The War Reporter Paul Watson on Winning the Pulitzer Prize, and: The War Reporter Paul Watson on Suicide, and: Portrait of the War Reporter Paul Watson as a Young Man, and: The War Reporter Paul Watson Meets Mother Teresa, and: The War Reporter Paul Watson Retells the Story of the Diver and the Goddess, and: The Poet and the War Reporter Paul Watson Go for a Sled Ride
Rent from DeepDyve- The War Reporter Paul Watson on Winning the Pulitzer Prize, and: The War Reporter Paul Watson on Suicide, and: Portrait of the War Reporter Paul Watson as a Young Man, and: The War Reporter Paul Watson Meets Mother Teresa, and: The War Reporter Paul Watson Retells the Story of the Diver and the Goddess, and: The Poet and the War Reporter Paul Watson Go for a Sled Ride
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- The War Reporter Paul Watson on Winning the Pulitzer Prize
Then somehow I find myself in a room like the Pantheon and the Parthenon confused. Wide gleaming chevrons of cold cuts fanned out on aproned tables. Wearing shoes and a navy blazer, wool slacks picked out this morning at Brooks Brothers. My boss eyes me. I guess I feel guilty aboutthat dead soldier’s family. Kevin Carter, who just last month was snorting Ritalin off the floor of my apartment before rocketing off into the townships, wins for his picture of a vulture waiting implacably for a skeletal child to stop struggling to lift her swollen skull from the red clay soil. Like Carter waited for that vulture to unfold its sere wings, which it never did, which gives his picture its leaden, boring doom. Do you hear thatapplause, Watson? They love us! Months later I’m back in Rwanda documenting machete mouths in the legs of women who’d hid waist-deep in mud. My satellite phone relays a message. Kevin Cartertook his own life. Duct-taped a garden hose to his exhaust pipe. Left a suicide note that I’ll paraphrase. I have been hauntedso now I will haunt you. With my eyes closed I see him waiting in the shade ashing his cigarette onto his lens. Waiting for the vulture’s promised embrace. Waiting for the good shot. [End Page 77]
- The War Reporter Paul Watson on Suicide
On a bed we discover the body of a child at the bottom of a pile of children. Quartered like chickens. Outside another’s been buried alive. Its hand like a tuber. At the refugee camp a girl stumbles barefoot into a ditch of corpses. Some wrapped in reed mats. Looking for help, crying. But nobody’s coming. I say to myself, This will make a great picture. This is a beautiful picture somehow. Raising my camera to my face I step on a dead old woman’s arm: it snaps like a stick. In Nyarubuye we push open a gate on a courtyard of Hell. Tangles of limbs junked. They’d come here to this church hoping God would save them but it only made it easier to be hacked to pieces. A single survivor shivers on the brown foam bed. The mayor asked for wallets, tossed them grenades. Men blown into pieces in midair. These are snakeswhose heads must be crushed. Neighbors took neighbors’ children and bashed their heads together till brains strewed the dirt. Infants keening beside their decapitated mothers were plunged head-first into latrines. A pregnant girl slit open and her fetus extruded like a docile calf. There was so much noise! the survivor recalls. All I wanted was to close my ears and lay on the ground and sleep in my family’s blood. Till her skin teemed with maggots. Then 40 days cowering in the charnel church. Praying I’d be killed too because I believed the world had been swept away. Of course I’ve wanted to killmyself before, writes the war reporter to the poet, but the truth is I lack [End Page 78] the courage. So I tell myself, Just go someplace dangerous, let somebody else kill you. [End Page 79]
- Portrait of the War Reporter Paul Watson as a Young Man
I was in a band called Eruption, we did a shitload of drugs: California Sunshine, Purple Microdot, Windowpane. My best friend Richard and I listening to Dark Side of the Moon in the middle of a circle we’d...
