Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Paul Anthony Douglas, Tuesday 29 May 6PM at St Bride's Church, Fleet street.

Paul and James one year on,


It’s a year on from when we heard the devastating news…that Paul and James had died in a roadside explosion in Baghdad and that Kimberly was fighting for her life.

They were 2 of roughly 130 journalists that have died in Iraq.

Next to more than 600 000 Iraqi civilians and some 3,700-coalition soldiers…
in the killing fields where it has become increasingly difficult to do what we all set out to do…to shed light on the situation and to document at least an element of truth…

And despite these sacrifices, the killing hasn’t stopped.

There is no end in sight,

Within the last 2 weeks ABC has lost a camera crew in Iraq.
And so the cycle goes on…lives are devastated and it’s hard to make sense of it…

I’ve worked with Paul in many places.
He always understood what mattered and was ready to go all the way to get to it.
It wasn’t just about depth of field to him; it was about the depth of vision and how close you could get to the core of a situation.

Paul just had this insatiable curiosity about life, about people and about his own boundaries.

He was always testing himself,
be that with a camera in some place where reason had long left the playing field,
on his motorbike hurtling down the M1
or battling with the intricacies of playing the harmonica.

James being a blues man, could relate to places where humanity gets stripped down to the bare bones.

He’d learned to accept and deal with those situations in his own, life-affirming way.

And the way Geri and Linda have kept their families together, guiding them through the hard times,
Christmas and birthdays and those unexpected times when you just plain miss your partner, or your dad,
is a testament to the strong family ties that both managed to nurture in a profession that doesn’t always make it easy to keep a family together.

In the crew room at CBS we still miss them –
Paul’s booming laughter and generosity and James’ wit and insight.
In the last couple of years Paul was really growing in his work, getting the measure of human emotions, getting into his prime. It would have been good to see how far he could have gone.

I would like to leave you with the words of the Sufi master, Rumi:
“God picks up the reed flute-world and blows,
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
A passion, a longing pain,
Remember the lips
Where the wind-breath originated and let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it -
Be your note!
Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes.
Sing loud!”

I think Paul and James would agree…

Wim de Vos




PAUL DOUGLAS,

There’s been something of a competition over who, among the speakers here, would get to tell which endearing anecdote about Paul. There's had to be a kind of clearinghouse so everybody doesn't step on everybody else.

In the interest of not giving away the plot, I won't list the stories, but you'll recognize them as they go by. You'll probably have a few of your own. The point is that there are so many of them and so many people who want to tell them. Everybody wants to be part of the testament. Everyone still wants a piece of Paul.

It’s a good thing there's so much of him to go around.

Paul was a big man in all the good ways. The impression he made wasn't just based on his height or the breath of his shoulders or even the width of his smile. The biggest thing about Paul was his heart.

We've all got stories. One of mine goes back to very early in his time at CBS. I think it was in January of 1994 in Sarajevo. Paul had been to Bosnia before and knew how to operate there. I think it was my first trip and it happened to straddle the Serbian New Year.

Serbian New Year celebrations had always been on the noisy side, involving the joyous use of various high explosives. Sure enough, sometime after midnight things started to go nuts. A crescendo of first small arms and then larger and larger arms fire began to land around the front line - on which the old Holiday Inn sat.

Many of you will remember the place was already pretty shot up, its windows long since replaced by UNHCR plastic sheeting. I was lying on my bed as the roar of incoming fire got louder and louder and closer and closer until - ka-bam! - a huge blast just outside my room actually knocked me off the bed onto the floor. The place filled with smoke and dust.

What seemed like seconds later, a flashlight (torch) beam cut through the gloom. I could just make out Paul's grin. "I told you to sleep in the bathtub," he laughed. The fact the tub was full of our emergency water supply hadn't occurred to him, I guess. But the point is he had moved through the blacked-out hotel during an artillery barrage, knowing my room was close to the front of the building, to check on me. I had been told that Paul was a good man to have around; I was just beginning to learn how good.

I learned a lot about Paul on that trip and subsequent ones to many other garden spots. The main lesson was to let Paul do the talking. Approaching a hostile checkpoint on the road, dealing with an increasingly agitated crowd, getting to some access point that somebody really didn’t want you to get to -let Paul do the talking… and usually the driving.

With his big smile, in that big hat, and that cheerful "How're you doing. Mate?" he was pretty well irresistible.

You'll hear a lot about Paul's good nature today, and that's all true. But I also want to leave you with an appreciation of how good he became at what he did. Paul started in the business as a sound man and decided he wanted to become a cameraman. He was one of the quicker studies I've ever seen.

