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‘Passengers in Charon’s Boat’: Reporters Covering Real-life Horror, Fear and Terror

Magdalena Hodalska

Abstract A photographer is awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his photo from Sudan and shortly after that he commits a suicide. A cameraman, whose footage from Eritrea provoked a worldwide aid response and helped thousands of kids, says: ‘I pray to God to forgive me for what I have done.’ A reporter, working in Iraq for the Red Cross, is kidnapped and decapitated by the terrorists, who film the execution to broadcast it on the Internet. A who lost her eye in an explosion in Sri Lanka, but never stopped covering conflicts, shows a dying baby, regardless of criticism that ‘it is too much to show on the evening news.’ She says that her heart broke but people must ‘see this to stop this’. Two days after that last material she dies in a rocket attack, in Syria. Journalists very often risk their lives to take pictures, descend to hell to bring testimonies and tell the stories of real-life horror, fear and terror. Accused of cynicism, the reporters are determined to show the world the things which most of people are afraid to see. Their apocalyptic images sometimes contribute to the end of bloodshed; their stories raise awareness and move our hearts. Have we ever wondered what is the price they pay for telling us about unimaginable horror they face every day? How do they deal with fear, reporting on terror and acts of human evil? I want to tell the story about professional storytellers: about their lives, devoted to bearing witness to the horrors of this world; about their more-or-less heroic deaths; about their struggle to deal with fear and qualms. The paper presents those who paid the highest price for the stories of fear, horror and terror.1

Key Words: Journalists, media coverage, stories, fear, horror, terror, reporters, war correspondents.

*****

‘There are places you never come back from.’2

They are the voice of those whose voice is muffled by bombs, helicopters, shooting. War journalists visit us almost every day, we see them in bullet-proof jackets, helmets, reporting live from the lines of fire in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Jerusalem, Rwanda, and so many other places that are the same place, where ‘politics, religion, old hatreds (…) set relatives, friends and neighbours against one another.’3 The innocent victims of conflicts, people trapped in a war zone hope that 2 Passengers in Charon’s Boat ______foreign correspondents would bring them help, would show the world what’s happening, so that the world could put an end to their horror.4 There’s something ‘unnatural and shameful about sticking a camera into the face of somebody, who’s just been wounded: ‘It’s one of the scrupulous that you have to overcome in order to do this job properly, but it doesn’t feel very good at the end of the day,’5 said Carlos Mavroleon, CBS News cameraman, shortly before his death. A part of the frustration of this job is you’re there in a situation, which is crying out for doctors, food, blankets, warmth, heat, and all you have is a camera (…). And you’re trying to explain to people, who’re starving that they’re gonna be on the news tonight. It doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work for you. It makes you feel like something less than a human being, it makes you feel like a vulture.6

