Oh, the places John Hockenberry has gone and the things he's done!

The onetime NBC television news correspondent, who now is hosting his own program on MSNBC (a cable network), rode a mule among Kurdish refugees in the mountains of Iraq, came under fire with U.S. troops in Somalia, and covered the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini amid millions of Iranian mourners shouting, "Death to America!" He violated an Israeli curfew in Gaza, worked pressroom phones in Jerusalem while Iraqi Scud missiles flew overhead, and reported on the eruption of Mount Saint Helens.

Hockenberry, 42, already has had a remarkable career. But what makes his achievements all the more noteworthy, to everyone but the correspondent himself, is that he's done it all and seen it all from the seat of his wheelchair.

An automobile accident at age 19 left him a paraplegic -- or as he calls himself, a "crip." But he's not just a crip, he's a crip with an attitude. Frequently, it's a bad attitude.

Ask him about Christopher Reeve's well-publicized goal to walk again, and he'll tell you it's objectionable. It implies that life as a paraplegic is somehow lacking. "If there's a message that's gotten through in my work," Hockenberry maintains, "it's that I don't go along with that idea. It's an insult to people who have actually been living with their disability, exploring the interesting facets of life with their different physical configuration, and [discovering] the lessons that can be learned and the interesting aspects of culture that come out of disability. I think that to obsess about a cure is to say that life [in a wheelchair] is diminished somehow, and I won't say that."

His words come out quickly, a series of giant run-on sentences, his voice tinged with a combination of frustration and resignation. No matter how many times he repeats it, few seem to get it. He's fine, thank you. He doesn't want your sympathy. He's not a man with something missing. He's a whole person, just different. "You either think that you're just fine or you're not, and you can't think that you're just fine and be thinking about the cure," he says.

Hockenberry has the broad shoulders and thick arms of an athlete. No surprise there, since he eschews electric wheelchairs and has pushed himself -- literally and figuratively -- around some of the most inhospitable places in the world. Times are good for him. He has his own television program after having been a correspondent for one of the highest-rated television newsmagazines. His memoir, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence (Hyperion, $14.95), was both a critical and commercial success. He's working on a second book, a novel. And his wife recently delivered twins. What could be better?

Well, for one thing, people could stop reading motives into his actions. He is not angry. Never was. Never will be. What about the time he insisted on buying a manual-shift truck even though stick shifts are not made for paraplegics? "Well," he concedes, "that was stupid."

Or the time during the summer of 1977 when, as Hockenberry was leaving a fair, a state trooper asked him to move his wheelchair from its special rack mounted on the side of his truck? When his explanation -- he couldn't reach the wheelchair unless it was positioned exactly where it was -- failed to sway the policeman, Hockenberry attempted to drive off. The officer held on; other officers pulled out their guns and surrounded his vehicle. "That was anger, but that was a very long time ago."

But what about the time he attacked a cab when the driver refused to put his wheelchair in the trunk? Hockenberry broke the taxi's headlights and jammed the door open, nearly severing his own thumb in the process. "I know that it sounds like I'm protesting too much, but the tone of that story [in the book] is what an idiot I am."

Certainly if anyone is entitled to be angry with the fates, it's Hockenberry. Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1957, he lived an average, uneventful life until February 1976. His father worked for IBM, and the family lived at various corporate outposts around the United States, from Syracuse, New York, to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Hockenberry was a sophomore majoring in math at the University of Chicago when he and his best friend, Rick, decided to hitchhike to Massachusetts to visit Rick's girlfriend between semesters.

It was a miserable trip. There were missed rides and drivers that left them in obscure, deserted locations where it was difficult to find another ride. It rained, and when they finally flagged down a recreational vehicle that promised to take them nearly to their destination in comfort, the RV broke down. Salvation came in the form of two college students, also on break from school and also in a rush. They'd been on the road 18 hours when they picked up John and Rick, and it wasn't long before they all fell asleep, the driver included.

The car swerved off the road. The driver was killed. Her friend and Rick escaped relatively unscathed. Hockenberry had a fractured skull, a broken shoulder and collarbone, and three crushed vertebrae.

Sitting in his office now, more than two decades later, Hockenberry's legs are strapped together by an elastic bungee cord with hooks at the end -- the type used to hold down cargo on the roof of station wagons. But from the beginning, Hockenberry never felt strapped down spiritually.

