MARK FRITZ: PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING

WAR CORRESPONDENT

Mark Fritz won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his searing dispatches from Rwanda, where lightning-quick slaughter killed roughly 800,000 people in a matter of weeks.

Fritz interned at the Detroit News in 1977, which included working weekends at the Murder Capital's legendary--and brutal--1300 Beubien police beat. He spent nearly six years at the Kalamazoo (Mich) Gazette, covering every beat imaginable. He won a State Bar of Michigan award for his coverage of an 11-year-old rape victim denied an abortion.

He was a staff writer for the Associated Press from 1984-1997, and again in 2003. Fritz reported on German unification, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone and Liberia, among others. As an investigative reporter for the Boston Globe, Fritz filed from the scene of the World Trade Center's destruction. As an AP editor on the Foreign Desk, he filed the first U.S. "A-wire" bulletin on the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

Fritz subsequently was named East Berlin correspondent, then West Africa correspondent. He later worked as a New York-based national writer for the Los Angeles Times (1997—2000), followed by stints as an investigative reporter at the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. He was twice a guest instructor at the Poynter Institue of Media Studies, the gold standard for theories on writing well while reporting hard.

He left the news business for a stretch to perform humanitarian work in the Darfur region of Sudan for the International Rescue Committee, and conduct war crimes investigations for Human Rights Watch in Uganda. The latter led to criminal charges by the International Criminal Court against a murderous cult leader.

Fritz's nonfiction book, "Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World," won a Salon Book Award, with editors calling the grim subject matter "strangely delightful." He is also the author of the novel "Permanent Deadline," a black comedy about war and big media.

He re-reported World War II with fresh revelations for the Boston Globe, literally moving up the date widely considered to be the start of the Holocaust. He was the first Western reporter to report at length from Chechnya. He wrote a ground-breaking Wall Street Journal story about the moral quandaries of the modern feeding tube. He had the last interview with doomed, would-be Nigerian President Moshood Abiola before his arrest and death in prison.

Fritz won the deadline writing awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 1995 (the Jesse Laventhol Award) and the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) in 1994. His work is cited in numerous textbooks, encyclopedias, journalism anthologies, and hundreds of citations from academic institutions such as Yale, Harvard and Cambridge.

"Lost on Earth" is a staple of foreign affairs classes throughout the English-speaking world, frequently cited as a benchmark in post-Cold War research.

Marx, Fritz und Engels: Pulitzer Prize-Winning War Correspondent Mark Fritz poses on East Berlin's Alexanderplatz in 1990. The statue of Marx and Engels was nearly erased after German unification as the West tried to eliminate the trappings of the former Stalinist government. But the statue set survives, a testament to the power of comfortable familiarity over unfashionable ideology.

East Berlin as German unification looms like a promise and a threat. Photo by Chris Clark.

A Soviet-built tank sits flattened while Kuwaiti oil fires blacken the sky. 1991, on the road to liberated Kuwait City. Photo by Mark Fritz.

Petra, the ancient city of overlapping civilizations in Jordan, virtually empty in 2003 because of the war in neighboring Iraq. Mark Fritz, war correspondent, is pictured.

A baby iguana, rescued from the crush of a refugee camp in Darfur, safely transplanted to a distant waterhole and foliage. Rescue carried out by Mark Fritz, AP war correspondent.

Lucy, a current rescue living with my ex, wants to play even after getting spayed. Photo by Mark Fritz, journalist.

Jerome Delay photo of journalist Mark Fritz on the clock on June 18, 2003, outside the palace that now houses the U.S. Embassy. Roughly 400,000 ex-Iraqi soldiers demanded their paychecks for surrendering to the U.S. invasion. Trigger-happy Americans in an armored vehicle tried to move through the unruly crowd, then fired "warning shots" that killed two Iraqis.

PERMANENT DEADLINE: By Mark Fritz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Tony and Dorothy Fritz, my late parents, cruised Manhattan just months before the World Trade Center was erased. I filed the Boston Globe from Hoboken, the dire view of Ground Zero. Photo by journalist Mark Fritz.

Sue Bannow strolls the walkway of an old fort in the Dry Tortugas, an archipelago in the Gulf of Mexico. The massive Fort Jefferson, alternating as fort and military prison, housed Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was convicted of conspiracy in the Lincoln assassination. Photo by journalist Mark Fritz. 1979.