1. Vultures Pulitzer prizewinning photo of a vulture sitting patiently next to a starving girl in Sudan became an icon of African famine. Taken by Kevin Carter in 1993, it was published in thousands of papers and magazines. 33-year-old South African journalist took a picture that ‘made the world weep.’7 Only the world didn’t know that the photographer was sitting beside the vulture for about 20 minutes, waiting for the bird to spread its wings, so that he could have a better image.8 The bird was waiting for the girl to die. Finally Carter took the photo and chased the bird away, and then he watched how the girl struggled to reach the feeding centre. He sat under a tree and wept.9 There were hundreds of such kids around him.10 In famine-stricken Sudan people were dying at a rate of 20 per hour.11 ‘They are always there. They wait, watching, patient. Every now and again they soar from the treetops in lazy flight, as an owner might amble about to inspect his property. They will get their fill, the vultures of southern Sudan.’12 That photograph, published the next day by The New York Times and reproduced by the media all over the world, outraged people, terrified them, moved and mobilized them to act and raise funds to launch aid campaign, which helped thousands of starving people. So we can say that the photographer has fulfilled his mission as a journalist: it is possible that the picture he’d taken, saved the lives of hundreds; nevertheless he didn’t save that one particular life he captured in his camera. Right after the publication, the readers wrote and called the The New York Times, asking what had happened to the child. The paper admitted that it was not known whether the girl reached the feeding centre.13 ‘Carter was praised for capturing the horror of famine and criticised for his heartlessness in not aiding the child. Americans called him in the middle of the night asking why hadn’t he Magdalena Hodalska 3 ______rescued the girl. Carter found it difficult to explain that at the same time she was just one of hundreds of starving children in Ayod.’14 It didn’t convince his colleagues, who either accused him of ‘setting up the tableau’ or questioned his ethics.15 The editor of St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, wrote: ‘"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering, might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." Even some of Carter's friends wondered aloud why he had not helped the girl.’16 After his death, the journalists said that he was ‘haunted by horror of his work’17. His followers wrote, ‘It is ironic that Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer for a photograph which to me is a photograph of his own soul.’18 Awarded with Pulitzer Prize, Kevin Carter reached the journalistic Olympus, but even there his demons awaited him. The girl began to haunt the photographer.19 ‘He told a friend: “I’m really, really sorry I didn’t pick the child up”.’20 Two months after his great triumph, Kevin Carter committed a suicide. The note, he left, mentions the ghosts he couldn’t escape: ‘I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger- happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners . . .’21 Is it fair to say that Carter is the second vulture in the picture? That the photographer took the photo of himself? People couldn’t stand the picture and blamed the reporter for their own pangs of conscience, stated one of Internauts.22 Strongly criticised by people who have done nothing to help the victims of famine, Carter must have been aware of the moral dilemmas his photo provoked. Faultfinders say the scene is his mirror-reflection or even more: the image of war photographers in general, preying on human suffering. It’s very easy to stigmatise, especially from the perspective of a warm and cosy university classroom. Having in mind that it’s much easier to condemn than it is to act, I’m not going to be the one to cast the first stone. Although I must admit that twenty minutes of waiting for a perfect composition is a bit too much. Carter was an experienced war reporter, a member of a famous Bang-Bang club23, he was shaped by atrocities he’d covered in more dangerous and risky situations, working against time. Then why did he waited so long, observing the dying child? His photo helped hundreds of starving kids. That one girl, captured in the frame, remained anonymous forever. In Western culture a vulture is a personification of death. The symbolism of this iconic photo is universal. Although, in Indian culture, for example, the vulture signifies a protective ghost, taking care of the children when their parents are absent.24 How much we want to believe that this was the case. Carter wrote, ‘The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.’25 Kevin’s friend João Silva, said that war coverage slowly takes away your smile.26 ‘It is not always bullets or bombs that kill war correspondents, but the horror they keep inside.’27

4 Passengers in Charon’s Boat ______2. The Horror They Keep Inside Mohamed Shaffi, Reuters cameraman, wanted to record the anguish of a family burned in an Eritrean village, where Ethiopian soldiers thrown a napalm bomb. The reporter thought the world should see that. Asked to film without the lights, he promised he’d switch on the camera head light for ten seconds and switch off, and ‘then again I’ll switch it on for ten seconds and switch off and I’ll be out of the room.’28 But he didn’t know what awaited him in the dark room:

The children were sitting on their bed… It was unbelievable. It was totally unbelievable what I saw… When we opened the door, even the slight wind passing through the room hurt them, like needles going through the body, and I could feel the pain, (…) the pain I had caused them.29

