Richard Engel, Staying On The Story

NBC News correspondent Richard Engel is “basically a pacifist.” He thinks war should be illegal. And for the last three and a half years, he’s documented plenty of reasons why.

“At 33, the baby-faced Engel has logged more time in Iraq than any other television correspondent, chronicling 3 1/2 years of carnage for NBC and shrugging off several close calls. As nearly all television correspondents rotate in and out of Iraq, Engel has stayed,” Howard Kurtz writes in a must-read profile.

Of the Iraq war, Engel says: “It’s horrible. I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies — rotting bodies, bodies buried in shallow graves. One time I watched a dog carry a severed human head in its mouth. You’re smelling bodies, you’re seeing people who are so angry and insanely distraught. The people who are being killed are too old, too stupid, too poor, too young or too weak, socially or otherwise, to leave.”