On the road to unity: An East German couple fuels up as German unification looms. Massive unemployment and sharp cultural differences have been a drag not just on the united Germany's economy, but the world's. The lead obit on unification day, by Mark Fritz, AP staff writer:

EAST BERLIN, East Germany (AP) --East Germany spent a melancholy last day as a nation and then faded into history, leaving behind 45 years of Stalinist rule and one brief, dizzy fling as a free and sovereign state.

SPEED TYPING (U.S. Army photo): During the 100-day ground invasion of Iraq in 1991, yours truly gave up the carefree life of a traveling "unilateral" (not beholden to military censors) to join the U.S. Army's First Cavalry Division on a march through nearly 200 miles of Iraq in 24 hours, the longest "forced march" in U.S. military history. At battle's end, I had to break free to write the tragic story about a kid in the unit who stepped on a U.S. Air Force cluster bomb and blew up. The Army wouldn't run it. After I left the pool system, Dave Crary, the AP editor running the war bureau at the time, said fuck it: write the story and we'll skip the monolithic military industrial editing machine. So Pvt. David Weizoreck got the battlefield obit he deserved, and the whole thing proved that editors on the ground will make calls that New York is too timid to make. The military threatened to toss the agency from the theater, but didn't. That would have been awkward.

SOUTH KANDAHAR PROVINCE: Photo by Mark Fritz, Associated Press. Anti-Taliban fighters on a probe deep into the mountains along the Pakistan border. Two days later, they'd lose 20 men in an ambush. 2004

A Hutu militiaman stands at the ready in a section of Rwanda where the Tutsi population has been all but wiped out. Photo by Mark Fritz. 1994

An underground bar in largely lawless East Berlin, 1991. Photo by Chris Clark.

Playing cards at home with Keeper on the Ivory Coast, where I ( Mark Fritz, West Africa correspondent for the Associated Press.) was based, covering 23 countries. Photo owned by Mark Fritz, journalist.

Foreign correspondent Mark Fritz, apartment hunting in Petra in 2003.

I traveled the fracturing USSR in October 1991, just two months before the Soviet Union would formally break apart. And all I got was this lousy card. Photo by foreign correspondent Mark Fritz.

SURVIVING THE PURGE: Many Communist icons were removed, but this statue in East Berlin's Treptower Park still stands in a united city. The 12-meter statue commemorates Soviet soldier Nikolai Masalov, who risked his life under Nazi gunfire to rescue a 3-year-old girl. Photo by journalist Mark Fritz.

WARZONE WHIZ: A U.S. army captain urinates in a cluster bomb casing during the 100-hour-ground war in Iraq in 1991. A day later, two of his men would be killed by unexploded cluster bombs during a scramble for souvenirs. Photo by war correspondent Mark Fritz.

THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF JOURNALISM: 101 Masterpieces (ISBN 0-7867-1169-8); THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF WAR CORRESPONDENTS (ISBN 0-7867-0866-2} and AMERICA'S BEST NEWSPAPER WRITING (ISBN 10: 0-31244367-6) are among the anthologies and textbooks featuring the work of journalist Mark Fritz.

KARL MARX STADT returned to its original name, Chemnitz, as Communism fell. In 1990, a smattering of protesters railed against the name change and the imminent removal of Marx' giant noggin. And damn, it's still there. Photo by AP Berlin correspondent Mark Fritz.

FUTILE PHONE CALL: Six days of grueling travel, seven nights of sleep deprivation, and a thousand miles of surreal road-tripping across an insane war zone, light torture included.

Interpreter Saleh Zamani and I were detained at the Iraqi border town of Safwan just after Iraq surrendered in 1991. We were interviewing the mayor when newly dispatched security muscle from Baghdad arrived and arrested us. We were interrogated, accused of espionage and were to be taken even deeper into Iraq, to the uprising-torn city of Basra, outside the DMZ. Reporters had been gone missing in similar arrests.

I was driving our Land Cruiser north with a security man in the back seat and Saleh to my right. We spotted a tiny UN observer encampment from which the DMZ was being observed. I punched the gas , threw the truck into a wild Bat-turn and skidded to the gravel while the security man leaped over the seat and tried to wrestle the wheel from me and get something out of his pocket. The security cars flanking us raced alongside. Everybody froze when three UN observers stepped forward to the barbed-wire gate.

This was way above their pay grade. The UN observer chief, Col. Al Feeney, stopped by with a phalanx of armored vehicles. He talked to security goons for a couple of hours, then turned to leave. "Sorry boys you're on your own." Fucker.