With tears in his eyes the reporter said that he asked God for forgiveness for what he had done. What exactly ‘he had done’? He made sure that those twenty seconds, put on air and shown around the world, moved people, encouraged intervention and eventually contributed to the end of bloodshed. After all, that is the goal of war correspondence. Sooner or later people would say: ‘this is unconscionable what we’re not doing,’30 this is how , a famous BBC ‘war zone thug,’31 expressed the hopes of all reporters covering conflicts. But he also said that the life of war correspondents is full of reproach: ‘Sometimes you reproach yourself for being crazy and sometimes you reproach yourself for being a coward. But whatever you do as a war reporter, you’re gonna have a life full of reproach, self-reproach.’32 Journalists very often risk their lives to take pictures, descend to hell to bring testimonies and tell the stories of real-life horror, fear and terror. Accused of cynicism, the reporters are determined to show the world the things which most of people are afraid to see. Their apocalyptic images sometimes move our hearts, awake conscience. However, ‘anyone can comfortably choose the parcel of horror he wishes to be moved by,’33 and journalists are well-aware of that too. As Elizabeth Kastor put it, ‘Each day we turn on the TV, open the paper and decide which new shards of information we will admit into our lives, what cruelties we will contemplate, for whom we will feel empathy.’34 War reporters go where no-one wants to go and they see things we would never want to see, to tell us about the real-life horror they witness. And they know it will be shown on television, if ever, before a piece of fiction in prime-time. In a world in which horror is sold as entertainment or art, the reporters tell us about ‘the Evil incarnate.’35 But have we ever wondered what is the price they pay for the stories and images that are, literally, burned in their memories? Hoping that their coverage would have an effect (‘Even the most cynical photographers have seen that their photos change things.’36), they risk their lives to tell the stories of horror. Magdalena Hodalska 5 ______Nearly every week journalists all over the world are being wounded, mutilated, tortured, kidnapped, murdered, or killed by a stray bullet or friendly-fire. Only last year more than a hundred reporters died, many of them covering conflicts.37 ‘They're cut from a different cloth. They're mad,’38 one can say. But those mad- men keep doing their job, hoping that the world would care. And the world watches the flames and carnage on the evening news, and very often shrugs its shoulders. ‘If I ever see a child with flies swarming around it one more time, I’m not going to watch that show again,’39 admitted one of the viewers, apparently tired of the show, or maybe uninformed that not everything on the telly is made for fun or designed to entertain. Susan D. Moller wrote about compassion fatigue, that sets in when people are exposed to media coverage of wars, famine, disasters, diseases and dramatic events which they can do nothing about. ‘In a world that moves steadily from massacres to genocide, from images of chaos, destruction, death and madness (…) the public resorts to compassion fatigue as a defence mechanism against the knowledge of horror.’40 How does it work? ‘One of the things I try never to do is watch the news at 11, because that really makes you an insomniac,’41 complained one of the viewers, the other admitted: ‘Rwanda. I don’t listen, (…) What can you do? You listen and there’s nothing you can do.’42 It is disputable whether such sentiments are compassion fatigue or compassion avoidance43, but the truth is that many stories of fear, horror and terror are ‘beyond such a mild emotion as compassion.’44 Susan Sontag warned us:

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. (…) If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either - - and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.’45

Janine DiGiovanni who covered the carnage in the Balkans, said that the most difficult thing about reporting in Bosnia ‘was not the blood or the crying or the coughing or even the hardship of not being able to wash or have a cup of tea or turn on the lights but the fact that we were covering a story that the public had grown tired of.’46 The same reporter described what she felt when two years later she went to Rwanda:

By the time I reached Goma, I could not have prepared myself for what I would see: the dead piled on the side of the road, naked and rotting, fathers clutching sons in a death grip, dead adolescent girls lying next to the living in the cholera tents (…) the very notion of one million refugees in one place was incomprehensible, and it took me five or six days to feel any 6 Passengers in Charon’s Boat ______emotion at all. (…) Like the television viewers who switch the channel because they are tired of seeing the same image of the crying child, the dead lying neatly with their arms crossed, or the food fights breaking out at a Red Cross distribution point, I had simply had enough. Some part of my brain had switched out.47

Journalists are not made of steal. At some point they can also find it is too much. Although they write for a living, very often they must resort to the phrase ‘Words cannot describe….’, keeping the records of the dead and dying, like Mark Fritz (Pulitzer award for his coverage of genocide in Rwanda), who ‘simply catalogued the killings.’48 In her report, Nancy Gibs quoted a missionary: ‘There are no devils left in hell, they are all in Rwanda.’49 That line was on the cover of Time magazine, on top of a photo of a Rwandan mother and a child. ‘And yet, it appeared to make no impact’ Janine DiGiovanni told about a man in a store who picked up that issue of Time,

The man’s eyes registered, and this was entirely believable boredom. He put the magazine down and bought a copy of Vanity Fair with Cindy Crawford on the cover in a bikini rising out of a seashell like Aphrodite. Given the choice of a glorious Cindy Crawford or a starving child, can you, in a sense, blame him?50

