As I pedaled my bicycle toward the gunfire and Tiananmen Square, dodging people in crowds fleeing in the opposite direction, I kept thinking: What a crazy occupation this is.

For weeks during the spring of 1989, the question preoccupying the world had been whether the student-led Tiananmen demonstrations paralyzing China would end with a democratic revolution or with massacres. That night, June 3, the phone began ringing in the apartment in Beijing I shared with my wife and fellow New York Times correspondent, Sheryl WuDunn. We had our answer: Tens of thousands of army troops were forcing their way into central Beijing, mowing down crowds of unarmed protesters and bystanders who tried to resist.

So I jumped on my bicycle, legs pumping madly, careening around tank traps students had set up, so I could report on a modern army waging war on its people.

It was probably the most important story I’ve covered and I got at least one big thing wrong — I’ll get to that — but I did manage to reach Tiananmen Square before the troops. I parked my bicycle near the famous portrait of Chairman Mao and began interviewing people in the throng of students and workers.

Although it was already dark, the square was lit by overhead lights and by the glow of two armored personnel carriers that protesters had set ablaze. At first, the troops, arriving by the truckload, fired over our heads. Then they lowered their aim and fired right at us.

The gunfire was episodic, coming in cacophonous bursts every few minutes. People would fall, we would retreat, the guns would fall silent for a time and our retreat would halt.

I was rushing around, interviewing people in Chinese, always trying to keep a layer of protesters between me and the bullets. Until I realized that I was taller than almost everyone around me, so that a valuable few upper inches of me were still exposed. I began stooping as I spoke to people.

“General strike!” the crowd shouted. “General strike!” Some people hurled rocks or Molotov cocktails toward the troops, but they couldn’t hit the soldiers — and then there would be another round of gunfire, and more would drop.

Groups of protesters commandeered two buses in hopes of reaching the troops. About a dozen young people boarded each bus, holding iron bars or other weapons with which they intended to attack the soldiers. The crowd screamed encouragement, but their courage was misplaced. As the protesters drove the buses toward the troops, the soldiers opened fire. The buses came to a halt, one of them on fire, and in a moment, these young people transformed from heroes into corpses.

I found myself in the midst of a massacre. With each round of gunfire, we were pushed backward on the blood-soaked Avenue of Eternal Peace. My bicycle was now close to the troops and not recoverable, so I ran to a nearby hospital to count corpses, and then back home. I had forgotten that it was a Saturday evening, which for the paper meant early deadlines.

When I didn’t return on time, Sheryl, who had filed her own story about the slaughter, was increasingly fearful that I had been shot. “There’s no point in worrying,” the foreign editor, Joseph Lelyveld, kept telling her on the phone; the anxiety in his voice made her worry even more. He tried to distract her by asking her to reach out to all the hospitals to document the death toll — a request that didn’t help Sheryl’s mood.

Finally, I burst in, hugged Sheryl, called New York to reassure editors there that I was fine and then filed my story by telex — a few paragraphs at a time, as I wrote them. I had never been so sad to have my byline and Sheryl’s under a banner headline across the front page.