Mark Fritz
Pulitzer Prize-Winning War Correspondent
Investigative Reporter
& Award-Winning Author
MARK FRITZ: PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING
WAR CORRESPONDENT
Mark Fritz won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his searing dispatches from Rwanda, where a meticulously planned genocide killed 800,000 people in 100 merciless days.
Fritz began as an intern at the Detroit News in 1977, working weekends at the Murder Capital's legendary 1300 Beaubien police beat, an intense prep school for bearing witness to horror. After graduating Wayne State University in Detroit, he spent more than five years at the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette, covering every beat in the house. He won a State Bar of Michigan award for his coverage of an 11-year-old rape victim caught in a furious abortion debate. He waited six years to interview her as an emancipated adult.
Fritz was a staff writer for the Associated Press from 1984-1997, and again in 2003-2004. He reported on German unification, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mauritania and Bosnia, 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 U.S. "A-wire" bulletin on the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989).
Fritz subsequently was named East Berlin correspondent, where he quizzed everyone from skinheads to Stasi spies; then West Africa correspondent, where he interviewed Nelson Mandela. He later worked as a New York-based national writer for the Los Angeles Times, followed by stints as an investigative reporter at the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal. He was twice a teacher at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and has appeared on media flagships such as MSNBC, CNN and C-Span's Book TV, He's contributed to outlets from The Huffington Post to the Washington Post.
He left the news business for a stretch to perform humanitarian work in Sudan's Darfur region for the International Rescue Committee, and conduct war crimes investigations for Human Rights Watch in Uganda. The latter led to an International Criminal Court conviction of a cult leader who made children kill their parents, among other things.
At the Globe, Fritz re-reported World War II with fresh revelations based on newly declassified files, including moving up the date of the Holocaust. He was the first Western reporter to file from Chechnya and interview its mercurial new ruler. He wrote a 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. LA Times Column One stories (he set the house record of 12 in 1997) include the power of parental grief to misshape policy; and the surge in multiple citizenships as a sign of an emerging, stateless society..
LEGACY
Besides the Pulitzer and State Bar nod, Fritz won the deadline writing awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 1995 (the first Jesse Laventhol Award) and the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) in 1994. His wide range of work is cited in numerous textbooks, encyclopedias, journalism anthologies, and citations from academic institutions such as Yale, Harvard and Cambridge.
Fritz's nonfiction book, "Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World," won a Salon Book Award, calling the book "strangely delightful." He also wrote the novel "Permanent Deadline," a black comedy about war and the hacks who cover it.
"Lost on Earth," a staple of foreign affairs classes throughout the English-speaking world, is frequently cited as a benchmark in post-Cold War primary research. Excerpts and reviews, from Elie Wiesel to P.J. O'Rourke, are here. Fritz is currently writing "Crashing in America: A Memoir from the Front."
This 90s-style retro page is the official archive of Mark Francis Fritz, author, investigative journalist &
Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent.
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 Stalinist iconagraphy. But the statue survives, a testament to the power of familiarity over ideology.
East Berlin as German unification looms like a promise and a threat. Berlin correspondent Mark Fritz strolls the boulevard of broken screams. Chris Clark. photo.
A Soviet-built tank sits flattened while Kuwaiti oil fires blacken the sky. It's April 1991, Iraq has surrendered and I'm on the road to pillaged lKuwait City, bootleg Billy Idol booming as drops of oil fall like rain. Photo by Mark Fritz.
Petra, the ancient city of overlapping civilizations in Jordan, virtually empty in 2003 because of the war in neighboring Iraq. Journalist Mark Fritz, 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.
Traveling with the First Cavalry Division into Iraq for the start of the ground war, here is Mark Fritz with members of The Wolfpack, a p;atoon of Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Yes, the guy in the blue shirt is NBC's Arthur Kent, who told a general "nuts" after his crew was prevented from recording a poignant desert funeral for a man from the Wolfpack. "Nuts" is how Brigadier Gen. Anthony McCormick responded at the Battle of the Bulge, when the Germans demanded surrender. Art is an elitte reporter uncowed by authority.
Jerome Delay photo of journalist Mark Fritz on the clock on June 18, 2003, outside the palace that 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 crowd, then fired "warning shots" that killed two Iraqis.