The editors throw out the rawest photos. Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a former war reporter, knows how it works: ‘Companies that advertise automobiles, perfume and expensive watches don’t like to see their advertisements run alongside those kinds of scenes.’51 We are looking at the disturbing pictures with horror and disgust, and we tend not to think who’s behind the camera or what else s/he’s seen, that we will never see. Because the ‘self-imposed media censorship’52 is due to select only small pieces of horror the journalists live by. Janine di Giovani recalled,

Every time I returned from Rwanda and Zaire, friends asked me: “What was it like? Horrible?” and then changed the subject before I had time to answer. I watched their eyes glaze over, and I can’t blame them, because hellholes are a bore, and there are a limited number of ways you can describe death and destruction.53

Susan Moeller wondered why people respond that way: ‘Was it because the extreme horror of the genocide defied comprehension and rational explanation— and therefore, perhaps, compassion?’ or maybe the ‘not wanting to see’ graphic and repulsive images mean that we stopped caring, we became emotionally Magdalena Hodalska 7 ______anaesthetized? ‘Or did we find the situation so beyond our understanding and so hopeless that we just didn’t want to think about it anymore?’54 The reporters are painfully aware of that. As well as news organisations which believe that the audience don’t want to hear the story about babies being blown up, so it’s better to give them a piece on ‘apple picking back home’.55 There are pictures which touch the public’s conscience, but at the same time there are those which never get through because no one is looking. ‘Sometimes you achieve a result and sometimes you don’t. It’s very sad when you don’t, it’s heart-breaking,’56 said another war thug, trying to find the reason why: ‘You cannot describe what it was like. The key, I think, is that they cannot smell it, you can see it, but you cannot smell it, and the smell of death is… there’s absolutely nothing like it.’57 The stench of death is something one can find in many painful memoirs from war zones. ‘The smell of a corpse beneath the rubble, the smell of death, slipping like fog along the bank of a river.’58 Journalists know they cannot describe the odour which they carry, nor the most dreadful images of the slaughter, for they will never be published, because the horror of the news goes ‘beyond the threshold of what the public could stomach.’59 The readers and viewers are often ‘left with unwelcome mental images that are difficult to shake.’60 At the same time, a perfect scapegoat is at hand, cause it’s very easy to blame the media for sensationalising the reports and bringing too graphic images to our living rooms, which ruins our comfort. Maybe in the eyes of the audience, media jump from one crisis to the next, from one ‘bloodshed du jour’ to ‘just another massacre’61, and the reporters can’t wait to tell the most dreadful stories of terror. One viewer said, ‘I don’t like to see these horrors. All these terrible things. When you turn on the news, they almost glory in it. They can’t wait to tell you the horrible stuff.’62 In the face of evil people don’t know what to do, and because they do very little, they don’t want to see the reports from hell, but the reporters confronted with evil, should know what to do: bear witness.63 ‘If “Never again” is to have any meaning at all, there must be those who carry history forward, who teach others what happened, who remember, who do not flinch.’64 Mazen Dana was Reuters cameraman and ‘a King of Hebron,’65 killed in a friendly-fire in Iraq in 2004, when a soldier didn’t notice that he was holding a camera not a gun (‘Why did you shoot him? We are TV. You see him with a camera! Why did you shoot him?’66). When three years earlier Dana received a CPJ Award for covering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he recalled he was injured ‘uncounted times and arrested many, many, many times. The type of injuries that I got, to see, three times live ammunition, about seventy to eighty times rubber bullets. About one hundred time beating from soldiers. Two times my hand were broken for uncovering my stories in Hebron.’67 [original quote] Journalists very often carry physical and emotional scars that will never heal, aware that people ‘feel hurt’ looking at the photos they took. Like the famous 8 Passengers in Charon’s Boat ______photograph of the albino boy in Biafra, which people find ‘painful and offensive’, according to the one who took the picture. Don McCullin recalled,

I went into the camp and I saw 800 children in that condition. I thought: How am I gonna get through this? I tried not to look at that boy, but he was focusing on me. And I thought: let’s get away from this boy, cause I can’t handle this. It was too much for me. So I was standing, looking at some other children. Suddenly someone touched my hand. I looked down and there was that boy and I thought: My God, how to get out of this? So I gave him a sweet, and he ran away. He stood in the distance, licking the sweet and watching me. Every time I print that picture, that boy talks to me.68

