This fading credential from 1983 says it all. Underneath the suggestively sputtering volcano  and to the right of my scared-stiff visage you'll see the acronym SPCA. The Salvador Press Corps Association.  Our motto: "They Treat Us Like Dogs."

On a good day.

My walls and drawers and memories and crooks and crannies of my brain are filled with hundreds of fragmentary scraps collected from Santiago to Salvador to Baghdad to Des Moines  and from dozens of other venues during a 35 year plus career in journalism.

They are all dear to me. Piece them together properly and you have re-assembled my life.

Each scrap or photo or scrawled note or fading memory can evoke its special mix of sorrow, joy, ecstasy, pain or laughter.

Yet, they all have two things in common. First, they remind me of the great privilege I have had to do so many things, meet so many people and learn so many things. Second, I am always to remember I am still alive to tell the tale.

Reporters' war stories, literal or otherwise, can be dreadfully boring to those outside a small circle of friends. But nary a night goes by when I don't shuffle through a half-dozen of them --perhaps only for a fleeting moment-- and re-live them almost as intensely as I did in the moment they occurred.

I have decided, then, to start writing them all down. For no particular purpose, except perhaps to fully savor them all one more time before they fully recede in time.

Over the coming weeks and months, that is what I intend to do on this blog. Purely as some sort of perverse hobby. And in no particular order. Nor with any guarantee that every detail is accurate.

Everything will be, merely, as I remember them. They are my truths. They have made my life and changed my life.

I hope you also derive something useful from reading through then. Maybe you will add your own.