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"Conscious that life grew daily more amazing, he said nothing. What had deepened his vision? Section after section the armies of humanity were coming alive. Alive, but slightly absurd; they misunderstood him so utterly: they exposed their weakness when they thought themselves most acute. He could not help smiling."
E.M. Forster


This photograph was a part of one of those extraordinary days that only this century can provide. I got to work at 7.30am. By 8.30am we had been ordered to the airport to cover the breaking of the drought out in the west, past Broken Hill; something like 1300 kilometres by road. The photographer, Ren, one of those wonderful in your face modern girls, a great character, chatting on the phone, driving, transmitting, talking to me, radio blaring, all happening at once. The airport was chaos; wild weather and thick fog had delayed all the flights; which suited us, we managed to catch the plane; passing through security, shoes off, metal tips, all of that.

We landed in Broken Hill, having seen the dramatic stretches of water ponding across the red earth, and headed west 70 kilometres in a hire car to do the farmer. We couldn't get to his house; the road was cut off by a flooding creek, and we tooted our horn. He was a classic from the minute he showed up: "It's so wet a duck'd get bogged," he declared. These were the best rains in a decade, virtually the only rains in a decade; and the drought ravaged property had been transformed overnight. That evening the frogs, buried for all those years in cases of mud, would be out, croaking and flirting; and the bloke was philosophical with the beauty of it all.

Look at that, he said, see that ant on that leaf. He must think he's in the middle of the Pacific!

It's beautiful, he kept declaring, just beautiful.

We transmitted the story and it was on the front page the next day; everybody happy. We were back in Sydney by 11; and by midday I was down at a press conference in windy Phillip Street, listening to water policy from prime ministerial aspirant Malcolm Turnbull.

The subtext was that the bloke was dying. "I'm riddled with cancer," he declared, cheerfully, well boldly, anyway. "They don't know why I'm still alive."

The farm which we described in such lyrical terms was being sold up and the family was moving down to Mildura to be with their disabled son, who was also dying. They couldn't have been a nicer family. Putting them on the front page was a nice way to help them say goodbye to the land. There are echoes, stories, footprints, wherever you look.

THE STORY CONTINUES:

"It was only a month since Bruce had died. Headboy, as he had been known, was a big handsome strapping lad who hadn't been ready to go. Much of the inner city was plastered with Headboy graffiti. His ultimate dream had been to be in a rock band.

"Headboy got in a few gigs before he got too sick to perform any more. He, Michael, would go round and visit him, sit in his public housing flat, feel the silence lap around them. It was so difficult to know what to say. How you feeling? Cheer up, things will get better.

"Things patently were only going to get worse. Angry at everything, Headboy made no effort to make his visitors feel comfortable. He was dying and didn't like one fucking thing about it. In and out of hospital for months, he could only envy the health of others. On his last day Michael went to see him in hospital. As he walked down the corridor towards the ward some of Headboy's friends were walking the other way. 'It's too late,' they said, tears in their eyes."

THE BIGGER STORY:

Forbes:


BAGHDAD - For Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the last of the original military planners of the Iraq war, visiting U.S. troops this week was not exactly a victory lap en route to his earlier-than-expected retirement.

But neither did it evoke a sense of defeat.

From the things he said and did, what may well be his farewell tour seemed almost business-as-usual for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: inspecting, questioning, encouraging commanders and troops.

Pace, a lanky man with a ready smile and a knack for public speaking without notes, is the only Marine to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the pinnacle of the American military hierarchy. He has been the principal military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense since October 2005, and for four years before that he was the Joint Chiefs' No. 2.

"I'm going to run through the finish line," he said on the way into Baghdad this week. And then he did run, almost literally, from one commanders' meeting to another, from one question-and-answer session with troops to another.

With obvious joy, he presided at a re-enlistment ceremony. With clear sorrow, he knelt at a 3rd Infantry Division monument to the soldiers it has lost here, sifting through dog tags to read each detail.

Although his Oct. 1 retirement date is drawing near, Pace said he'd be back. And he insisted that the visit carried no special meaning beyond the usual importance of inspecting things first hand, which he did from dawn to dusk and beyond, across Baghdad and in the restive city of Ramadi.

"This visit for me is the same as the one last month and the one I would have made in October if I was still around," he said in an interview. "This is me doing what I should do: getting out, visiting with troops, listening to commanders ... taking the pulse on the ground, getting my own sense of the battle."

It's a battle that almost no one who was involved at the start had imagined would still be in doubt.

During the run-up to the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and for the next two years Pace was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, second fiddle to Air Force Gen. Richard Myers. In that role he had a voice in war planning and Iraq policy but was not widely viewed as an architect of the strategy for toppling Saddam Hussein.

Even so, at a stage in the war where prominent lawmakers of President Bush's own party are calling for troop withdrawals, Pace is now seen as part of the crowd that turned a quick military triumph into a quagmire.