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Sandy Gall, War Correspondent Without Swagger, Dies at 97
Sandy Gall, a veteran correspondent for Britain's Independent Television News who covered with calm precision the globe's major conflicts in the last half of the 20th century, died on Sunday at his home in Penshurst, a village in Kent, England. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Carlotta Gall, a reporter for The New York Times.
For nearly 50 years, Mr. Gall's weary eyes and elongated features were ubiquitous on British television. As a war reporter in Vietnam, Africa and the Middle East, and for more than two decades as an imperturbable presenter on Independent Television's popular 'News at Ten,' he was in all the country's living rooms.
He covered the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., and the arrival of U.S. Marines in Vietnam in 1965. He was one of the few journalists to see North Vietnamese tanks roll into Saigon in 1975, and he captured on film the early days of the Vietcong occupation; fleeing British diplomats left him the keys to the embassy club so he could use the pool. The queen decorated him, and Prince Charles wrote the preface to one of his books.
In his later years Mr. Gall became known as a specialist on Afghanistan. He trekked hundreds of miles to report on the anti-Soviet guerrillas, known as the mujahedeen, who fought to free their country from Russian control in the 1980s. He wrote six books on Afghanistan and founded a charity for disabled Afghans, drawn by the improbable pluck of the country's people and by the rugged landscape, which reminded him of his native Scotland — 'but without the whisky,' he liked to joke, ruefully.
He published his last book, 'Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud,' a biography of the assassinated mujahedeen leader, whom he admired, when he was 93.
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