Vaughan Smith

Vaughan Smith is a journalist and former war reporter. He came to journalism sideways: a Grenadier Guards officer who bluffed his way into the first Gulf War in his old uniform with a hired camera, then filmed wars from 1988 to 2012 in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo. He was the only journalist to film the 1998 attack on Prekaz, the massacre that called the Kosovar diaspora home to fight; a bullet found the mobile telephone he was carrying, and Pristina's airport today bears the name of Adem Jashari, whose compound he filmed. He was shot twice, won twenty-eight news awards individually or in teams, was one of the producers of the acclaimed Kosovo documentary The Valley, for which he negotiated access to the Kosovo Liberation Army, and made Blood and Dust, an Afghanistan medevac film widely watched on Al Jazeera. He founded Frontline Television News, London's Frontline Club and the imprint Frontline Club Books, and lives in Norfolk. The Extraction Pattern, with a foreword by the neuroscientist Katalin Gothard, is his first book.