This Burning Land

Jennifer Griffin and Greg Myre have been covering international affairs since the day they met in 1989 at an overflowing soccer stadium in Soweto, South Africa. On that day, Nelson Mandela’s prison colleagues received a thunderous greeting upon their release from decades in jail.

At the time, Greg reported for the Associated Press, and Jennifer was a college student taking a year off. They were also present when Mandela himself walked to freedom, and they went on to cover the dramatic final years of apartheid.

Greg and Jennifer moved to Pakistan in 1993 and often traveled to war-torn Afghanistan. They spent their honeymoon under rocket fire … for which Greg has never been fully forgiven. But they were among the first to interview members of an obscure new group calling itself the Taliban.

They eventually landed in Jerusalem in 1999. It was the calmest place they had been in years, and they started a family. But they soon found themselves raising two daughters while covering the worst fighting ever between Israelis and Palestinians.

They reported on every major event, from peace talks in the summer of 2000 to the Palestinian uprising that came shortly afterward. They witnessed the terrible bloodshed that included frequent Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli military incursions. They covered the election of Ariel Sharon and the death of Yassar Arafat.

During this time, Greg worked for the New York Times and Jennifer was the correspondent for Fox News.

In their years abroad, they traveled to more than 50 countries and reported on a dozen wars. But they found none so gripping as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is the basis for their book, “This Burning Land.”

They now live in Washington, where Greg is a senior editor at National Public Radio and Jennifer is Fox’s national security correspondent.

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