What drives journalists to risk their lives in Africa’s most lethal war zones? What does it do to them when they witness unimaginable horrors and try to describe them? And should they go on dicing with death once they are married with children?
These were some of the issues I put to James Brabazon, a British war reporter and filmmaker, when he visited Johannesburg last week to promote his new memoir, My Friend the Mercenary. The title refers to Nick du Toit, a South African who, along with former SAS officer Simon Mann, was jailed for his part in the shambolic coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea in 2004.
Brabazon was meant to film the coup and could have ended up in jail with them but for a last minute decision to pull out. Two years earlier, Du Toit had acted as his bodyguard when he was the sole journalist to film behind rebel lines during the Liberian civil war.
Sitting in a board room at Penguin Books, Brabazon (38) recounted to me how, like many young men, he set off to make his life extraordinary, inspired by the work of photojournalists Don McCullin and Robert Capa and the heroism of his own grandfathers.
An epiphany about his purpose came in a small town surrounded by Liberian government troops. He recalled: “The rebels had captured a prisoner of war, an astonishingly beautiful young man who had been stripped naked down to his underpants, a live flesh wound in his arm, his arms tied behind his back.
“The commanders were openly discussing whether they were going to kill him or not, so I started filming him on the basis that I assumed that would confer a degree of protection. Very naively, I thought once I filmed this man there was no way the rebels were going to kill him because I would be documenting a war crime.
“I think the prisoner thought that as well. At one point he gave me quite a wry smile and certainly did not let me out of his sight. Then as I was filming, just keeping a very steady simple shot on the guy, on the front line a dead rebel was carried back. The commander saw one of his own mates had just been killed, knocked the guy down and shot him, point blank range in the back.
“At that point I thought OK, this is a different set of rules. I walked over to the guy, still filming, and he was looking at me. He’d originally looked at me with a sense of relief and salvation, and now there was that recognition between us that that was just not true, that this was the end.”
For Brabazon this was a turning point. He added: “What took me into that war wasn’t particularly noble. It was about being a young man and having a rite of passage and having an ‘Experience’ with a capital ‘E.’ But I think what takes people into war and what keeps them there are usually two very different things. After seeing that man die, and other men and children die, I felt that actually I had a real responsibility to tell their story.”
Western invention
And one of the important strands of that story was his realisation that the caricature of the bloodthirsty, drug-crazed African savage was a Western invention. Many of the rebels that Brabazon knew made immense personal sacrifices, losing friends and living on a handful of rice a day, while remaining dedicated to firm objectives that he says must be understood to achieve peace.
He said: “I watched people executing other people and then eating them. But the thing that most disturbed me is that those people, once you’ve removed the trappings of war, are just people like you and me.
We share far more in common with the stereotype of the bloodthirsty African rebel than we have distinct from them. At the end of the day you look into the eyes of someone who’s just executed a prisoner and what you’re really seeing is yourself looking back.”
But when, if ever, should a journalist intervene? Brabazon was confronted with a child in huge pain after being shot through the head, hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital. He recalled: “I came very close to giving that child an overdose of morphine because I looked at it thought, if this was a dog, we’d just shoot it, because you wouldn’t let anyone live in this kind of pain. I stopped myself at the last moment mainly because there’s a voice that speaks to you.
‘It’s fun’
“That is the crux of being at war. You operate outside of society.
“There’s this great Bob Dylan quote, ‘To live outside the law, you must be honest.’ I say to my students, there are no rules, there are no laws, the only law is at the end of the day, when you look in the mirror, can you live with yourself? If you can, then you’ve done the right thing.”
Despite such living nightmares it is often observed that, if not exactly enjoying war, both soldiers and reporters mourn its passionate intensity when it is gone, and maybe even yearn to go back. The protagonist in the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker finds family life and shopping grey in comparison to handling roadside bombs in Iraq.
Brabazon puts it: “The horrific, unspeakable truth of war is that it’s fun. My grandfather said to me that war was the only environment in which men are allowed to love each other unconditionally, and I think the soldier’s hankering after the battlefield is in large measure to do with that. It’s a sense of belonging, of friendship, of kinship if you like that you don’t find anywhere else in society. People often find that they belong in war because they suddenly find a connection with the common humanity of people around them.”
He admitted that, returning from Liberia, it took a long to time to readjust. “It ruined relationships. I really disappointed people. As a young man at the time I had just the most astonishingly beautiful girlfriend: a tall, bubbly, brilliantly intelligent, wonderfully sexy, rich, phenomenally good cook of a lover and a companion, and all I wanted to do was go back to war. That’s not normal.”
Brabazon went on that staring death in the face brings a “recalibration”, but so does staring life in the face. “When my first child was born everything was recalibrated again and I saw the world very differently. When my second child was born … I’ve watched them grow up. All of these experiences keep multiplying in their intensity and meaning. There’s no end to the journey, it just changes.”
In Liberia he was literally inches from death. Now, as a married father, would he take the same risks again? He replied: “There’s nothing like that position to re-ask the question, how much of this is a moral imperative and how much is ego? When my wife was pregnant with our first child I spent six months in a pit with American soldiers in Afghanistan, and when I came home she said, ‘You’re never doing that again. I don’t care what you think your responsibilities are to the story, you have responsibilities at home.’ And she’s right.
“So would I go back to Liberia again now and do this trip over again right now, with these children? I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think I would. The only responsibility I had then was to the story, now I have people that depend on me to keep their body and soul together and it’s a very different prospect. But I have been back to war since I had children and I will keep doing it.” – guardian.co.uk