Interrogated in Basra, awakened with glaring lights on the hour, given wormy bread to eat and a garbage dump to sleep, Basra security was almost comically sinister. We were separated. I jotted down funny fake names (Bernie Abu Dhabi?) of the people I'd supposedly interviewed. We were told we would be taken to Baghdad. Further interrogation.

The road trip wasn't fun. Security crammed into the truck and taunted us about our predicament. We were interrogated again in Abu Graib prison, stoically listening to the screams of one poor soul being whipped with elastic we'd seen coiled around his jailer's hand. The AP reported Saleh and me free after two days, and that was it. UPI, on the other hand, reported all of this.

The trip was not even half done.

We kept breaking down in the desert, the land covered in unexploded cluster bombs and other ordinance. We ate watermelon with a platoon assigned to guard a radio tower, which now lay on its side, demolished.

We were forced to leave the truck behind and were dumped at the border with Jordan, which made us wait a couple days for a visa. A Palestinian businessman eventually gave us a ride to Amman, finally ending a 1,435 km (about 892 miles) journey. One of the AP's white-washed "history" books insisted the adventure lasted only a third as long and only included Safwan.

No mention of the escape, the epic trek across a country laid waste by war. But then, I' d escaped the AP-mandated, warzone-training class run by former SAS in England, which clueless new management forced me to attend. It actually wasn't that hard to lift the burlap bag from my head and bolt for the tree line, the sound of blank shots going off wildly while I ran through the forest.

These hostage-class grifts are based on grouping reporters together and making them wear signs and armor. I always found the less conspicuous, the better, and raising your profile in a war zone is a bullshit philosophy.

A US Army captain approaches a berm protecting a now-crushed tank. The hunt for souvenirs cost the platoon the lives of two men. US-led air forces saturated the theater with cluster bombs, with one in 10 still unexploded. Photo by Mark Fritz.

Photographer Ricardo Marzalan and the intrepid crew of The Desert Lion, a vintage Land Rover that topped out at 45 mph. This is Baidoa, a decimated city in Somalia. Uncredited photo of Mark Fritz, journalist.

LADY GODIVA OF THE CAROLINAS: Took a motorcycle trip to artsy Asheville, NC, in 2010 and ran into a protest against a new city decency law: Men could go shirtless in public while women could not. At least until this visitor from France showed up. Photo by Mark Fritz, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent.

Heading into Taliban country in southcentral Afghanistan in 2004. Photo by Mark Fritz, journalist and war correspondent.

My father was a motorcycle MP in Italy during WWII, and passed his fondness for bikes down to his sons. Here's a 2009 ZX-14 Ninja with M4 drag pipes and a Power Commander V. It was fast. (Photo by journalist Mark Fritz).

Petra, 2003, the crossroads of ancient civilizations almost empty of tourists because Iraq War II is raging next door. Photo of Mark Fritz, journalist and author.

A Bradley Fighting vehicle races alongside the one I'm in as the 100-hour ground war gets underway in Iraq in 1991. Photo by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Mark Fritz.

Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman interviews Los Angeles Times New York Correspondent Mark Fritz in 1999 for the documentary "The Last Party," aka "The Party's Over."

Adrift in the Sahara: A Tuareg woman and her son hunker down in a refugee camp outside Timbuktu, near the Mali-Mauritania border, where both countries were torn by ethnic violence in 1994, as they are now. Photo by West Africa correspondent Mark Fritz of the Associated Press. The photo is private and unpublished and all rights reserved.

With a passenger, sitting on my customized 2009 ZX-14 Ninja; it's a distant successor to the 1973 Kawasaki H2 I rode from Kalamazoo to California in 1980. It was then the fastest motorcycle you can buy, as is this Ninja in the photo. Photo of journalist Mark Fritz by Chris Clark.

At home in Abdijan, Ivory Coast, where I served as AP West Africa correspondent in 1993-94. Notable stories included a ground-breaking, computer-assisted investigation of how Western nations were using Africa as a dumping ground for products that severely undercut local farmers. And that's my good girl Keeper, dog of three continents. Photo of yours truly, property of Mark Fritz, journalist.

FIRE IN KUWAIT: Photog Laurent Rebors and I crept close to the Kuwait-Saudi border disguised as British combat engineers to get past Saudi checkpoints. We were among the first journalists with eyewitness accounts of the scores of fires--many sabotaged by Iraqi military--that burned out of control for months. Rebors photo. 1991.

