'We are more alike than different." My old professor, Morrie Schwartz, told me that.We were sitting in his home, watching the TV news, Morrie under a blanket, dying from ALS, his body already decayed beyond hope.The fighting then was in Bosnia. We saw awful images, death and destruction. Morrie began to cry."What's wrong?" I asked."This is so terrible," he whispered."Well, of course," I said, embarrassed, "but you don't know any of those people. Why are you crying?"
As reporters go, Seymour Hersh is not only famous but also pretty darn reliable. He won a Pulitzer Prize during the Vietnam War. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre. When he writes, people listen.Recently, he and I were on a radio show together. I asked him about his latest piece for the New Yorker in which he reported that the first real U.S. commando effort in Afghanistan had gone badly and that the Taliban -- thanks partly to an ill-advised, overly noisy U.S. effort -- had fired upon a dozen of our elite soldiers, seriously wounding several of them.
Mitch Albom writes about running an orphanage in impoverished Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his kids, their hardships, laughs and challenges, and the life lessons he’s learned there every day.