Taking a dive

I’ve always been fascinated by that stuff. I want to experience what it’s like to be in a war

OK, I know I’m banging on about the war but ’twas not my intention when I came here for a nice weekend of diving. Bali, the island of the gods of mass tourism, complete with underwater traffic jams and prepubescent Legong dancing girls. Yet even here the war catches up with you, well me, in unexpected ways. And by the way, for someone used to the Middle East Bali’s supposedly strict security measures may seem touchingly low-key at the moment.

Anyway, on my first dive trip, and the drive to the site of the wreck of the USAT Liberty, I was joined by two gregarious young Americans, students at Wharton who just started a six month stint in Singapore, Ben and Arman. They duly asked me what I did for a living followed immediately by, “ever been to any war zones?”. For the next four hours, except underwater where talking is frowned upon, they continued to question me relentlessly on the subject. One of them in particular unhesitatingly expressed an interest in the mechanics of war, the personal danger etc. including the desire to actually be in a war. Short of joining up that is. I suppose because you don’t squander a degree from Wharton on the army.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with either of these seemingly reasonable and well-travelled business students. They sounded sincere and very well-informed. Who says that today’s students don’t follow the news?

What did strike me was their interest in my war stories. I’ve written before that usually people’s eyes start glazing over when I talk about my job and what I did in some conflict areas. I always thought it was me, the way I told it. But these two, a bit too long only to be polite, seemed genuinely interested, in the physical reality of the journalist, in the details of war and in some broader policy questions. They asked why journalists keep doing it if so many get killed. So sue me, I may have hammed it up a bit. Or maybe not so much. Maybe it’s an age thing and the people in my cohort have heard it all before. Who knows. Maybe it’s just that war is indeed a young men’s game and the younger we are, the more we’re fascinated by it.

We did two dives to the wreck of the US Army Transport Liberty, an American warship that was torpedoed off Bali during WWII. The two war-curious Wharton students thought the first dive a bit dull,we stayed well clear of the structure and just watched the marine life. But they went all hooyah over the second one when we ducked through some openings and hovered really close. None of it means much, except that I went for a dive.

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The Balinese coast at Candidasa

(Probably not) the final word on the war correspondent’s dilemma

Here’s a very considered, courageous and deep-digging inquiry into the question of why war correspondents do what they do.

PODCAST – Diary of a bad year: A war correspondent’s dilemma – NPR’s Kelly McEvers

And more at transom.org It is infinitely more complex, sophisticated and inquisitive than my short blog post on the subject. I wonder if there’s anything left to say. Then again, everybody has a slightly different story.

An evening on Tim Hetherington – and all I took were some lousy phone pics

More musings on conflict reporting – my conflicted view

Stephen Mayes, director of the estate of Tim Hetherington, talks at de Balie in Amsterdam
Stephen Mayes, director of the estate of Tim Hetherington, talks at de Balie in Amsterdam

Tim Hetherington was a wonderful photographer and documentary maker who operated mostly in conflict zones, which on 20 April 2011 got him killed in Misrata, Libya. The Arab Spring, so hopefully named, has been particularly deadly and otherwise damaging for those covering it. An exhibition of Tim’s work arrived in Amsterdam in July and a new film on his life, a tribute directed by Sebastian Junger with whom he made the 2010 award-winning documentary Restrepo on life at an American outpost in Afghanistan, also had its Dutch premiere…


Various friends of Tim’s attended the launch and gave presentations that I won’t go into; I want to talk about me and Tim. I never met Tim, never heard of him before Restrepo and only vaguely afterwards. But we had a few things in common, apart from rugged good looks (I wish). We both did journalism courses in the UK and we both ended up in war zones. I know it’s not much but it’s more than some. Yet when I listened to the presentations and as I watched the film, the gulf between our experiences seemed vast, making me question the way I engaged with some of the same topics that Tim came across. There was a charming bit in which he has to talk about what it is that he’s doing. He starts out with a rather worthy description, only to stop himself short and say “that’s bullshit”. More attempts follow before he gets it right, kind of. It feels like it’s meant to show the difficulty war reporters have in talking about their work without sounding pompous, full of pathos and bravado or, on the other hand, overly jaded. But it can also be seen as defanging any such qualms pre-emptively as in, ‘see, he knew how difficult it was to talk about it’. Yet he talked about it a lot, on camera and on the record…


It always makes me feel uncomfortable. I have not heard people talk about war reporting in public in a way that sits well with me, probably reflecting a puritan streak that urges me: do, don’t tell. I find it almost impossible to talk about my decade or so covering conflict in a way that does not somehow trivialise it, dramatise it or worse, instrumentalise it for my own greater glory. When I sometimes try to discuss it, as dispassionately and in as sparse and stripped-down terms as I find possible, it feels as if nobody listens. Poor me. It is as Tim also said: you need to communicate in order for people to be able to engage with the subject. But I feel utterly conflicted about people who continue to communicate such issues outside the context of immediate war reporting. In the film on his life, many also said of Tim that he was always engaged with his subjects, the people he came across, whom he kept treating as individuals, as human.

Stephen Mayes, James Brabazon and Max Houghton talking about Tim Hetherington at de Balie, Amsterdam
James Brabazon, James Brabazon and Max Houghton talking about Tim Hetherington at de Balie, Amsterdam

Expressing such engagement also makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Maybe there’s a big difference between writers and photographers, also in the levels of danger encountered and in the way they process what they see, but I find the exhortation to keep in mind that the people you write about or photograph are also human, individuals with their own stories and not just characters in a larger plot, utterly redundant and preposterous. The cliché that war reporters only write about cannon fodder or people as numbers, is misleading and tiresome. Overwhelmingly, reporters who risk their lives, who insert themselves knowingly into dangerous situations, are very much aware of the excess of humanity around them. Human yes, always interesting? No. War and conflict tend to polarise people, resulting in a couple of standard narratives that many of those involved and engaged in conflict employ. It is a reporter’s job, maybe not a photographer’s, to puncture those shells and dig down to the real story if there is such a thing. Combat may temporarily heighten one’s senses but continual conflict flattens everything, including what distinguishes people. After a while, all stories become similar, whether it’s an American soldier’s or an Iraqi Jihadist’s. The logic of violence is often frighteningly similar and therefore also horribly clichéd. Yes, it is ritualistic and it has to do with male bonding but to me these themes never held the fascination they seemed to have had for Tim Hetherington. Perhaps that is at the root of much of my unease; I have always been a reluctant war reporter with a visceral distrust of people who sought out such situations willingly. Just maybe the life and work of Tim Hetherington will start me thinking differently about such things. But I’m a hard nut to crack.

I yet have to see Tim Hetherington’s show ‘Infidel’ at Foam Amsterdam and may post on this again afterwards…