Almost as soon as a war breaks out these days you see them: while planes and ships are deploying, presidents are making speeches and everyone else is getting out, the journalists are getting in.
Afghanistan has been no exception. Even as smoke continued to rise from the World Trade Centre, journalists were popping up, incongruous in their Marks & Spencer polo shirts, 20 miles from Kabul.
It has been this way for 10 years. The Gulf war led smoothly into Yugoslavia, which led onto Bosnia, then Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone, not to mention two Chechen wars: enough to ensure that, for the first time since the Vietnam War, there are now virtually full-time war correspondents.
And now a whole new generation of war reporters is being blooded in what may be the most extended of the whole lot - the US war on terrorism.
The actual reporting skills needed for war are little different to reporting anything else: write what you see, ask questions, do interviews - preferably from both sides, though this does present the ticklish problem of popping across front lines.
Success is a matter of balancing two imperatives. On the one hand, to seek out battle. A war reporter in an unfamiliar place simply heads for the sound of the guns. Working against this impulse is, of course, the need to stay alive.
The seasoned hacks know it pays never to assume anything. It makes sense, when racing for the sound of those guns, to stop for a chat with locals and soldiers, especially if they are from the unit that just mined the next stretch of road.
Another consideration is communications. No use being in the thick of the action if there are no phones. A few years ago this was a major problem - and most journalists, arriving in a new place, first had to search out the local telex office, then hope it was not already crowded with other journalists.
But this problem is evaporating with the arrival of laptop-sized satellite phones. Now you really can take your communications with you, a handy thing for the coming war in Afghanistan, one of the most remote places on Earth.
Yet we are some way from the walking-talking journalist. For the Kosovo war I took along not just computer and sat phone but a solar panel to give me electricity while on the mountainous Albanian border. Never again. In future, I will be packing a few cartons of cigarettes, for use in persuading local warlords to let me power my satphone from their generator.
And then there is the motivation. Some journalists flee their first ever war, vowing never to go back. Others can't wait for the next one.
Wars are dangerous and terrifying, of course, but they are also thrilling. It is the same thrill as any journalist feels when working on a breaking story - only more so. War is quite simply the most intense experience around. And while being shot at is terrifying, watching a battle from a neighbouring hill is exciting.
But there is a price to pay. Last year, the Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, arguably the finest and bravest reporter of the Bosnian war, was killed in Sierra Leone. It was his bad luck to be on the wrong road, bumping into a group of soldiers who mistook him for the enemy.
There are any number of rules, of course. Never carry a gun. Never wear a uniform. Never argue with a warlord, or head down a road until you see a vehicle coming from the opposite direction.
But it is in the nature of war that you end up taking risks. Every so often you are driving along on a sunny day, you get to a checkpoint and the soldiers tell you they have no idea what is going on over the next hill.
And then you have a choice. Take a chance and go forwards. Or turn back, and find yourself a proper job.
Spare any thoughts of sympathy, however. Journalists, on the whole, do a good job, but remember, they are in wars because they want to be. Any time they get worried, they can turn around and run away - an option that is not available to the locals.
