarabad who administered information and hope.

And an isolated village that used a makeshift basket affixed to a rope as a bridge across a deep mountain chasm.

And families left without shelter as the bitter winter approached..

One day, I told the boys I wanted to do a story about the earthquake zone’s uneasy neighbors, and we visited a makeshift clinic established by a local group reportedly affiliated with Al Qaida, that operated near a similar U.S. hospital.

Aleem offered to wait in the car as Ali and I went inside.

The men greeted us politely but we had to wait a long while, squatting on our haunches, drinking lukewarm tea, before someone told us that the person we needed to interview was not there.

The gave us a cell phone number for a Doctor Amer Aziz and showed us the door.

Back at the car, Aleem challenged us.

“Why did you do that?” he asked. “Paul would have never gone in there!”

Wait, now you tell us?

Still, I was alive, with all my limbs.

I dialed the number for Dr. Aziz, who picked up on the first ring, as though he’d been anticipating the call.

I explained who I was, that I wanted to interview him about his clinic.

“I don’t talk to Americans,” he said.

Not a great start, but he stayed on the line, and I finally convinced him to sit down for an interview a few days later in the city of Lahore.

That’s where he told me that he had twice treated Osama bin Laden, as well as the sick and poor, and that activists such as himself “are not such monsters.”

We published the story. I hoped my mother wouldn't see it.

A few days later, without Ali, Aleem and I drove into the Pakistani countryside to interview a local man who used the lottery money he’d won while driving a cab in Washington, D.C. to provide much-needed drugs for people wounded in the quake.

On the way back, Aleem fell asleep at the wheel and our car skidded into a huge truck bringing relief supplies to the quake zone.

We came to with the front of the vehicle crushed beneath the truck as I pulled bits of windshield glass from my nose and mouth.

We both laughed and hugged one another over our latest near miss.

Years later, after several reporting trips to Pakistan, I continued to insist to my mother that the place was safe. 

In 2008, as I prepared to return there, following the assassination of politician Benazir Bhutto, the Economist magazine featured a cover story on the situation. 

There was a huge image of a grenade, with the words:

“Pakistan — The World’s Most-Dangerous Place.” 

Someone sent it to my mother. She called to say what we both knew:

I’d been lying to her all along.

There was nothing more to say. 

I was going.

When it came to my work, she never trusted me again.