Not only that boy, we found out later. Don McCullin is one of the greatest war reporters, ‘now lives in an isolated English manor where cabinets are filled with photos of the dead and dying.’69 They come out at night, says the reporter, ‘and they greet each other in the most ghoulish atmosphere.’70 Those who survived a war; those who ‘kept breathing when others were dying’71; those who took pictures are now sleeping in houses ‘full of the memories of ghosts.’72

3. Haunted by the Images They are haunted by the images of those who died before the lenses of their cameras. Like Kevin Carter, Don McCullin or Krzysztof Miller, a Polish photographer, who suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, like thousands of reporters, whose coverage we see on the evening news every day. After 20 years of covering wars Miller was safe in Warsaw, when he started losing contact with reality. When the demons visited him for the first time and started ‘rocking with him’:

I was rocking on a chair in my kitchen. Window blinds closed tightly, so that no sniper from Bucharest 1989 could shoot me. I didn’t go out into the streets, to avoid Russian mortar grenades. I didn’t buy any food, cause I feared that the hungry Hutu from Congo would pinch it. I was rocking all the time and the thoughts and memories were flying through my head. Like those planes in Afghanistan, attacking the Taliban’s stands. And my friends understood that I have to go to a shrink. Shaman treating war tatters, such as myself.73

But long before that last war, the war with his demons, Miller took the famous photo, called ‘a graphic monument of a war reporter’, showing photographers Magdalena Hodalska 9 ______pushing and shoving over one dead body, waving to each other to get out of the frame not to spoil the composition. I’m referring to real-life horror from all over the world, because ‘it’s always the same place, the same war, from Troy to Mostar or Sarajevo, it’s always the same war.’74 In Africa, America, Asia, the Middle East or the Balkans: ‘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.’75

Image 1: war photographers, pushing and shoving over one dead body in Thakoza, Republic of South Africa, on the 19th of April 1994, a day before the first free election when Nelson Mandela was chosen © 2013 Fot. Krzysztof Miller/ Agencja Gazeta. Used with permission.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte said, ‘There are places you never come back from.’76 Chris Hedges, former New York Times war reporter, knows that

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, (…) bearing the awful mark of Cain.77

10 Passengers in Charon’s Boat ______The images that stalk them day and night, come back in memories triggered by sounds, smells or colours. Pérez-Reverte described that traumatic experience in The Painter of Battles. The main character of the novel, a former reporter and now The Painter, noticed he had red paint under his fingernails, ‘so like blood.’78 And the red paint brought the memories:

It was Sarajevo, although it could have been Beirut, Saigon, anywhere - Falques had had blood under his nails and on his shirt for three days. The blood was that of a child blown up by a mortar grenade; he had died in his arms, bleeding to death as Falques carried him to the hospital. There was no water to wash in, no clean clothes, so for three days Falques had the child’s blood on his shirt, on his cameras, and under his fingernails.79

