War Correspondent

I’ve been a war correspondent for years. I’ve been to Rwanda, Eritrea, South Sudan, mostly war-torn places in Africa. I have also been in Bosnia and Afghanistan. I’ve seen bloodshed and torture and indiscriminate killing. I have witnessed large-scale slaughter down to the killing of a three year-old boy. There are always wars in these parts of the world, there are wars in all parts, but here they seem to be the fiercest, the most prolonged, the most chaotic and alarming, the places where anything happens at any time. 

In all my years as a correspondent, I have seen one thing in common amongst all the fighters, they call themselves soldiers though that appellation is faintly ridiculous, they are just men and sometimes boys, they have even sometimes been women, the thing they appear to have in in common is this rage, the pure visceral hatred. These two things are inextricably linked, the hatred and rage. The hatred fuels the rage and the rage causes more hatred. It is a cycle which no one seems to be able to escape from. I have seen the rage on the faces, that’s what I see. I have seen how quickly this rage builds up and explodes when they come close to their so-called enemy. I have seen in one moment the men chewing bread, smoking, drinking tea, until in one instant the enemy is spotted, behind a hill, up ahead in the jungle, down below in the valley, and in the next, we’re all back in the jeep and the abiding emotion is not so much fear or trepidation or even excitement, it is the rage that has built up from the conviction that they must slaughter the enemy. How this rage takes hold and pushes everything else to the side is an incredible thing to behold. How it manifests itself to the exclusion of everything else. How it grips their bodies and sets their lips twitching. How it makes their legs shake, their bodies vibrate. It is the rage is in all the cells of their body and once triggered it must be released.

It might sound bizarre but it is not so much the killing itself which I have found the most shocking. I have seen men take a machete to a group of six other men, lop their heads off one after the other. It was not so much the hauling of the blade in the sky before making contact. It wasn’t even the contact itself, the severing of the head, the blade grinding through the sinews and then the head toppling off once it had decided that gravity could no longer hold it. It wasn’t the reaction of the victim either before, during or after. It wasn’t his look of despair or his shaking or for some, their resolution to accept their fate expressed in becoming stiff like a stone as if nothing can hurt them. It wasn’t the men who vomited and excreted or those who just broke into sobbing and pleading for their life. What was the most shocking was the disgust in the face of this murderer. The most shocking was his lip curl, his snarl, his violent rage, how it was as if the bodies of these men didn’t matter to him in the slightest, that the fact that beyond the bodies, these men having feelings and a brain, families and connections was an irrelevance to him, it was so apparent to me that the man wielding the machete was so overcome by the rage that he didn’t see anything but this rage and certainly didn’t see the men kneeling down as humans. What is it that makes someone so angry?

This hatred, this disgust, has been responsible for all acts of barbarism I’ve witnessed in my time as a correspondent. I can’t remember a time when a killing was justified or measured, planned or reasoned out. I can’t remember a time that any of it ever made sense. This might sound obvious, but the wars ostensibly had a purpose. Defence from invasion, protection, protecting people but not only people, protecting resources so that civilians wouldn’t die, at least those were and have been the purposes clearly stated by leaders and statesman, filtered down to the generals. I am neither a war-mongerer nor peacenik, meaning it can be very hard to say when and what can be justified. But when it came down to it, all the generals and leaders that I’ve had the good or bad fortune to go around with, were just there as if to cause havoc, and any purpose seemed to go out of the window. There was no strategy. It went from one thing to a mandatory destruction of the enemy.

There were times, would you believe, when they didn’t know who they should be shooting. It would change from moment to moment, and it can get confusing when a dark red lapel means one thing and a lighter shade another. And I saw a small squadron attempt to turf out some supposed rebels from inside a village, but just before they went in -- with enough firepower to kill thousands of men, let alone the twenty or so who were actually in there -- one member of the company spotted the uniform and the lapel, and the speed with which the rage left his face was unimaginable, the whole company had been gripped by this ugly tooth-baring determination until they suddenly got the message and were transformed into normal people again. They just started chatting. Their bodies loosened. Their eyes became alive. The other men had been saved by the wrong/right shade of lapel, but all that meant was that some other group was going to get it.

It was the speed of the transformation that I found so alarming every time, so hard to fathom. It didn’t make sense. How could you be, at least to my eyes, a quite normal person one moment, and so overcome by the next? How could their conviction take them over so quickly? You see these men weren’t all murderous all the time, most of the time they were normal men, doing what normal men do, they joked around with and cared for each other, they spoke about their families and kids, they spoke on their mobiles if they were fortunate enough to have one. The media depiction of this one singular evil is too pat and unnuanced, and these were men who, I will freely admit, I could be perfect friends with in the moments when they weren’t being destructive. They were typical Jekyll and Hydes.

I am not trying to philosophise, to ask questions about the human condition, far from it. I can only say what I see. I am not judging, though I suspect some of you think I should. It was never my job to judge, and judgment just doesn’t have any place when you’re right in amongst it.

But though I won’t judge, it is my time there that has made me see the distinction between the men I’ve been amongst and people who live, say, in the west, people who I come back to after each spate, and it always strikes me that however angry people at home become, they never exhibit this rage, there is something within us that is either inhibited or just not so angry, and I can assure you that it is not the frenzy of war, the atmosphere, it is not the bloodlust or any other slightly nebulous driving force, because there is no such frenzy when you’re there, it’s more accurate to say that there’s a mixture of all sorts of emotions, but if we, or I were put in this situation, we wouldn’t be so depraved and disturbed. I am not for one minute trying to elevate our moral status, we would still go for the killing, but it wouldn’t be quite as barbaric, quite as rough. We would prefer to do it by stealth. I cannot imagine myself so consumed by rage as these men were, nor can I imagine any of my friends being so.

It wasn’t the war at all. I saw some of the men go apoplectic at some minor family mishap. I have never seen such disproportionate fury.

And despite what you might believe, the rage never burns itself out. If anything, the complete opposite is the case. The more they react, the worse it gets. There appears to be this inexhaustible fount of it, and the more that it’s accessed the more violent it becomes, but also the greater the surplus. You’d think that these fighters would tire of getting angry, literally physically, as it would exert such a drain on their energy, but they didn’t.

That is why, partly, I felt I had to withdraw. I felt that even if my presence wasn’t detrimental, it probably wasn’t positive. Aside from perhaps the very slight tendency to act up the rage -- I don’t mean put on a show – I never saw any change in the people I followed. And since I was a war correspondent, I was only useful in so far that there was fighting. As soon as the fighting stopped, I was out of a job. Perhaps deep inside was a selfish urge to let this all continue, as horrific and horrifying as it was. But then I realised they would never change, they would never break the cycle, there was no point to it, there’d be no improvement, in some ways the situation just had to be accepted as it was, not to let people go on killing each other, but to accept that they were full of anger and that because of that there was going to be killing and war, there were going to be facial contortions I will never exhume from my mind. 

There is still fighting all around the globe, but I don’t have to be part of it. As soon as one war dies down another crops up. Same forces, different terrain. Same internal forces I mean. It doesn’t matter where you go, there will always be fighting. How long will it go on for? Who can say.