-
Foreword
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Foreword When it is all over, when the emotional and physical exhaustion have left war journalists depleted and broken, their personal lives often in shambles, their sleep plagued by images of carnage and death, and their careers at times in tatters, they come home to their news organizations, or, in the slang of the profession, to the beast. The beast, which for years they fed with exotic news stories, photographs, and video footage, loomed over them as they filed from dismal and depressing towns and cities, wracked by violence and fear, in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Balkans . The beast was rarely satiated, always looking for a new angle, a new variant on the killing and the mayhem. The names of these obscure, far- flung conflicts become dusty and vague with time to those who were not there. But these same names, and the pain and misery the names evoke, wind themselves slowly like a huge coil around the hearts of survivors. The beast moves on, swallowing new news, consuming different lives and passions . This is the nature of beasts. But those who were in the war cannot forget. They become frozen in time, walking around newsrooms years later with eyes that see things others do not see, haunted by graphic memories of human cruelty and depravity, no longer sure what life is about or what it means, wondering if they can ever connect with those around them. I have watched some fall, like high-flying aircraft that burst suddenly into flames, to earth, where the twisted wreckage of their lives lies in pathetic heaps. The beast moves on. It leaves them behind. It consumes new fodder, those young idealists who go to war to change the world and come home betrayed , bearing the awful mark of Cain. Journalists under Fire is not simply about the trauma of covering war. It is also, although this is often unstated, about the callousness and cruelty of news organizations, which crumple up and discard those who return to them in pieces. It is about a news culture that does not take care of its own. And no organization, as Dr. Anthony Feinstein observes, is exempt: ‘‘Not only had most of the news organizations neglected to provide for the psy- x Foreword chological welfare of their war reporters, but trauma researchers had ignored them too.’’ Feinstein writes, ‘‘Trawling through the literature, I could not find a single reference to the subject—no articles, chapters, or abstracts. I had stumbled on a virgin topic, lying unrecognized within a larger literature devoted to the emotional consequences of traumatic events.’’ As much as this book is a chronicle of the trauma of war journalists, it is also a searing indictment of the beast, which even now feeds off of the emotional and physical shattering of those it sends to war, many of them freelance journalists and so more easily neglected by the beast because of a lack of formal institutional ties. But the beast is not solely to blame. ‘‘To a degree,’’ Dr. Feinstein notes correctly, ‘‘the profession itself has helped foster this silence. Embedded within the persona of the war journalist is an element of self-deception: the idea that he is someone who can confront war with impunity. It could be argued that this is a necessary prerequisite that allows war journalists to practice their profession. The news bosses are not immune to this way of thinking either, for it affords them a degree of comfort when dispatching journalists to wherever the latest conflagration erupts. The profession has been so effective in fortifying these constructs and perpetuating a very public myth that researchers in the field of psychological stress have, to date, passed them by.’’ War is a potent narcotic. Like any narcotic, it is highly addictive. In large doses, it can kill you. Once you sink into the weird subculture of war, it is hard to return home, where all seems banal and trivial. In war the polarities of life and death are laid bare. In war your senses are heightened. Colors are brighter. You are aware in ways you never were before. There is no past or future. All is one intense, overpowering rush, something soldiers call a ‘‘combat high.’’ And those who can control their fear go back to seek these experiences again, seek them in strange, twisted landscapes of human depravity. ‘‘For many war journalists, particularly when young and starting out on their careers, it is...