He became one of those people who could shoot not just the obvious, but could shoot the essential. He could get at the inner image that was often the most important.

I'll tell you only one story - of the time he and I were on HMS Sir Galahad, which was making the first run up the previously and maybe still-mined channel into Umm Kasr in southern Iraq early in the war. It was pretty tense to begin with and got worse, as at one point, a fast boat appeared on the ship's radar … heading right for us. We were on the bridge. The tension built as it got closer and closer - 5,000 yards… 4,000 … they couldn’t identify it… the closer it got, the more it looked like trouble. Guns were manned. Trigger fingers twitched. The boat turned out to be friendly - or as friendly as a boatload of Australian special forces can be. But it was a hairy time there for a while.

Looking at Paul’s tape of that episode afterward was an education. The building tension on the faces… doo-dads blipping… that spot speeding toward us out of the haze. You could have just run his tape raw on the air. And I remember thinking; Paul has become one of the really good ones. I think his family should know not just of the friendship and affection he enjoyed, but of the respect. You could trust him in every way.

His loss - to his family and to us - is a great one in every way.

As a further tribute to Paul, I think it's important to say a few words about the circumstances of his death. It's been said he died doing what he loved, and I'm sure that's true. He loved the work, he loved the camaraderie; OK, he loved the air miles. But in his own way, he was a journalistic warrior in the important battle to tell people what they should know.

Paul was in Iraq out of a sense of responsibility … to his job, to his family, to his colleagues. If he hadn't been there, someone else would have had to.

Paul was not a cowboy; far from it. He was careful out there. He did not take unnecessary risks. When Paul said, "I don't think we should do that," it was a pretty good indicator that you shouldn't do it.

He would reassure Linda of his cautious approach, and she told me the other day that she used to worry more about him riding his Harley up and down the M1 than she did when he was away.

Yet the odds caught up with him. Paul is another victim of this war.

A little bit of all of us died on that Baghdad street … and a little bit of Paul lives on in all of us.

By Mark Phillips
©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.



JAMES BROLAN,

I see in the notice the family put out for this service that the total points in the Scrabble depiction of James’ name comes to 22. James would never accept that. Surely there were some double- or triple-letter scores on the board that would have raised his total to some unassailable level.

James was a double- or triple-score kind of guy - and not just in Scrabble. With James, you didn’t just get another crew member… a sound man. You got a humorist, a script consultant, a social worker, a cook, a fashion consultant, a therapist, a pharmacist and a director of games.

On that point, let me just clear up a misconception that somebody somewhere had accused James of cheating at Scrabble. Nobody really accused James of cheating. What some people do say is that he just had his own view of the rules.

So let’s just admit for the final time… Of course you can "avenue" roads - as in the road needed to be widened, so it was "avenued." Word score: 11.

Of course… there’s such a thing as a qadi Q_A_D_I (not Katie), except it isn't the obscure sailor's knot James said it was - it's an Islamic judge. Score: 14. You challenged James at your peril … and not just around the Scrabble board was he usually the smartest guy in the room.

If there’s a Scrabble heaven, it’s a good bet that James is in it… and I’m pretty sure that there, you get to make - or bend - your own rules. But then again, so does everybody else.

James was a rule bender - but in a good way. He was a creative rule bender. Once when he was part of a camera team that was being denied entrance to an even, he looked around saw a broom and some cleaning equipment, picked it up, talked his way past the guards saying he was a cleaner - and staked out a prime position for his cameraman.

Another time, when he similarly denied access to a fashion show -Alexander McQueen I think it was - James noticed a flower shop across the street. In he went, bought a bouquet, walked up to the security guard saying he had flowers to deliver for Mr. McQueen, was let right in - and staked out a prime position for his team.

No wonder cameramen used to fight over him. One said famously that having James go work with someone else felt like they had stolen your girlfriend.

James was popular for another reason as well: He wasn't only the smartest guy in the room; he was also the funniest. A James one-liner could be devastating and would often be all you remembered from a trip or story

When he and Mat and Bob Woodruff were embedded with the U.S. military during the Iraq invasion, he dubbed their little gang The Desert Prats. What the Iraqis thought of that emblazoned on the side of their Humvee, I’m not sure, but it confused the hell out of the Marines.

The helmet he wore bore his name and blood type on the front - and across the back it was the phrase "make tea, not war," which I think was the battle cry from his old regiment The Royal Green Jackets. If it isn't, maybe it should be.

