I Know I Was Doing My Job

“There probably can never be full recovery of memory,” writes Chris Hedges in his 2002 book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), “but in order to escape the miasma of war there must be some partial rehabilitation, some recognition of the denial and perversion, some new way to speak that lays bare the myth as fantasy and the cause as bankrupt.”

Hedges has won multiple prizes for his writing about wars. In 2002, he was a member of a team of reporters for The New York Times that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism, and he won an Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. In 2003, he questioned the war in Iraq during a commencement address at Rockford College, at which point the Times issued a formal reprimand, insisting that he stop speaking about the war, as it undermined the newspaper’s impartiality. Hedges subsequently resigned.

Now, he’s writing columns for Truthdig, analyzing how, a decade after 9/11, the US has become “what we loathe,” getting arrested in front of Goldman Sachs, and speaking out against the “plutocracy” at Occupy Harvard.

He’s also interviewed in Under Fire: Journalists in Combat. Recently named to the short list for the Best Documentary Oscar, Martyn Burke’s powerful film offers the experiences of a number of war correspondents, including Jon Steele (author of War Junkie: One Man’s Addiction to the Worst Places on Earth), Christina Lamb (Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands), and Finbarr O’Reilly, still working for Reuters. Their stories are all different but their reasons for going back are strikingly similar: “It was harrowing,” Steele remembers, “I liked being there, I liked the way it made me feel.”

Each interviewee describes the many effects of trauma, from the adrenalin rush in combat to the rationalizations and agonies that follow. The AP’s Ian Stewart first appears in photo where he’s in a hospital bed, after he was shot in the head in Sierra Leone. The CBC’s Susan Ormiston describes “a tearing of the soul just prior to leaving, because you’re going into a risky situation, [and my children] don’t have really very much say in that.” (She and Lamb both underscore that mothers—and women correspondents generally—are subjected to specific sorts of questioning by colleagues and observers, and that they understand but also resent it.) Steele notes that “framing the shot of someone suffering or someone dying or someone dead” can be “obscene in some ways, and when I say that I needed those people to die, I needed them to suffer, it’s not as callous as it sounds.”

This question, of course, goes to the heart of what it means to be a war correspondent, how to live with the idea that your job is to report and record death and injury. As Canadian photographer Paul Watson recalls the effects of his 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a US soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, he underscores that he feels haunted by his subjects, and his sense that he has exploited or desecrated the dead.

Such haunting muddles and sometimes undermines the familiar rationale for this kind of work, that it’s important to show the rest of the world what’s happening, to show war’s horrors and costs. Even as journalists confront how they deal with others’ pain, they must also face their own risks (only two journalists were killed covering WWI, in the past two decades, almost 900 have been killed, about one a week). This combination means that many suffer from PTSD. O’Reilly points out, “Previous generations didn’t even acknowledge that this was a problem. Today there’s more of a recognition by the institutions that they need to take care of their employees,” including counseling and medical treatment. The film includes a couple of over-the-phone sessions between Dr. Anthony Feinstein and O’Reilly: the violence, the doctor observes rather obviously, “becomes habitual… it becomes your reality.”

“It’s taken a tremendous toll in every way,” says Hedges in Under Fire, “The same way a drug breaks down an addict, war was breaking me down.” The emotional, moral, and political complications here are dense, as O’Reilly notes. It’s “normal” to respond to such turmoil adversely, but as the parameters of what’s normal are also in turmoil. “This is pretty normal,” he says of his confusion and nightmares. “This is what happens when people do what we do.” Hedges observes that he’s coped with PTSD for years, that “Anything can touch you off, and in some ways you’re kind of looking to be touched off”; Stewart says it “destroyed my life”; and Anthony Lloyd (who writes for The Times of London) says that while he has a “healthy suspicion of the term PTSD” and suspects he doesn’t have PTSD, “a shrink would say one of the first signs of it is you don’t know you have it.”

One typical trauma that brings on PTSD is the death of a colleague. As the journalists here recall such losses—Kurt Schork, Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, and Tim Hetherington—they wonder about the job. “It makes you think about why we’re doing it,” says O’Reilly, “if it’s really worth it in the end, to lose your life for a picture.” 

Under Fire can’t come to resolutions, but it does pose a series of questions that affect everyone, not only the journalists who find and provide images and stories. “The whole truth,” writes Hedges in War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, “may finally be too hard to utter, but the process of healing only begins when we are able to at least acknowledge the tragedy and accept our share of the blame.”