There was never any sense of denial or bargaining with God or any of the other stages people who've suffered trauma often experience. "You can't deny that you can't feel your legs," he says. "It's a fact. I know I'm not going to walk tomorrow. The idea that people normally deny [their disability] and then normally get angry and then normally accept it is psychological malarkey.

"I don't think there's anything normal about denial. Psychologists present this to you as if it's the script for how to be a paraplegic. You're in an accident where the driver dies and you're bleeding and can't feel anything when you touch your knees. You don't need a whole lot of psychological mumbo jumbo to recognize the fact that you're not going to walk again."

There is a been-there, done-that sense of resignation to his tone. It's a subject he's discussed before, frequently with total strangers. One of the downsides of life in a wheelchair is that people he's never met before feel free to approach and ask personal questions -- about how long he's been in the chair, about his sex life, and his personal favorite, whether or not he has considered suicide. Suicide? Out of the question!

"The human race constantly goes through acts of coping and dealing with adversity. The sun moves a tiny little bit, and we're all dead. The idea that I break my back and boom, we're all over with, I think goes against the general human experience...

"I think it's abnormal to contemplate suicide. I don't understand why that's amazing to people. I think it's more amazing to sit around and look at television all the time. I would say, 'You are so courageous to watch TV every day.' Committing suicide for that makes more sense to me."

Reinforcing this conviction is Hockenberry's recollection of photographs he'd seen of an uncle. He'd never met the man -- the picture was actually of a child -- and assumed he was dead. In truth, the uncle, who suffered from a rare genetic disorder, had been put in a home. No one was going to put John Hockenberry away. He was determined to take on life -- and do it on his own terms.

Temporarily, he went back to school, but the University of Chicago had virtually no facilities for wheelchairs. The frustrations of coming to terms with his new body, and dealing with employment counselors and other bureaucrats who had little understanding of what it means to be disabled, convinced Hockenberry to drop out, pick up stakes, and start anew.

He chose the Pacific Northwest -- Eugene, Oregon, to be exact. He landed a job as a trainer at a home for developmentally disabled adults. Here he met Alice, a nurse and the woman who became his first wife. He also returned to school at the University of Oregon, where he majored in music. His rationale was simple. He'd almost died. Studying something "useful," something helpful in terms of a future career, was no longer a priority. "I loved music and I wanted to do what I wanted."

Interestingly, he chose the piano as his principal instrument. Yes, he'd taken piano lessons as a child. Yes, he loved the piano. But it is an instrument that requires the use of foot pedals. "I didn't take the piano to prove a point," he maintains. Still, it seems an odd choice.

He approached the instrument with his characteristic zeal, developing a device that enabled him to operate the pedals by depressing a bulb in his mouth. And the moment he had proved he could do it, he moved on. "I realized I could either be an event the stunt people talk about, or a pianist, but I couldn't be both."

He came to journalism accidentally. One of his odd jobs during college at Oregon was delivering The Oregonian (the local newspaper) early each morning. He'd drive and Alice would fling the paper onto porches and lawns while they listened to National Public Radio (NPR). The local NPR outlet, KLCC, was an enclave of hippies and activists, and when Hockenberry called to complain about a story, he received an unexpected reaction:

"Someone said" -- and here he breaks into an imitation of a California surfer dude -- "'Well, why don't you come down and volunteer? We'd like that.' I had...no answer for [that]. So, sure enough, I said I would go."

Hockenberry signed up as an unpaid intern. At first he performed grunt work, but soon his responsibilities increased. When Mount Saint Helens erupted, NPR network news looked to KLCC, the only station with a news department anywhere near the mountain, for reports. Many of these came from Hockenberry. Even after the volcano calmed down, the NPR news desk was impressed enough to continue using the station, and Hockenberry, for reports about the Pacific Northwest.

"I loved it from the beginning, but I was always mystified about why I loved it," he says of reporting. In retrospect, the answer seems obvious: He'd found his calling. Though he had never considered journalism as a career, Hockenberry had worked on his high school newspaper and been a member of his debating team. Current events had always intrigued him; he had strong opinions about many issues, and, as he puts it, "I could think on my feet."

Steve Franklin, a Chicago Tribune reporter who was posted in the Middle East with Hockenberry in the late 1980s, became a big fan. "One of the most incredible things was how quickly John made friends. He was excellent at making contacts. Other journalists were astonished at how fast that happened," says Franklin. "He had the absolutely brilliant ability to talk to a high-level government minister and then go out and talk to someone at an amusement park in Amman. He also had a great imagination."

