Feb 12, 2019 5 min read

Think back to when you were 17 and had a job, probably at that point just to have a few dollars in your pocket.

At that age, Lara Logan was working at a newspaper in her native Durban, South Africa, and displaying considerably more initiative than the average teenager.

“I did every job that every other journalist at the paper didn’t want to do,” the correspondent for CBS’s “60 Minutes” recalled. “I would literally raise my hand: ‘What do you not want to do, any of you?’ And I would do it.”

And so, she told her audience Feb. 5 at Upper St. Clair High School, she ended up working the graveyard shift in advance of the Sunday edition, with her duties including delivering copies to the Durban’s police station, fire station, hospital and morgue.

That was in the late 1980s, during the final years of South Africa’s apartheid and the government’s facing accusations of promoting violence. Logan learned that some of the victims wound up at the morgue she visited regularly, taken there under cover of darkness.

Eventually, her contact allowed her to see the bodies, “not because I had a morbid fascination with corpses,” she explained, “but because I wanted to know, for sure, what happened to them.”

As she related as the latest speaker for the Town Hall South lecture series’ 50th season, her morgue experience started her on a path toward doing everything she can to take firsthand looks at what she covers as a journalist.

The path has taken her through much of Africa, into the Middle East and to the heart of the U.S. military action in Afghanistan that has persisted since shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“At that time, the Taliban had 95 percent of the territory there,” she said. “And it was pretty scary, if you remember the images of women in burkas being executed in the stadium by the Taliban for crimes such as showing a sliver of skin on their sleeve or having shoes that were too shiny, something like that.”

Nevertheless, she was determined to go to Afghanistan and embarked on a process of getting there that involved contacts in multiple countries and “spending the night in a French prison with a bunch of refugees,” plus giving someone a fake phone number for a visa to get her as far as Russia.

“I discovered that there were thousands of journalists in Moscow trying to get to Kyrgyzstan,” she said about one of the former Soviet republics closer to Afghanistan. “That was the way in, to go from there.”

So she talked the owner of an airline into transporting her that far. Then from Kyrgyzstan, it was a trip in an old, rickety Russian aircraft.

“Every time it tried to take off, it hit the deck. It was too heavy, and so people started throwing things off. And I will say two journalists got in a fight on the tarmac about whose equipment would be tossed off. Mine was the first to go, because li’l ol’ me, what was I going to do?” Logan recalled.

“The pilot didn’t speak a lick of English, and we had no idea where we were going. We just flew and flew and flew, and it got darker and darker. Through the window, you could see these mountains, huge mountains rising in the dark.”

Even without using lights – to do so undoubtedly would have meant being shot down – the pilots landed safely. Logan made her way to the front line at Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, and stayed for several months.

One night, she was awakened by a hand over her face and was taken to a nearby house.

“They open the door, and there are all these Taliban commanders sitting, drinking vodka and whatever else they can get their hands on,” including alcohol made from dead flies: “It feels like it strips the skin off the inside of your throat as it goes down,” she said.

“And that is where they made their deals. That was just extraordinary to me, to see how it actually happened.”

A dozen years later, by that time the mother of two young children, Logan traveled to the West African nation of Liberia to report on the epidemic of the often-fatal viral hemorrhagic disease Ebola.

“I went to do that story because I really thought it was important to use the platform that we had at ’60 Minutes’ to tell that story in a human way,” she explained.

She told of visiting a clinic divided into two areas, one for people whose cases of Ebola were confirmed. Dressed head-to-toe in protective gear, Logan encountered a woman who had a 3-year-old boy with her.

“First they came to tell her that her husband, on the other side of the plastic, had died of Ebola,” Logan said. “And I remember standing there, listening to her screams and that pain in her voice. Then they came to take her child. And you know, once you go to that side, you don’t touch your child again. They don’t come out.

“That was one of the most difficult stories I could ever imagine doing.”