Either you put your life on the line to be there, or you've missed the boat,wrote Spanish war correspondent Julio Fuentes before he was murdered in southern Afghanistan six months ago. In this newly translated essay, which Fuentes wrote while in Sarajevo, he reflected on the small band of'blood brothers' who cover wars for a living

War correspondents are not soldiers or participants but observers, whose job necessarily draws them into scenes of warfare, terror and grief if they are to tell the story as it is. Working for a long time in armed conflicts changes forever the people who do it, in ways that cannot be undone. It alters, sometimes profoundly, their world-view and their very philosophy of life. I am speaking not of the fly-by-night visitors but of reporters who stay put for months at a time, in the eye of a hurricane of shrapnel and everyday death, doing their job in the most extreme circumstances, treading daily along that line that separates life from death, mutilation or mental collapse.

Those of my generation, who have cut their teeth in a decade of wars all over the world, no longer get tanked up in the bars of legendary hotels or sip martinis as they watch Saigon burning. We form a small family - in mourning for our own kind, our lost brothers and sisters - too hardened and just too busy to get intoxicated on old-fashioned romanticism. If you want to chronicle or photograph the horror, the men of war, the civilians blown to bits (and here I am thinking of Bosnia), the agony of wounded children or the effect of saturation bombing on Sarajevo, you have to grit your teeth, do up your flak jacket, shove your helmet on and get ready to gamble your life.

Maybe it seems a bit crude, put like that, but the best kind of news reports tend to be filed from hell, written at the worst of times in the nastiest of situations. There is no way around it: either you put your life on the line to be there, overcome your fear, stop worrying about sudden death or injury, or you've missed the boat already.

That's the reason, the sole reason, why ours is such a small family. There's a kind of badge of office or trademark that is stamped on the foreheads of only a few war reporters.

Having spent months in the wars of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Panama, Afghanistan, Iran-Iraq, Liberia, the Gulf and, for the last year and a half, stationed full-time amidst the savage butchery of the former Yugoslavia, I can barely count on my fingers the number of proper war correspondents I have met.

Some of those who were my friends are dead by now. And hardly anyone honours their memory. They sacrificed their brief, brave lives in the pursuit of a truthful account of what humankind is like when it is at its most wretched and debased.

Some were slain in the kind of place where a human life is worth scarcely as much as the bullet that might take it from you. I have seen them die, caught in a burst of fire from an M72 anti-aircraft machine gun, like the BBC cameraman Tomislav, who met his end aboard an armoured Land Rover outside Travnik in central Bosnia; I've seen them screaming in pain, peppered with shrapnel and broken glass while the Osijek hotel in Croatia was pounded by Serbian Katyusha rockets; I have tried to comfort them in bombed hospitals, like the Kosevo (in Sarajevo), whilst they murmured the name of God or called out for their mothers as the anaesthetic began to wear off; I've seen them fall, knocked over like wooden puppets, when a sniper's bullet found its mark. I have wept by the rickety old bed where Jean lay, a reporter for the French daily Libération, squeezing his hand and stroking his blood-caked hair.

Anyway I'm not here to write an epitaph or to portray my workmates as heroes or martyrs in the cause of journalism. They are neither heroes nor martyrs, despite appearances to the contrary. The fact is, they tend to be ambitious, thick-skinned and competitive. We're sometimes accused of having lost our grip on the old values of camaraderie and the tribal ritual of getting pissed at midnight.

At the end of a day full of terror and toil in Sarajevo, with shells exploding right beside you, you feel like you've just crawled out of a giant mincer. Sarajevo is like a time-machine for growing old quickly, a mincer for minds and bodies. Alcohol, like food or the ammunition that the Bosnian defenders need, has been in short supply for too long. And then there is the mental punishment of nightly air-raids, the thought that you might perish in a hail of shrapnel just as you're having a sweet dream about a long-ago night with your beloved.

We may have seen the last of the old romantic school of war journalism; but we few long-term Sarajevo correspondents have become blood brothers.

We might listen to Morris, from WTN, tinkling the piano at midnight after knocking back some "humanitarian relief" in what's left of the Holiday Inn, but we're hardly likely to turn this scene into a myth or start writing tear-jerking books about it.

Every day, you have to put to one side what is left of your nervous system whilst your report or your pictures make their way down the dodgy satellite line from Associated Press, warming your hands the while on an ancient wood-burning stove. Never mind that it's raining bombs, that shrapnel is hurtling across the streets to kill people, that snipers will be lining you up every time you head out of the hotel's underground car park with your accelerator slammed to the floor. We all know the score.

Newspapers and news agencies aren't especially bothered by what their reporters have to contend with. Your story has a deadline to meet, even if it means having to cut across a Sarajevo that is in flames, dodging the streets where mortars are exploding. It is, of course, equally possible to hang around in the hotel, writing from your bedroom, peeping out at the empty streets from behind concrete walls. But that's another story altogether, not this one; it wouldn't be the truthful, authentic story that is written into the very eyes of those who belong to the pure breed. The list of "hotel war correspondents" could fill a phone book.

Those who teach in the school of war journalism recently set up in the French city of Colliure shouldn't try to turn reporters into unarmed soldiers. They should get to know, face to face, that far-distant gaze you find in the eyes of those who tell the world about war, armed with just a laptop computer or a couple of cameras. They should teach about the "Vietnam syndrome" - or post-traumatic stress - which comes about when horrors heap up in the mind and which has long-term effects.

You can learn to distinguish between different calibres of missile by the way they sound and your basic instinct for self-preservation is the best mechanism to alert you to danger. Once you have scurried a few times across that line between life and death, or after you have come to your senses with dead bodies all around you, there are just two things you can do.

Either you go back home, or you try to pull yourself together in the eye of the storm.

First published in Spanish in 1993, this article was translated by Michael Mullan.

While working for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Julio Fuentes was murdered in southern Afghanistan on November 19th, 2001, in an ambush which also claimed the lives of his colleagues Azizullah Haidari, Maria Grazia Cutuli and Harry Burton