He was good. His reports were seamless. As Tim Gorin, a national producer for NBC who covered Princess Diana's funeral with Hockenberry, put it: "He has an extraordinary ability to home in on what the story is. Sure, there were times when we needed to get into buildings and couldn't, but there was no situation we couldn't navigate together, and it became a much richer experience."

After he and Alice divorced in 1984, Hockenberry moved from Eugene to Washington, D.C., as a news reader on "All Things Considered,"a popular daily newsmagazine program on NPR. Then he went to the Middle East as a correspondent from 1988 to 1991, and after that, back to NPR in the United States. (During this period he was even named a finalist in NASA's Journalist in Space program, which was later abandoned, following the Challenger disaster.) He joined ABC in the early 1990s, where he met and married his second wife, Alison, an ABC producer, before being hired by NBC in 1996. Whatever he did, wherever he was, he worked harder than everyone else.

The Tribune's Franklin recalls how Hockenberry "threw himself into fighting the perception that someone with his disability couldn't do the job. He had more energy and more vigor than anyone I know. He went to places others never did."

When he couldn't find someone to help him negotiate difficult terrain, he'd literally crawl up flights of stairs to get to a source or, as he did in 1991, ride a mule in northern Iraq -- a painful experience -- to reach Kurdish refugees.

A far greater problem than navigating the pothole-filled streets and alleyways of the Middle East was convincing others -- and, more important, himself -- that his efforts were not a stunt. "I kept asking myself whether I was there to prove a point or to tell [the Kurds'] story, and I think I came to realize there wasn't a simple answer. Ultimately, I think the decision to get on that mule had less to do with me being a hardass and everything to do with solving the problem of getting to them.

"I could have walked -- rolled -- away and done a story. But there was no point to it unless you got to the people."

His friend Steve Franklin believes that "John isn't as driven as he once was. I believe he burned off a lot of that tension when he needed to prove himself." To a degree, Hockenberry agrees. His success, the realization of just how good he is, has calmed him down somewhat.

And so has Ushuaia.

Shortly after joining NBC, Hockenberry interviewed Nicolas Hulot, host of the French television series "Ushuaia: The Ultimate Adventure." In each episode, Hulot, a sort of daredevil-environmentalist, performs death-defying acts in exotic locales.

Hulot uses the term Ushuaia (the name of the southernmost town in the world, in South America, and pronounced oo-'SWAH-yah) to describe his adventures -- "the place where reality ends and dreams begin, the outermost bounds of the human spirit," according to the show's producers.

After Hockenberry completed the interview and switched the tape off, Hulot turned to him and said, "So, that wheelchair is your Ushuaia."

"I just said, 'Yes, yes,'" Hockenberry recalls. "I know the truth of Ushuaia because I lived it." To the indefatigable correspondent, life in his wheelchair is an ongoing adventure, whether it involves conquering the obstacles of piano foot pedals or traversing the mountains of Iraq.

One more Hockenberry epic:

In the early 1990s, he decided, at the last minute, to purchase tickets to a popular Broadway show that two of his friends were planning to see. When he got to the box office the day before the performance, the only seats available were in the balcony. There were no special facilities for disabled patrons, but he was assured this would present no problem if he contacted the manager when he arrived the next day.

On the day of the performance, when Hockenberry left his friends to find his seat a few minutes before the curtain was to rise, the manager refused assistance. Instead, he told Hockenberry the only way to reach the balcony was by the stairs. Worse, he said Hockenberry would have to be accompanied despite the fact that he had been sold a single ticket, and the theater's staff was not allowed to touch him. The best the manager could do was refund his money.

"I just wanted to see the show," Hockenberry says. "I didn't want to get locked in mortal combat... So I said, 'I'll get out of the chair. I'll hop up the stairs. Can you just carry the chair? It will take you no time at all. I've done this all over the world. And there's no particular reason why I shouldn't be able to do it in New York.

"They basically just threw me out of the theater. I was so angry, I would have come back and burned that theater down," he says. Instead, he wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times that attracted the attention of a human-rights lawyer who filed suit on Hockenberry's behalf.

The judge took one look at the case and ordered the theater to install facilities for the disabled.

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Curt Schleier is a frequent contributor to Biography. This article was published originally in Biography. Copyright © 1998 by A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved.