War Reporting…Can I do it?

First and foremost, the reason I want to be a journalist is to help people. I want to shed light on situations where human rights abuses are being committed, situations that for whatever reason don’t often get attention in the mainstream media.
Watching the film Welcome to Sarajevo, a film about the Bosnian war, I grappled with the notion of whether or not I would be able to continue filming in certain situations like they did, or whether or not I would want to put the camera down and lend a hand to victims of the war, lying bleeding in the streets.
As much as I think I would like to be a foreign correspondent, I am not sure I would be emotionally or psychologically prepared to do so. I was traveling throughout India and South-East Asia in 2003 when Bush had just launched his attack on Iraq. That trip is the major reason I am studying to be a journalist. I applied for journalism school immediately when I got home. And the main reason for that is because I could not believe that no matter where I was, no matter how small the village, it seemed like everyone was watching CNN. A station that in my opinion, was fairly biased and pro-American. I wanted to ensure that other voices besides these were heard, I guess to be an alternate voice to the voices presented by CNN. I think that is what I more or less wrote in my application letter. And I think I had pretty idealistic notions about saving the world and such things that aren’t quite as strong as they once were inside me. Journalism school has a way of beating those ideals out of you. I think I am only able to hang on to some of those ideals still because of the volunteer work that I do in Toronto at a local community radio station.
My other point about South-East Asia and India was that while I was there and traveling around, I felt really awful about merely traveling around in all these exceptionally poor places and not really giving anything back to the people, simply taking. I told myself I would never travel like that again. I was emotionally affected by what I saw, especially in Cambodia, with young children and babies, covered in dirt, living in the streets, sniffing glue.
And so I wonder now, how will I be able to see worse situations? See those same children not only starving and covered in dirt, but also covered in blood?
Can I do it?
In an interview for PBS just before the Iraq war began in 2003, Bill Moyers asked Chris Hedges, a journalist who covered the first Gulf War, what the men and women who are about to go into Iraq will be experiencing
He said, “...they're going to have to confront their own mortality. And at that moment some people will be crying, some people will be vomiting. People will not speak much. Everyone will realize that from here on out, at least until the fighting ends, it will be a constant minute-by-minute battle with fear. And that sometimes fear wins. And anybody who tells you differently has never been in a war.”
I wonder if it’s like being a doctor, where the first few times you see people dying in front of you, you feel really emotionally affected by it. The first few times you lose a patient, it keeps you up at night. But eventually, the more it happens, the more you become distanced from the event, detached, you realize that it’s just a job. Sometimes people make it, and sometimes they don’t.
In addition to the fear of not being able to handle the images I will see, I am also afraid of becoming emotionally vacant, of becoming that doctor who no longer feels any emotion when a patient dies. I don’t necessarily want to be that person.
But I wonder, is that the only way to be a war correspondent? Do you have to become that person to be effective and not start adopting every poor child you meet? Was the main character in Welcome to Sarajevo a good reporter; was he even at all effective in advancing his cause by doing all those reports on the orphanage?
When I decided to enter journalism school, I was also simultaneously looking into becoming a social worker, to do advocacy and aid work.
I chose to become a journalist because I thought it would be the most effective way of helping people, by reaching a greater population. But I wonder will I still feel like I made the right decision if I find myself covering a war? Will I put down my camera? Will I feel guilty if I don’t? Or if I do?
For the first time ever last semester, I realized above all, I truly am a journalist. There was a Columbine-esque shooting at a college in Montreal in September. One of my friends goes to that college. The two-joint thoughts that entered my mind when I found out was, “Oh shit, I hope he’s ok.” And, “I need to get a hold of him so I can do an interview with him for radio.” So as soon as I finally did get a hold of him, after asking if he was ok, I asked him if he would let me interview him. So I rushed down to the radio station and did it. So I wonder, will I be looking at dying people in the streets and thinking, “oh I wish that person would move out of the way so I can get a better shot.” I hope not.
I also speculate if you have to be like James Nachtwey to be a successful foreign correspondent. The documentary War-photographer presents him as someone who seems to not form too many close friendships or partnerships with others. Another journalist who I admire a great deal is Anna Maria Tremonti, host of the CBC radio show The Current. She spent some years as a foreign correspondent and won a Gemini (Canadian television award) for her coverage of the Bosnian war. But she’s in her 40s and as far as I know, has never been married and has no children and it is often said to be the price she has had to pay for her success, especially as a woman.
Is that the price you pay to be a successful journalist, especially as a woman? Because if you do, I’m not sure I’m prepared to give those things up.
In a profile written about Anna Maria Tremonti for the Ryerson Review of Journalism, Marianne Delija writes about Tremonti’s time in Bosnia:
She spent her nights alone in a tiny room with twin beds in Sarajevo's Holiday Inn, where the walls were cluttered with bullet holes and other marks. She couldn't turn on the light because a sniper might spot it and shoot. She lay awake her first night, eyes darting around the room, like a child afraid of monsters under her bed - only the monsters were bullets and bombs (and they were real). She leaned a mattress against the window to muffle the bangs and blasts. Something could come through that mattress and kill me, she thought. She jumped up and fastened her flak jacket over her long T-shirt and tights. She grabbed a sleeping bag and pillow and rushed out into the dark and empty hallway. She lay down on the floor. But now there was a 10-storey atrium made of glass about three feet away. What if something came flying through that glass? With that, she picked herself up and made camp in the tiny hotel bathroom. She snuggled into the sleeping bag with her feet by the sink and her head next to the toilet. But if something hits that wall and the sink comes flying at me… leaving the sleeping bag on the floor, Tremonti grabbed her pillow and went back to bed. There's no use in panicking, she rationalized. There's nothing I can do. She was fast asleep an hour later. And having come to terms with the danger, she never had trouble sleeping again.
Is that how it works? You face fear once, you know you could die at any minute, and once that initial first fear dissipates, you get over it, never to feel that same emotion again? Is that why a fake kidnapping is orchestrated by Andrew Kain and his team, who train journalists before going into war-zones, to get rid of that first initial fear of death so that every terrifying experience that comes after it feels like some sort of game?
I was watching Robert Fisk, middle-east correspondent for The Independent, being interviewed by Amy Goodman on Monday. He was talking about the first time he interviewed Osama Bin Laden, the first question he asked him was what it was like fighting the Russians in the 1980s. Fisk said:
He (Osama) recalled an attack on a Russian firebase, a Russian artillery position in Nangarhar province -- capital is Jalalabad. And he said, “As we were advancing, a mortar shell fell at my feet.” And he waited for it to explode and kill him. And he said, “I felt sakina, a calmness” -- it’s a religious idea that you are not worried about death, you are outside this world, you are linked in with God and the idea of another world, another life. And the mortar shell didn't explode. There must be many people who wish that it had, but it didn't. And, obviously, it was quite clear talking to him that this was a very important moment in his life. He had conquered fear and the fear of death. And once you do that, you start discovering perhaps that you love death, but it's not the same. You remember the famous phrase we always hear from suicide bombers, “You love life, we love death,” which is the most frightening thing you can hear. And I think at that moment, that during that attack on the Russians -- I mean, it was a Soviet base, a Soviet army base- I think that must have changed him in some way.
It seems as thought conquering this fear of death, coming face to face with it for the first time changes you in a deeply profound way, and not necessarily in a good way. It allows you to risk your life over and over again. It allows you to become someone like Osama Bin Laden. Or someone like Chris Hedges, who uses war correspondence as a narcotic, a drug to get high from; or someone like Anna Maria Tremonti, or James Nachtwey, who cut off the ability to form close relationships with others.

What will happen to me, the first time I stare death in the face?