Nicholson A State of War Exists

Reporters in the Line of Fire
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84954-344-6
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

'The worst moment in a war was my fear I would not be sent to it.' So wrote the young Michael Nicholson, a reporter whose astonishing career has covered eighteen major conflicts. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, A State of War Exists sees the veteran journalist pondering what made him want to risk life and limb travelling to the most dangerous parts of the world, at the most dangerous times - over 200 journalists have been killed in the last three years alone. Was it machismo or masochism that encouraged him so compulsively and repeatedly to risk his life? Nicholson introduces us to trailblazers who have inspired him and countless others with their bravery, wisdom and skill in presenting the 'pity of war'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nicholson, Michael

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

‘The worst moment in a war was my fear I would not be sent to it.’

I wrote that over twenty years ago when I had already gone to nine of them. Now, as I hang up my boots, the final tally is eighteen. The expectation of the sight and sound of war never failed to exhilarate me. Risk spiced my life. But then I had the return ticket, the paper promise to lift me, whenever I chose, away from the killing fields to a safe haven.

There was only one response to that repeated question: why? A self-deprecatory shrug of the shoulders and the simple and generally misunderstood one-liner – it was because I wanted to. I simply could not resist the invitation and it was easily done because, except for the once, it never occurred to me I would not come back. James Cameron, my paragon, once wrote that it was against the rules to have a war without him. I know the feeling well.

War reporters belong to an exclusive club of globetrotters. They are issued a privileged passport to travel this world and witness astonishing happenings. It is usually only when they are together that they talk of their wars and even then warily. Their adventures seem so unlikely in retrospect. Who else would believe them?

Is it machismo or masochism that encourages us so compulsively and repeatedly to risk our lives? Probably both. There is no choice. Having done it once, you have to do it again and few of us would have the cheek to deny that the chase becomes an end in itself. We are all slave to the same impulse a gambler must feel when his luck is running. To some it is like sex.

One of the greatest television combat cameramen, Tasmanian Neil Davies, was a good friend of mine. He spent more time covering the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia than anyone from any network.

He was quite fearless, believing, as many of us did, that he was invincible. He wrote these lines on the flyleaf of every working diary he kept in all his years in South East Asia:

Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!

To all the sensual world proclaim.

One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without a name

It says it all and that message was his daily mantra until the day he was killed by a stray bullet in an attempted coup in Bangkok.

War has glamour. You win no friends admitting it. Walter Cronkite, the doyen of American broadcast journalists, once wrote that there is nothing in the field of journalism more glamorous than being a war correspondent. He said the public stereotype them as handsome derring-do swashbucklers, dashing from one crisis to another in romantic criss-crossings, flamboyant, brave and exhilarated by danger.

Ernest Hemingway reported the Spanish Civil War and Jack London, reading reports of General Gordon’s last stand in Khartoum, decided he too would become a war reporter for the thrills. In 1904 he travelled to Japan to cover the Russo-Japanese War with ‘gorgeous conceptions’. Disillusioned, he quickly returned home and, like Hemingway, confined himself to novels.

The New Yorker once described war reporters as ‘congeries of eccentrics and prima donnas, not so much serious as cynical’. Michael Herr wrote in his Vietnam masterpiece Dispatches:

We have been called many names; war-junkies, thrill freaks, wound-seekers, ambulance-chasers, hero-worshippers, dope addicts, closet queens, ghouls, seditionists, traitors, career prostitutes, fiction writers, more nasty things than I can remember.

War is entertainment. Most people only know it courtesy of Hollywood. Actors play soldiers as heroes in simplified, formulaic scripts where the good guys beat the bad guys in the ultimate sacrifice, defending right against wrong, liberty against tyranny.

There is the iconic scene in Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. American helicopters laden with napalm, flown by junkies led by a mad colonel, playing Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ over loudspeakers, obliterate villages and all who were once alive in them. It crystallises not just the insanity of war but the glorious black romance of being part of such a mighty killing machine. It remains Hollywood’s darkest vision yet in its continuing fascination with war and all its attendant horrors.