4. The Passengers in Charon’s Boat One reporter sees his dead colleagues walking toward him; another smells the stench of death, while being in London, civilised world, ‘the sense that the smell was all over you... it would not go away.’80 Like dismembered children haunting Jon Jones.81 Like a Chechen woman waving the bloody leg of her family member, who visits Anthony Lloyd of London Times, far too often.82 Chris Hedges can’t look at meat ‘after seeing what huge explosive shells did to human flesh in Sarajevo.’83 Plunged into dark depression, trying to come to terms with what they have seen, they all suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In her chapter in this volume Nino Tabeshadze writes about the trauma of war victims who survived the war in Georgia in 2008, having witnessed the atrocities themselves or seen the dramatic reports on TV. But how about those who filmed the bloodshed, recorded the killings and covered the horror, and then ‘rubbed their hands with soap for long hours,’84 as if they wanted to rub off the memories? Up until recently, there have been no piece of research devoted to psychological trauma of war correspondents.85 In 2006 a Canadian psychiatrist Anthony Feinstein examined male and female journalists and their responses to war experiences, like those visions mentioned above, flashbacks, nightmares or other symptoms: uncontrolled anger, troubled sleep, hyper vigilance.86 The BBC correspondent Allan Little warns: ‘Do not delude yourself into thinking, that you can swan in and swan out of other people's wars year after year and not be affected...’87 Most of them are affected: their personal lives are shattered, relationships destroyed, their ‘sleep plagued by images of carnage and death.’88 They’re trying to connect with people around them but it’s very difficult, because those people (living in peaceful world) are talking about ordinary preoccupations. ‘Listening to them I wondered: Don’t they realize? What does a dented car matter, a run in your stocking, the payment on the TV? Do you know what I mean?’89 Magdalena Hodalska 11 ______A war reporter becomes a link between the two worlds: the world of peace and the world of war, like a sacrifice mediating between the sacred and the profane.90 Reporter leaves the world, in which ‘one can leisurely drink beer and snipers don’t shoot at pretty girls,’91 and enters the world, where he is almost drenched by the tears of the victims and people are almost beating upon him to listen to them. Correspondents report what they saw and heard, the news is their gift, for which they risked or gave their lives. Like Dan Eldon of Reuters, stoned down by a mob in Mogadishu in 1998. Like Daniel Pearl from The Wall Street Journal, abducted by Al-Queida and beheaded in Pakistan in 2002. Or Enzo Baldoni, an Italian II Diario freelancer, who worked for the Red Cross in Iraq in 2004, kidnapped and decapitated by the terrorists, who filmed the execution to broadcast it on the Internet.92 Like Waldemar Milewicz of Polish TVP, who was murdered on a road from Bagdad, when their press car got into an ambush in 2004; the assassins knew he was a journalist, that’s why they shot him.93 In war zones journalists become a target, no signs (no Red Cross, no Press or TV), no emblems can protect them. Marie Colvin, London Sunday Times, lost her eye in an explosion in Sri Lanka, but never stopped covering conflicts. During the siege of Homs in Syria in 2012, she recorded a dying baby, shown in CNN Anderson Cooper 360˚ regardless of criticism that ‘it is too much’94 to show on the evening news. ‘Why is it important, do you think, to see these images? Why is it important for you to be there?’ Cooper asked Colvin, she replied:

I feel very strongly they should be shown. Something like that, I think, is actually stronger for an audience — for someone who is not here, for an audience for which the conflict, any conflict is very far away. That’s the reality. These are 28,000 civilians — men, women and children — hiding, being shelled defenceless. That little baby was one of two children who died , one of children being injured every day. That baby probably will move more people to think, what is going on and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?95

Two days later Marie Colvin died in a rocket attack, when shells hit the temporary press centre, killing Colvin and a French photographer Remi Ochlik, and injuring other reporters (Paul Conroy of and Edith Bouvier of ).96 Someone wanted to stop them. But the story they are telling, continues. As A. Perez Reverte put it, after centuries of being drained, blood continues to flow.97 Journalists are witnesses charged with ‘the keeping of memories — memories of the survivors and of the “immensity of evil” that killed the thousands.’98 At most times they feel helpless when the only thing they can do for the victims of conflicts 12 Passengers in Charon’s Boat ______is to remember them: to remember that albino boy cluthing an empty beef tin, the dismembered children in Grozny, teenagers wearing t-shirts and jeans, laid neatly in a morgue in Sarajevo. After returning from Rwanda, Fergal Keane confessed,

For now I can only promise to remember the victims: the dead of Nyarubuye, the wounded and the traumatized, the orphans and the refugees, all of the lost ones whose hands reach out through the ever lengthening distance.99

In a ‘lifetime of photographing cruelty and wickedness,’100 war reporters have seen more wars then any of the soldiers. They tells us stories of fear and terror, and carry the remains of hell and horror along with them, wherever they go. ‘For someone who’s lived a war, the dawn is a sign (…) of fear of what’s going to happen. And dusk is a threat of the coming shadows; darkness, a terrorized heart.’101 A. Pérez-Reverte called them ‘tourists of horror.’102 With one-way ticket to hell, they are indeed the ‘passengers in Charon’s boat on the river Lethe,’ like Chris Hedges once said: ‘I longed to drink the waters of the Lethe, which the ancient Greeks believed obliterates all memory.’103

Foreign correspondents quite simply report on genocides and call them holocausts, because they are human. They are the ones choking on the smell of death, gagging at the sight of toddlers who “lay sliced in half.” They can try and disassociate themselves from what they are witnessing— if only to get through the day— but the horrors pursue them.104

The problem with the professional storytellers is that they remember too much.

Post Scriptum. ‘What makes a good newspaperman?’, New York Herald Tribune editor Stanley Walker asked in 1928. "The answer is easy: He knows everything... His brain is the repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages... He can go for nights without sleep. He dresses well and talks with charm. He hates lies and meanness and sham... When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some remember him for several days.’105

Notes

1 Quote in the title of the chapter is taken from Chris Hedges, Foreword to Journalists Under Fire : The Psychological Hazards of Covering War, by Anthony Feinstein (Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), ix. Magdalena Hodalska 13 ______

2 Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Painter of Battles, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Random House), 49. 3 Pérez-Reverte, Painter of Battles, 35. 4 ‘The Russian girl had come because she wanted us to film what had happened because she felt that it was bad and wanted journalists to show the world what was happening’. Anthony Feinstein, Journalists Under Fire : The Psychological Hazards of Covering War (Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 10. 5 Dying to tell the story, document film produced and directed by Kyra Thompson, 1998. 6 Ibid. 7 Scott MacLeod, ‘The Life and Death of Kevin Carter,’ Time, 12 September 1994, Viewed 1 May 2013, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981431,00.html. 8 Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (London: Routledge, 1999), 147. 9 MacLeod, ‘Life and Death of Carter.’ 10 Charles Paul Freund, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition: A War Fuelled by Imagery,’ Reason Magazine, June 1999, Viewed 1 May 2013, http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/ultimate_in_unfair.htm. 11 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 147. 12 Doug Struck, ‘A Harvest of Death: Famine stalks Sudan Civil war brings 'nightmare' for millions,’ The Baltimore Sun, 21 April 1993, Viewed 1 May 2013, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-04-21/news/1993111111_1_southern-sudan- civil-war-happening-in-sudan. 13 MacLeod, ‘Life and Death of Carter.’ 14 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 148. 15 MacLeod, ‘Life and Death of Carter’. 16 Ibid. 17 ‘Photographer Haunted by Horror of His Work, Obituary: Kevin Carter 1960 – 1994,’ Sydney Morning Herald 30 July 1994, Viewed 1 May 2013, http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/ultimate_in_unfair.htm. 18 Joanne Cauciella Bonica, quote from an Internet discussion entitled ‘Suicide of a Pulitzer Winner,’ Viewed 1 May 2013, http://members.home.nl/gerhardnijenhuis/msp/time.htm. 19 Freund, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’. 20 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 148. 21 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 148. 22 Magdalena Hodalska, ‘Etyczne problemy w pracy korespondenta wojennego,’ in Korespondent wojenny. Etyka - historia – współczesność, ed. Kazimierz Wolny- Zmorzyński et al. (Kielce: Wydawnictwo WSEiP, 2013), str. 45-55. 14 Passengers in Charon’s Boat ______

