Lynsey Addario

And I know from 25 years of covering war that that's something called bracketing.

It's where people who are positioning artillery basically gauge an area they want to target and they get closer and closer with every strike until they hit the target.

And so the rounds were coming closer and closer.

And then the third round came in and literally we dove for cover.

And I saw the flash of the mortar hit the gravel in front of me.

And it was really probably 20 feet away.

And I felt the spray of gravel on my neck.

So when I popped back up, I didn't know if it had been shrapnel or gravel.

And you hear me saying...

No, no.

That's my colleague, Andriy Dubchak, who I've covered most of the Ukraine war with.

And we checked each other to make sure we were fine.

And then once our security advisor, Steve Bungie, cleared for us to cross the street, we came upon this scene.

I mean, it was very dusty, very chaotic.

And I immediately clocked kind of these very small moon boots.

And...

It dawned on me that it was a family or there were children because initially, for some reason in my head, I thought it was going to be a soldier.

So I started photographing.

Of course, my first instinct was to run because we were still under fire.

And I started photographing and I was thinking in my head, there's no way the New York Times will publish photos of dead civilians because I know I've been doing this a very long time.