Wearing a blue jacket, a pale shirt, chinos and black shoes, James Foley sat on stage describing his capture and imprisonment by Libyan soldiers loyal to Muammar Gaddafi.
Foley, a photojournalist now presumed killed at the hands of an Islamic State militant, was talking to students of his former journalism school at Northwestern University in Illinois.
It was 2011 and he had recently been released after a 44-day stint in Libyan prison. For the first 18 days no one knew whether he was alive or dead.
"Really, it's a cautionary tale what happened to us," he said in the interview. "Some of the things I'll never be able to change, but I wish that I could have."
Foley had previously been on embedded tours with US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he wanted to get closer to conflicts in the Middle East.
"The one thing about the embed is you always have a screen, there's always a screen literally of US armour ... separating you from the population," he said.
"The idea with the Libyan revolution, is it's journalists embedding with rebels, and that's essentially what we did."
His editor at the GlobalPost had told him not to go - it would be hard to get in, The New York Times was already there, internet would be scarce.
But Foley said he wanted to "nail down some facts" rather than rely on the Facebook rumours surrounding the Arab Spring.
"I'm drawn to the front line naturally," he said. "It's like Facebook, a press conference by this Transitional Council - but you're like 'I've got to confirm this'."
In Libya, he and his colleagues were attacked by Gaddafi forces, pinned down under "a roar of bullets".
Foley's fellow photojournalist, Anton Hammerl, was killed. The rest of the group were imprisoned.
"A soldier's pressing your face into the bed of a truck, [you're] bleeding from the scalp - it's the worst kind of shock," Foley said.
"The next morning you wake up and you realise the worst thing in the world has happened, you know, just the worst possible thing. I mean Anton is most likely dead and we're captured and nobody knows where we are."
Over the next month, the journalists found themselves in "a bunch of prisons".
Eventually Foley was allowed to make a phone call. He called his mother's number - the only number he knew - and she picked up.
"That was a miracle man," Foley said. "That was God right there."
He blamed himself for making "a lot of mistakes" the day he and the others were captured. He should have been more careful, he said.
Why did Foley become a war correspondent? Partly to find out about conflicts his brother was fighting in with the US Airforce.
"I think it's some kind of romantic notion you have about yourself, too," he said. "
"You want to be a writer, you want to see the world. Fiction didn't work out too well, let's try the real thing. I mean there's an amazing reach for humanity in these places, in these barren places."
Being captured once did not deter Foley, who came back to a barren place, Syria, to nail down some more facts.
"The honest fact is when you see something really violent, it does a strange thing to you," Foley told his interviewer.
"It doesn't always repel you, sometimes, as you know, it draws you closer. Feeling like you've survived something - it's a strange sort of force that you are drawn back to. I think that's the absolute reality."