PERMANENT DEADLINE: By Journalist Mark Fritz,
Tony and Dorothy Fritz, my late parents, cruise Manhattan months before the World Trade Center is erased. I filed for the Boston Globe from Hoboken, the perfect ground-level view of Ground Zero. You could feel the heat and smell incinerated concrete as the buildings blackened the sky and burned to the ground. Anthony Fritz Jr. and Dorothy (Horvath) Fritz were both WWII veterans. Photo by journalist Mark Fritz.
A Lake Michigan lighthouse sits stranded in ice during the cold winter of 2010. Visitors turned out in force to experience the big lake, frozen like a pond. Photo by journalist Mark Fritz.
Road to unity: An East German couple fuels up as German unification looms. Massive unemployment and sharp cultural gaps have been a drag not just on the united Germany's economy, but the world's. My obit on unification day, by Mark Fritz, AP staff writer:
"East Germany spent a melancholy last day as a nation Tuesday before fading 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, journalist Mark Fritz (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 war's end, I had to break free to write the story about a kid 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 censors. So Specialist David Weiczorek got the battlefield obit he deserved. The military threatened to toss the AP from the theater, but didn't. That would have been awkward.
WARZONE WHIZ: A U.S. army captain pissses in a U.S. cluster bomb casing during the 100-hour ground war in Iraq in 1991. Next day, two men from his unit would be killed by cluster bombs during a scramble for souvenirs. Photo by AP journalist Mark Fritz.
A Hutu militiaman stands at the ready in a section of Rwanda where the Tutsis have been wiped out. Photo by Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Fritz. 1994
:HASHTAG AFGHANISTAN: A semi-stoned militia in South Kandahar Province on a Taliban hunt in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.. They'd lose 20 men to an ambush the next day. 2004. Photo by journalist Mark Fritz
Playing cards at home with Keeper on the Ivory Coast, where I (Mark Fritz, West Africa correspondent) was based, covering 23 countries. Keeper was rescued in Berlin, taken to West Africa for a couple years and eventually winding up on my farm in New Jersey. Photo owned by Mark Fritz, journalist.
DEATH STRIP: I bicycled the roughly 100 miles of deathstrip between the Berlin Wall to see how long-separated blocks co-existed. I settled on Bernauer Strasse. The economic and social divisions were staggering,. When the wall was opened, Bernauer became a microcosm of bitterness between the affluent people on the West side, and the poor devils who'd been caged on the East side. Photo by AP East Germany Correspondent Mark Fritz.
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.
SOVIETS: Many Communist icons were removed, but this statue in East Berlin's Treptower Park still stands. The 12-meter statue honors Soviet soldier Nikolai Masalov, who risked his life under Nazi gunfire to rescue a 3-year-old girl. Photo by journalist Mark Fritz. (In the doorway, a brief outline of my ex-father-in-law, the great Ted Vaughn.).
Investigating the underground bar scene in largely lawless East Berlin, 1990
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 featuring Mark Fritz.
KARL MARX STADT returned to its original name, Chemnitz, as Communism fell. In 1990, a smattering of people protested the removal of Marx' giant noggin. And damn, it's still there. Photo by AP correspondent Mark Fritz.
At home in Abdijan, Ivory Coast, where I served as AP West Africa correspondent in 1993-94. Notable stories included a 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 Mark Fritz, journalist.
FIRE IN KUWAIT: Photographer Laurent Rebors and I crept close to the Kuwait-Saudi border disguised as British combat engineers to get past Saudi checkpoints. We were the first journalists with eyewitness accounts of the scores of oil fires that burned for months. Laurent Rebors photo. 1991.
. Though I believe I did my best work in Berlin and in Nigeria, I won Pulitzer 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 dust-covered bank vice-president told me that Tower 2 security 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, useless laws triggered by parental grief; generational conflict and the DMV; and a computer-assisted look at how Western nations are dumping surplus food on Africa, crippling local farms.
At the Iraqi border. These are two Egyptian army soldiers who let me interview fresh deserters from the Iraqi front. The ground war had yet to start, but a constant conga line of B-52s dropping 500-pound bombs on their bunkers. drove them to the other side.
Ticket for the deciding 5th game of the 1984 World Series, Tigers over the San Diego. Detroiters celebrated the usual way: Setting 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 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.
DYING IN DARFUR: Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist Mark Fritz, working as a press attache to the International Rescue Committee, listens to the horror stories of fresh refugees.
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.
At Columbia University for the 1995 Pulitzer,awards, that's International Reporting winner Mark Fritz and his guru, the late Assistant Foreign Editor Frank Crepeau, who influenced generations of reporters.
CRASHING IN AMERICA: A Memoir from the Front, an upcoming autobiography by Mark Fritz, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent. This cover is just a mockup.
BAGHDAD: Seized at the border town of Safwan just after Iraq's 1991 defeat, interpreter Saleh Zamani and I faced espionage charges as we took a 1,435 km (892 miles) ride from Basra to Baghdad to Jordan. At one point we escaped to a UN observer camp with a security man hanging on my wheel, but the observers could only observe, so they left.
Interrogated as spies in Basra, pissed security woke us hourly by flipping lights and shouting. "What time is it!" They were comically sinister, We were taken to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, listening to the screams of one poor guy getted whipped.
AP reported us free in a news brief out of Baghdad. Then fresh security piled into the truck for the ride to Jordan. The truck kept breaking down and unexploded ordnance littered the land as we walked for help. We ate watermelon with a melancholy platoon guarding a radio tower, now demolished.
Security stole the truck and dumped us at Jordan, which made us wait a day for a visa. We hitchhiked to Amman, ending a thousand-mile march in six days. One of the AP's disturbingly revisionist and error-riddled "history" books said the adventure lasted a third as long and only included Safwan. The agency has a history of botched reporter detention interventions. In my case? Pretend it never happened.
UPI had the escape, albeit set in the timeline that ends in Baghdad. But then, I'd escaped the AP-mandated training class run by former SAS in England. It actually wasn't hard to lift the burlap bag, look around and bolt for the tree line, the sound of blanks going off in frustration as I vanished into the woods. I didn't stay for the certificate cerremony.
Photographer Ricardo Marzalan (r) and the crew of The Desert Lion, a vintage Land Rover that topped out at 45 mph. Baidoa, Somalia. 1993 Far left is journalist Mark Fritz
ENEMY MINE: A US Army captain approaches a berm protecting a now-crushed tank. The hunt for souvenirs later killed two men from his unit. Air strikes saturated the theater with cluster bombs. Photo by Mark Fritz.
LADY GODIVA OF THE CAROLINAS: Took a bike trip to artsy Asheville, NC, in 2010 and ran into a protest against a city decency law: Men could go shirtless in public while women could not. At least until this Frenchwoman showed up. Photo by journalist Mark Fritz.
Heading into Taliban country in southcentral Afghanistan in 2004. Photo by Mark Fritz, journalist and war correspondent.
My dad was a motorcycle MP in Italy during WWII, and passed his fondness for bikes down to his sons. A master mechanic, here he is on our 1968 Triumph Trophy.(Photo by journalist and motocycle enthusiast Mark Fritz).
Petra, 2003, the crossroads of ancient civilizations almost empty of tourists because of the Iraq war is raging next door. Photo of journalist Mark Fritz,
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," Only in Hollywoodland mixed with Manhattan could a kid from the Detroit suburbs interview Eric Clapton and cover the kick off of Prince's Purple Rain tour in Detroit, both for the Associated Press. Only in LA could I put Paul Newman and Monica Lewinsky in the same story.
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.
With my stepped-on 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 was this Ninja. Photo of journalist and motorcycle enthusiast, Mark Fritz
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 journalist 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.
Even in 1991, it was strange the AP put together this team of white males for coverage out of Dahran, Saudi Arabia for Iraq War I. Supposedly, it's gotten better, though the agency is usually a decade or three behind the times.
A friend takes a walk on the Dry Tortugas, an archipelago in the Gulf of Mexico. and home to massive Fort Jefferson, the largest brick structure in the Americas.
This is 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 a ghost. He was charged with murder and enlisting children to be killers, among many other things. Photo by Human Rights Watch investigator journalist Mark Fritz
Bootleg copies of Permanent Deadline, a roman à clef of sorts that triggered a round of slanderous character assassination by AP degenerates and parasitic grifters who hijacked the book by Mark Fritz, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent. It's free on Kindle.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journslist Mark Fritz was among the first Western reporters to visit Berlin-Hohenschoenhausen, the notorious Stasi's main political prison. 1990.
South Sudan in 2006: Mother and child visit a clean water station maintained by the International Rescue Committee, where I worked. Photo by IRC press attache and journalist Mark Fritz.
Journalist Mark Fritz, apartment hunting in Petra.
Appearing on C-Span's BOOK TV, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Fritz addresses the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York on April 13, 1999. Fritz's spoke about his book "Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World," which chronicles and puts into perspective the biggest human migration in history.