“I am going to die now, and I wonder if it’s going to hurt,” recalls the Sky News reporter Stuart Ramsay, who was in Ukraine when he came under fire from a suspected Russian assassination squad. Ramsay tells the harrowing story to the British-Iranian investigative journalist Ramita Navai, whose new podcast, The Line of Fire, brings on war reporters to talk about their near-death experiences in the field. CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward joined Navai to talk about how 9/11 changed the course of her career and life (Ward has been reporting on the war in Syria for almost a decade, and before that on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq). She also spoke candidly about the benefits of being a woman in her field. “In places that are more tense,” she tells Navai, “I’m viewed as a curiosity rather than as a direct threat.” —Clara Molot