A Pencil and a Pocketknife: Confessions of a War Correspondent

Mike Tharp has been a journalist since age 16. He has worked for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Far Eastern Economic Review and U.S. News & World Report in Dallas. Tokyo, San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was also executive editor of a daily newspaper in California. For a dozen years he's taught journalism in California and Texas. He's been to 61 countries and covered seven wars as a correspondent--one in Vietnam as an Army combat correspondent and as a civilian in the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo/Albania and two embedded deployments in Iraq. He also played on a small college national championship basketball team in Kansas. In 1967-68 he was a Rotary Foundation Fellow at the University of Wales in Cardiff, which he calls "the best year of my life.