Correspondents belong to an association of Cassandras. We spend a career in the energetic hope that what we report will do good, that it can somehow change the world for the better. We travel from conflict to conflict, from one human misery to another and, like the cameramen and photographers who are our brave companions, we suffer from an overdose of everything. The world’s woes are perverse and self-inflicted and in time we become saturated with them.

Yet we are supremely privileged. We have a seat in the spectator stands of great events, both witness and juror as history is being made. We write the first drafts.

It is an odd occupation, a war profiteer with death and destruction as the matter-of-fact reason for being there. It is difficult to catalogue the wars we have known and not begin to doubt their recall. The temptation to embellish is always at the shoulder and sometimes difficult to resist.

Who would believe how many wars this world has lived through in one lifetime? Two World Wars are indelibly recorded. We are coming to terms with the bloody aftermath of the Iraqi invasion and the futility of taming Afghanistan. Television’s catalogue of events in the so-called Arab Spring is still vivid. But who remembers the others, the little wars?

Can you recall the starving, emaciated face of Biafra? The Palestinian grenade rolling down the aisle of a Pan Am jet? The pits full of rotting corpses on the birthday of Bangladesh? The faceless napalmed babies of Vietnam?

Do you remember Idi Amin’s Uganda, the House of Death in the Congo, the cannibals of Cambodia, the decapitated nuns in Rhodesia, the blacks bleeding red in Soweto? Cyprus and war, Israel and war, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Algeria. War on war.

War reporters, then as now, confess to inner conflicts. How do we mark the foggy line between sincerity and technique, the imperative from the glib, a line so fragile that one can tread all over it in those anxious minutes to a tight deadline, or a ringing phone, a nagging producer, a thirst? How do we explain or excuse that final decision on what to report and what not to?

James Cameron wrote that never in his life had he made any claim to be an objective journalist, if objectivity meant the uncritical presentation of wrong or foolish events. To him it was dispassionate reporting, cold-blooded, bystander journalism. His trademark was to show emotion, humanity, disgust, despair, impotence.

It has been called the journalism of the repressive self-righteous. But veterans of war will ask how else can you respond, surrounded by the carnage of a mortar attack on a crowded Sarajevo market place or walking through hospital wards full of mutilated crying children in Rwanda? Is it possible to be anything but subjective in war?

There are newspaper reporters with long-established reputations, well known for their emotional writing of war and their dedication to a cause. They break the taboos of journalistic impartiality, writing what they see without the least restraint, and they do not spare their readers the horror in the detail: soldiers do not die without bleeding, anti-personnel mines take away their genitals, mortar shrapnel opens up the stomachs of pregnant mothers. Unlike so much television news, their reports are printed unfiltered, unsanitised.

This is one account by Robert Fisk of the massacre by Christian militia of Palestinian refugees at the Chatila camp in Lebanon in 1982:

They were everywhere, in the road, in laneways, in backyards, beneath crumpled masonry and across the tops of garbage tips. Blood was still wet. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting the corpses, women, young men, children, babies and grandparents, lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned down. A child lay on the roadway like a discarded flower, her white dress stained with mud and dust, the back of her head had been blown off by a bullet fired into her brain.

And this from John Pilger describing the Veterans’ March in Washington in 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War:

Never before in this country have young soldiers marched in protest against a war they themselves have fought and is still going on. They have stopped Mr and Mrs America in the street and told them what they did, about the gore and the atrocities, a battalion of shuffling stick figures.

A former quartermaster, shouting through a loud hailer, described to rush hour shoppers how he helped raze a Vietnamese village.

‘Listen to this friends … the whole village was burning but the spotter planes reported people fleeing across open fields, so we switched to fragmentation shells and began to chop them up. Then we began firing phosphorus shells and watched them burn.’

They belong to what is often called ‘attachment journalism’, what one critic of it eloquently, if cynically, describes as the journalism of ‘sanctimonious moral perfectionism motivated by a social conscience that too often overwhelms’. They are accused of being flagrantly partisan, anti all wars, each intent on persuading readers that his or her opinion should be theirs too. They do not deny it....