Having helped conquer the country - after a fashion - James may have single-handedly inspired the insurgency. He was shooting prayers in a mosque in Sadr City - in Muktader al Sadr's mosque, actually. When all the men knelt in prayer - their foreheads on the ground in rows as you've all seen - James was kneeling on the end of one of those rows fiddling with his sound mixer and noticed the cameraman panning over. Thinking quickly, he knelt down too.

Now James always had a problem with his trouser belt line when he knelt over - a throwback, perhaps, from his decorator and builder days. When the men behind him lifted their heads, the view they got of James was probably more than they cared for. Let's just say they had somewhere to park their bikes. Uproar ensued. Sensing a problem, the crew's security adviser moved, in putting his vast experience in hostile environments to work. Here's what we’re going to do, he said. We’re gonna leg it. The rest is history.

James did it again after particularly nasty recent interview with the U.S. commander in Iraq in which, as the questions got harder and harder, the commander got more and more monosyllabic and sour. That guy, James later said, must be the battalion's chief lemon taster. If only we could put lines like that in the scripts.

Another time he was miking an interview with a bunch of Iraqis - holding the boom above their heads as the reporter asked question after question. He must have held it there for half an hour - never complaining. Finally the reporter hit on a line of questions that worked and the answers came boom, boom, boom… just what they had been looking for. "That's great," the reporter said - thanks. James looked at him, dropped his aching arms and said, "why didn't you ask those questions at the beginning?"
I'll end this series of yarns with my favorite: In Afghanistan, James was with a crew at an Afghan Army firing range. They’d done an interview with an American colonel - call him Col. Smith - who felt he had said something he shouldn’t have. Several minutes later, Col. Smith comes over, clearly very agitated, saying, "look, I said something there you shouldn’t use - can not use - in the story. It would be very bad for what we’re trying to do here" - meaning very bad for him - so don’t use it.

Quick as a whip James looks at him and says, "Of course we won’t use it, Private Smith. The other Americans there cracked up. The colonel was completely embarrassed and trying to re-assert his authority says - in effect, "you're so good at firing off your mouth, try firing this, wise guy," and hands him an AK. James, the military-trained James, picks up the gun, cocks it aims and blasts the target to shreds, adding injury to insult. In some American mess somewhere, people are still laughing at that one.

For the one or two of you who haven’t heard the "how James disarmed George Clooney" story - I’ll repeat it briefly. James, said by some to look like Clooney, went up to him before an interview, paused and said, "goodness me," - or words to that effect - "it's just like looking in the mirror. Nobody who was there can remember what Clooney said in the interview, but everybody remembers James' line.

Reputations are built on stories like that. And friendships.

If we remembered him in that way - there are hundred, maybe thousands of children from Iraq to Pakistan to Nepal to who knows where who remember him for his little sight gags: the separating thumb trick … the offered-and-then-quickly-withdrawn handshake trick.

I can still hear the kids laughing. It was always the best way to find James - look for the gaggle of laughing kids.

Or look for the pack of Sherpas on Mount Everest. For James, the ascent to the Everest base camp was living a dream. Among his legendary consumption of books were accounts of the great explorers and adventurers, Mallory among them.

But rather than using oxygen on the climb, James used Rothmans … and of course, all the Sherpas smoked too - all the time - as they hauled their loads uphill. It was a relationship made in heaven, to which they seemed to be climbing. The Sherpas provided the local knowledge and James provided the jokes and the fags.

There’s a guy in a carpet shop in Islamabad - a big fat guy - who James always called my other brother from my other mother. A silly line. He’d introduce the guy that way to anybody else in the shop. The guy loved it. Whenever James would walk in the place there’d be a race to see who would say it first. I don’t think it reduced the price of the carpets any, but I'm told that like the rest of us, when the other brother from the other mother heard the news of James' death, he took it pretty hard. Like a death in the family - even one with two mothers.

James was a guy who naturally connected with people, whether working as part of a film crew or decorating houses. Once you knew him, you stayed connected. All over this part of London there are Queen's counsels, famous composers, film and theatrical directors, who met James because they hired him to paint their houses and who stayed friends. I'm told we're in this church today because James once did some decorating work for the Vicar.

James was a privilege to know. He had the knack or seeing the levity in situations in which there wasn’t much levity. He made the terrible, bearable. Among the great tragedies of today is that he isn't here to help us through this.

James is still everybody's other brother.

Geri and the family have asked that I end with this quote from Kipling’s Kim, and you’ll soon see why:

"From time to time, God causes men to be born - and thou art one of them - who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news. Today it may be of far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountain, and the next day of some nearby men who have done a foolishness against the State. These souls are very few; and of these few, not more than 10 are of the best."

By Mark Phillips
©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.