The Denver Post: I am an enemy of the people. For all the “presidential” promise some perceived in Tuesday’s teleprompter-smooth speech to Congress, that didn’t change.

I guess I always was an enemy of the people, even when covering the revolution in Iran so Americans would know what was going on in that critical country, as a mob with machetes chased my camera crew and me, and I was beaten at an Islamic cemetery, and had a colleague killed right next to me. He must have been an enemy of the people, too.

I also apparently was an enemy of the people when I barely made it over a shard-encrusted wall during a firefight between murderous militias in Beirut, while another colleague wasn’t so lucky and died scrawling the names of his children in his own blood. Another enemy of the people, no doubt.

I must have been an enemy of the people when I waded through dioxin-laced mud to report on the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and when my crew and I had to hotfoot it from gunmen in the Colombian jungle during a raid-gone-bad in the war on drugs.

Obviously I was an enemy of the people when I got death threats from an American arms dealer I tracked down in Libya, and when I lived for a week in a room running with rats and cockroaches during the war to oust tyrant Idi Amin from Uganda, and when I laid for hours in a swamp aside a runway measuring Soviet air power during their invasion of Afghanistan, and when I slept on desert sands with scorpions all around during the Gulf War.

So the American people would know what was going on.

Then there’s Daniel Pearl, beheaded in Pakistan. And James Foley, who lost his head in Syria. And Marie Colvin, blown apart by shells there. More enemies in our midst.

Visit The Denver Post for more.