[media-credit name=’Derek Montgomery’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]An eager crowd of students, faculty and community members spilled into the aisles of the Howard Auditorium at the Fluno Center Wednesday night to hear Anthony Shadid, University of Wisconsin graduate and Pulitzer Prize winner, deliver the Ralph O. Nafziger lecture.

Shadid, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism at UW, received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in international news reporting for his work as a Washington Post reporter in Iraq.

Shadid started his speech by saying, “Madison is one of my favorite places on Earth.”

He added that working as a reporter for the Daily Cardinal was the most fun he ever had as a journalist and started him down his lifelong career path.

The majority of Shadid’s speech focused on several personal encounters with Iraqi people and his recent 14 months of continuous reporting in Iraq.

One Iraqi man Shadid met in 1998 told him that although the Iraqi people were prisoners of an oppressive regime, he personally did not consider the United States the country’s savior.

“[The man said] the Iraqi people had nothing to do with the invasion [of Kuwait] yet were suffering from the U.S. sanctions,” Shadid said. “I had never heard anything like this.”

Another Iraqi man Shadid spoke with just five months before the most recent U.S. operations in Iraq began told him his country’s outlook was grim. The Iraqi told Shadid he thought the American invasion was just an angry response to the 9/11 attacks, rather than an effort to spread democracy.

Although Shadid said the feelings of the Iraqi people were ambiguous, he also said Americans sometimes don’t recognize the depth of their anger and frustration.

Shadid repeatedly stressed that one of the main things he learned in his time in Iraq was how much more complicated the situation continuously becomes.

“[Iraq] is a landscape of conflicting emotions,” he said.

Shadid won the Pulitzer for his “extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril, the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended,” James Baughman, director of the UW Journalism School, said in his introduction to Shadid’s speech.

“[Shadid] covered one of the most dangerous areas in the world,” Baughman said.

UW sophomore Lauren Krieg, who attended the lecture, said it was interesting to hear the perspective of a highly respected Pulitzer Prize winner.

UW senior Jen Ertel said Shadid’s speech was not what she expected, particularly in light of the many personal accounts he shared.

“I liked his perspective on the real [Iraqi] people,” Ertel said.

The Nafziger lecture, sponsored by the UW Journalism School, hosts distinguished journalist lecturers to provide a service to the community.