WATERVILLE -- After accepting the Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism Sunday night, New York Times foreign correspondent John F. Burns joked the hooded headgear he received with the award was meant to cover his bushy hair.

Colby College President William D. Adams called Burns the "chief foreign correspondent" of his era at the 55th Elijah Parish Lovejoy Convocation.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a graduate of Colby and abolitionist publisher, was killed in 1837 by a mob enraged by his anti-slavery editorials. The Lovejoy award honors both his memory and the achievements and courage of the journalist who receives it each year.

In a long career spent in many of the world's most dangerous places, Burns twice won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1993 for his coverage of the destruction of Sarajevo and the war in Bosnia and in 1997 for his coverage of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Burns has been arrested in China and Mozambique for his reporting and was forced to hide from Saddam Hussein's secret police after escaping arrest in Iraq, according to a biography on Colby College's Web site.

He covered the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the end of apartheid in South Africa and was the Time's first Islamic affairs correspondent, from 1998 to 2001.

Sunday night, speaking in the Lorimer Chapel on the Colby campus, Burns said he felt a little bit like an impostor in receiving the award.

He said Lovejoy was a man who changed history and set a standard for courage, conscience and commitment that are unrivaled in American journalism or any other journalism.

Burns said he was also daunted by the names of the men and women who had received the award before him.

Burns' talk came at the end of an evening centered around journalism at war, including a panel discussion by three journalists who have covered the Iraq war: Andrea Bruce of The Washington Post, Bill Nemitz, of the Portland Press Herald, and Christine Spolar of the Chicago Tribune.

The three shared different perspectives of a war that they covered in different ways.

Bruce, a photojournalist, showed images taken during the first part of the war in which she traveled relatively freely and during times when her movements were restricted by the great danger she and other journalists faced.

In one, a Marine holds a handgun to an Iraqi man's head, in another boys escape the heat by swimming in a river.

A series of photos chronicled the life of an Iraqi woman who was forced into prostitution to feed her two boys after her husband was killed during the invasion. The woman wore blue contacts and dyed her hair blond. In one of Bruce's images, she styles her hair to look like pop star Britney Spears.

Bill Nemitz, who traveled to Iraq three times, twice in 2004, when he was embedded with the Maine Army National Guard's 133rd Engineer Battalion, spoke of the changes in the attitudes and way the soldiers he met thought of the war.

During his first visits to the war, Nemitz said a lot of the soldiers seemed to agree with the official stance of the military and the Bush Administration, and accepted that they were working to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

Of his return visit, years later, Nemitz spoke of waiting to board a military transport plane with a group of soldiers who were returning to Iraq.

As they waited, with about 100 soldiers, it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop, except for one young soldier who was quietly sobbing, said Nemitz.

"This young guy, he could not have been more alone," he said.

Even the graffiti underscored a change in perception, he said.

In a bathroom stall, under a slogan calling for soldiers to remember Sept. 11, someone had written that attack was about Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, not Iraq.

Christine Spolar, who served as a bureau chief in Iraq, spoke of the difficulty of training Iraqis who had never been exposed to real news and who had to be convinced to translate precisely her tough questions.

Over time, she said, those Iraqis became excellent journalists. Spolar and Bruce said those Iraqis faced terrible dangers to cover the war.

Speaking of the state of the American effort in general, Spolar said "We are in a very sad place and the Iraqis are in a very sad place."

She said she does not know any Iraqi that enjoys living in their homeland now.

Alan Crowell -- 474-9534, Ext. 342

acrowell@centralmaine.com