Gori/Tbilisi - I never met Dutch TV reporter Stans Storimans and the closest I ever was to him was when the ambulance carried him out of Gori, Georgia, while I was deciding whether or not to go in. I was standing on a road next to a reporter from a big London city newspaper and a Czech radio journalist when the red-and-white Russian-make van with Storimans inside of it tore by.
We were a kilometre or two from Gori and right next to the still- warm but no longer smoking hulk of a Georgian army BMP armoured personnel carrier. The turret was lying upside down, about 50 metres away.
We weren't alone. The BMP had attracted about three car loads of reporters, a mix of East and West Europeans. The cameramen took polite turns with the best angles for shots of the gutted vehicle.
I poked through the charred remains of the BMP. There were shards of metal tubes with fins and I recalled my NATO training. I decided those were bits of Soviet 82mm air-to-ground rockets.
The sky was mostly overcast. I thought "Either that was a nice shot or that Russian pilot just decided to unload on an abandoned BMP." I made a mental note to worry about rockets.
Our job, as foreign reporters outside Gori that day, was to get into the town, where only a few of the poorest inhabitants supposedly were left, and determine whether or not the Russian army was inside. That was important from a news point of view, as Gori, unlike South Ossetia, is in Georgia proper, so if the Russians were in Gori they had expanded the conflict.
The Georgian government, with increasing hysterics, had been sending e-mails and text messages and even phone calls to reporters for hours: the Russians are in Gori. But the Russians denied it, as did Gori residents phoned by reporters. So there we were, outside the town trying to decide whether it was worth the risk of driving inside.
Our reporter troika decided to go in, very slowly. We would talk to some people, and leave. We knew a Dutch reporter had been hurt by an airplane up ahead in the main square, but we also knew airplanes generally go away. We all spoke good Russian and knew that since we could communicate with Gori's residents, we had an excellent chance of learning where we shouldn't go.
Gori even before the war was not a pretty place - lots of Soviet concrete high-rises, gravel roads, not too many trees, few shops, poorly-dressed people, and plenty of mud or dust depending on the season. Wartime, more windows were broken. Most of the people were gone, but minutes after driving into the town we found a middle-aged couple next to some bags - they wanted out of Gori but there were no buses, so they were walking.
Yes, the Russians had been dropping bombs, there had been about ten or so explosions all morning, most of them them right after dawn.
We thanked them and pushed on. We found an old woman, standing on the side of the road, crying. I pointed out that she wasn't coherent and did we really want to stay still, in one place, trying to communicate with her? We drove on.
A few men at the main square pointed to the place where the foreign reporters had been hurt a half hour ago. Stories varied, one man saying a machinegun had cut up their car, a second saying it was an auto cannon, and a third saying he hadn't seen the attack, but heard something like a "big saw."
A statue of Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, overlooked the square, some broken glass, rubble, trash, and shot-up automobiles.
The place where the Russian pilot inflicted fatal injuries on Storimans looked like a grubby Eastern European city centre after a football riot.
The sky was quite grey at this point. The Georgians told us staying out in the open wasn't a good idea, so we drove up a side street.
I went up to a park bench and asked a priest questions. No, they hadn't seen any Russian tanks. Yes, the Russian air force was dropping bombs, the last one hit the square. A man pointed out a metre-wide and shallow crater by a store. Cleverly, I told myself the Georgians didn't know rocket craters when they saw them. Cluster munitions, which actually I knew about, didn't occur to me. I was worried about rockets.
Then a jet rumbled. The Gori men went back to their park bench. My colleagues and our car did a quick 180, and I had to trot - not sprint - to hop into the back seat. We were leaving Gori.
We had done our job, we had all by ourselves confirmed although Russian ground troops weren't in Gori (yet), there were jets above it, and sometimes the jets' pilots were trying to hurt things on the ground. Storimans knew all that before us, of course.
The London newspaperman, Prague radio woman, and I, we learned Storimans' name from the wire services like every one else. It was only later in the week we read Human Rights Watch had concluded Russian cluster bombs killed Storimans and injured another Dutch reporter, and their Georgian driver. On Friday we read the Russian denial.
During our visit to Gori we never heard an explosion, no-one shot at us, and when we heard a jet in the distance we ran away. How exactly our colleague Storimans died, at the time we had little idea, and frankly we did not even try to find out.
But we took the refugee couple back to Tbilisi with us.
