War & Peace Quote by Morley Safer

War reporting, in Safer's telling, can become less a calling than a craft you get too good at. The blunt admission, "After four or five different wars, I grew weary", isn t heroic or haunted in the Hollywood sense; it s occupational fatigue, the kind that comes from repeating a job that keeps paying you in adrenaline and moral ambiguity. He s puncturing the romance of the foreign correspondent as much as he s confessing to its toll.

The sharpest edge is in the seemingly casual claim that covering a war like Vietnam "isn't that difficult, really" when it is "open to coverage". Safer is drawing a line between wars that permit witness and wars engineered to resist it. Vietnam, for all its chaos and official spin, was unusually accessible to reporters: relative freedom of movement, fewer embedded constraints, a press corps that could test government narratives against what it saw. That access didn t make the war simple; it made the act of verifying reality less obstructed.

Subtext: the real fight in modern conflict journalism isn t just against danger, but against managed visibility. Safer is also quietly critiquing the professional incentives of the era: when the battlefield is open, the story can be gathered with competence and nerve. When it isn t, the reporter becomes a pawn in information warfare, dependent on briefings, escorts, and curated scenes. His weariness reads as foresight: not only did he tire of wars, he tired of the shrinking space where truth can be observed firsthand.