A Bloody Day in Paradise

In Phuket, Thailand, the morning of Dec. 26 was as gorgeous as the seven that had preceded it. I was playing golf with a Finnish couple a few hundred meters from the island’s western coast, when some kids came running onto the course, upset and agitated. Something terrible, they let us know, had happened on the beach.

Racing back to my hotel to check that my wife and children were fine (which they were) I received a voice mail from Alex Perry, Time’s New Delhi bureau chief, on vacation in the Indian Himalayas. He knew much more about the disaster than I did, so even before I saw the devastation on Phuket’s beaches for myself, I knew that many had been less fortunate than my family. And that we had a huge story on our hands.

Back in Hong Kong, Time Asia’s deputy editor William Green and senior editor Zoher Abdoolcarim, together with picture editor Lisa Botos, had started to deploy our forces, as correspondents and photographers in the region called one another with the news. Photographer John Stanmeyer, near his home in Bali, got a text message about the disaster from Andrew Marshall, who writes for us from Bangkok. Within hours they were off, Stanmeyer to Sri Lanka along with New Delhi correspondent Aravind Adiga, and Marshall to Phuket with photographer Philip Blenkinsop. In Jakarta, correspondent Zamira Loebis scrambled to get up to Aceh province in northern Sumatra, and arrived there early Tuesday morning with photographer Kemal Jufri. As she drove into the provincial capital Banda Aceh, says Loebis, she realized the scale of the tragedy. “There were hundreds of bodies,” she recounts, “covered in blue and yellow plastic.”

Traveling around Sri Lanka, Adiga recalled Sept. 11, 2001, when he was in Brooklyn, New York, watching the World Trade Center collapse, and thinking, “Everything is finished.” But as he says, the world went on after Sept. 11, and “I keep telling myself that the world will go on after this, too.” Whatever the news brings, these talented reporters and photographers—together with many more, based in New York, London and elsewhere, whose contribution to this special report was no less important—will do their best to bring it to you. Last week, I couldn’t have been prouder to be part of the team.