Mark Fritz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Foreign Correspondent. I won the award for Rwanda, land of a thousand hills and 800,000 kills. Besides wars, I was an investigative reporter for the AP, LA Times, Kalamazoo Gazette, Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe. My books are LOST ON EARTH: Nomads of the New World, and PERMANENT DEADLINE, a satirical novel about war reporting.

I covered 911 at ground zero, where a bank vice-president told me that authorities in Tower 2 told tenants to stay put after Tower 1 was hit. Many did and many died. I've written about genetic engineering of the food we eat, meaningless laws triggered by the power of parental grief, and a computer-assisted look at how Western nations are dumping surplus food on Africa, crippling local agriculture that can't compete. I've also written about end-of-life issues, including how a feeding tube for premature infants was being used widely on dying adults. It was a controversial cash cow for doctors, and a numbing gaggle of moral quandaries for everyone.

At the Iraqi border (the berm is the boundary freely ignored by nomads). These are two Egyptian army soldiers who let us interview fresh deserters from the Iraqi front.

Ticket for the deciding 5th game of the 1984, Detroit Tigers over the San Diego Padres. Detroiters celebrated the usual way: they rioted and set cop cars on fire.

A staredown with Roxy, my rescued stray. Inquiries about this retro-rudimentary site, the official page of Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Mark Fritz, can be addressed to info@mark-fritz.com.

Journalist Mark Fritz (yours truly) in Raleigh, NC, with his 2009 Kawasaki ZX-14 Ninja with M4 drag pipes and a Power Commander V super tuner, which I can say in all modesty was the fastest street bike in Raleigh.

Journalist Mark Fritz prepares a barbecue in Abidjan, the Ivory Coast, in 1994.

Anthony Walter Fritz, Jr., my father, was a motorcycle MP during WWII in Italy, and he passed his love of bikes down to his sons. Photo by Mark Fritz, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent.

Kawasaki 2009 ZX-14 with M4 drag pipes and a Power Commander V supertuner. Photo by journalist and bike enthusiast Mark Fritz.

CRASHING IN AMERICA: A Memoir from the Front, an upcoming autobiography by Mark Fritz, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent.

NO LAND'S MAN: This is the mountain pass in 1990 between East Germany and Czechoslovakia, two countries that would cease to exist with the fall of Communism. The DDR was adopted by a really condescending West Germany that year, and Czech and Slovakia would start new timelines as separate countries. I'm convinced nations don't have eras; they have versions. (Photo of Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Mark Fritz by Collins Yearwood).

CUDJOE KEY, USA: That goddam cheap typewriter we had to use in the first Iraq invasion finally found a home on a beach in the lower Florida Keys.

ICH BIN EIN BERLINER: A slight grammar slip, and JFK pledges solidarity with Berlin by calling himself a jelly doughnut. Photo by Chris Clark.

Evem in 1991, AP put together this team of white males for coverage out of Dahran, Saudi Arabia. Supposedly, it's gotten better, though the agency is usually a decade or three behind the times.

It's the goddam Ant-Man! It's also Halloween.

A boy soldier forced to join the cult Lord's Resistance Army, which conscripted youngsters to kill their families in northern Uganda. He was one of scores of people I interviewed for Human Rights Watch and, ultimately, the International Criminal Court. The ICC subsequently issued an arrest warrant for cult leader Joseph Kony in 2006, but he remains at large, if he's alive. He was charged with murder, rape and enlisting children to be killers, among many other things. Photo by Human Rights Watch investigator and journalist Mark Fritz

Pirated copies of my book, Permanent Deadline, which triggered a round of character assassination by former AP degenerates and grifters who hijacked the book by Mark Fritz, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent.

The asylum/prison is Berlin-Hohenschoenhausen, the notorious Stasi's main political prison.

South Sudan in 2006: Mother and child visit a clean water station maintained by the International Rescue Committee, one of the non-profits where I worked. Photo by IRC press attache and journalist Mark Fritz.

NINJAS: This is a 2021 Kawasaki Ninja 1000 SX, with a full Akrapovic exhaust system. Photo of Mark Fritz, journalist and motorcycle enthusiast.

SAUGATUCK, Michigan, on the frozen shores of Lake Michigan in the winter of 2010. Photo by journalist Mark Fritz.

Journalist Mark Fritz in southern Afghanistan with anti-Taliban fighters, circa 2004. Inquiries to info@mark-fritz.com.

MARK FRITZ, JOURNALIST