We – photographer Kate Geraghty and myself – had been flying blind and we still were. Nearing the end of almost a month reporting on a mindless Ukrainian separatist war and the heart-numbing missile strike that destroyed the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on July 17, 2014, we had decided that if families and friends of the Australian victims could not get to the crash site, then we were obliged to bring them a keepsake.



First we wondered about a small quantity of soil, which might be carried in a locket. But we settled on seeds – they would be lighter, more compact and, with careful gardening, might be propagated from year to year. It would help too, we thought, that sunflowers are such happy chaps.



We were an Australian news crew in a war zone. However, because we were not there in any official capacity, it seemed we alone had the freedom of movement to harvest the seeds. But as time ran out and my imagination took over, we became overwhelmed by the idea.



“This is something for government,” I told Geraghty, and then I contacted Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s office to outline my grand plan, which was for Canberra to buy a local farmer’s crop of sunflower seed and distribute the seeds to families and friends of Australian victims and perhaps even to governments representing the other 260 victims. But there was no call back from Canberra – and the appearance of giant harvesters in nearby fields told us we needed to act fast.

We made a dawn arrival at Rassypnoe, which we had dubbed ‘‘the cockpit village’’ because it was where the cockpit section of MH17 had crashed to earth. We stood among head-high plants with a big empty suitcase – and in the absence of any cutting tool, we soon found that the only way to part the bread-plate sized flowers from the stringy stems was to wring their necks, as it were. We then drove north for five hours, to clear the conflict zone, and flew to Kiev.

In the capital, my hotel room quickly took on the look and smell of a barnyard, as I shucked the seeds from the flower heads. By 2 o'clock the next morning my hands were blistered and blackened, but the volume of the bulky suitcase had shrunk to a more manageable bundle of tightly rolled hotel laundry bags, weighing just 1.5 kilograms. Geraghty headed to Australia that morning; I came home to the US.