23 Four South African photographers: Greg Marinovich, João Silva, Ken Oosterbroek, and Kevin Carter were known as the ‘‘Bang Bang Club.’’ Six days after Carter learned he won the Pulitzer, his best friend Ken Oosterbroek was killed in Takoza and Greg Marinovich severely wounded. For further details see Greg Marinovich, João Silva, The Bang-Bang Club (London: Random House 2000). 24 Władysław Kopaliński, Słownik Symboli (Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 2007), 375. 25 Quoted in MacLeod, ‘Life and Death of Carter.’ 26 Carlin, Romano, ‘Trauma, Torment of War Reporters’ review of Journalists Under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War, by Anthony Feinstein, Viewed 1 May 2013, http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/ultimate_in_unfair.htm. 27 [Anonymous], ‘Inner Horror Plagues War Photographers,’ The Dominion, 17 September 1998, Viewed 1 May 2013, http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/ultimate_in_unfair.htm. 28 Dying to tell the story. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Martin Bell, In Harm’s Way: Reflections of a War Zone Thug, 1996. 32 Dying to tell the story. 33 Pérez-Reverte, Painter of Battles, 10. 34 Quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 225. 35 Pérez-Reverte, Painter of Battles, 160. 36 Dying to tell the story. 37 For further details see: Committee to Protect Journalists, http://www.cpj.org/, or Reporters Without Borders, http://en.rsf.org/. 38 [Anonymous], ‘Inner Horror Plagues War Photographers.’ 39 Quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 224. 40 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 226. 41 Quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 235. 42 Quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 235. 43 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 235. 44 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 236. 45 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 15. 46 Janine DiGiovanni, ‘Tired Moving of the Pictures,’ Sunday Times, 14 August 1994. Quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 238. 47 Ibid, 236. 48 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 281. 49 Nancy Gibbs, ‘WHY? The Killing Fields of Rwanda,’ Time, 16 May 1994, 57. Magdalena Hodalska 15 ______

50 Janine DiGiovanni, ‘Tired Moving of the Pictures,’ Sunday Times, 14 August 1994. Quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 236-237. 51 Pérez-Reverte, Painter of Battles, 110. 52 Feinstein, Journalists Under Fire, 11. 53 Janine DiGiovanni, ‘Tired Moving of the Pictures,’ Sunday Times, 14 August 1994. Quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 304. 54 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 304. 55 As put it, quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 260. 56 Dying to tell the story. 57 Dying to tell the story. 58 Pérez-Reverte, Painter of Battles, 83. 59 Feinstein, Journalists Under Fire, 11. 60 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 234. 61 Ibid., 260. 62 Quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 235. 63 Ibid., 306. 64 Ibid., 306. 65 Paul Holmes wrote in Mazen Dana’s obituary, quoted in Magdalena Hodalska, Korespondent wojenny. Ofiarnik i ofiara we współczesnym świecie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo UJ, 2006), 74. 66 Tarek Al-Issawi, ‘Journalism watchdogs demand inquiry into shooting of cameraman by U.S. Army in Iraq,’ quoted in Hodalska, Korespondent, 102. 67 Committee to Protect Journalists, ‘Mazen Dana: 2001 Awardee’, Viewed 1 May 2013, http://cpj.org/awards/2001/dana.php. 68 Dying to tell the story. 69 [Anonymous], ‘Inner Horror Plagues War Photographers.’ 70 Dying to tell the story. 71 Pérez-Reverte, The Painter of Battles, 43. 72 Dying to tell the story. 73 Krzysztof Miller, 13 wojen i jedna (Kraków: Znak, 2013), 348. 74 Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Territorio Comanche (Madrid: Ollero y Ramos Editores, 1994), quoted in Hodalska, Korespondent, 7. 75 Chris Hedges, Foreword to Journalists Under Fire : The Psychological Hazards of Covering War, by Anthony Feinstein (Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), ix. 76 Pérez-Reverte, The Painter of Battles, 49. 77 Hedges, Foreword, ix. 78 Pérez-Reverte, The Painter of Battles, 70. 79 Ibid. 80 Feinstein, Journalists Under Fire . 81 Ibid., 11. 16 Passengers in Charon’s Boat ______

82 Ibid., 10. 83 Hedges, Foreword, xi. 84 Miller, 13 wojen i jedna, 335. 85 Ibid., 6. 86 Ibid., 87 Ibid., 88 Hedges, Foreword, ix. 89 Pérez-Reverte, Painter of Battles, 111. 90 Magdalena Hodalska, Korespondent wojenny. Ofiarnik i ofiara we współczesnym świecie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo UJ, 2006). The anthropological study is in line with H. Hubert and M. Mauss, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice (1899). 91 A. Perez- Reverte, Territorio Comanche, quoted in Hodalska, Korespondent, 3. 92 [Anonymous], ‘Enzo Baldoni è stato ucciso. : "Abbiamo un video",’ La Repubblica, 26 August 2004, Viewed 1 May 2013, http://www.repubblica.it/2004/h/sezioni/esteri/iraq31/jazeera/jazeera.html. 93 Redakcja, ‘Śmierć Reportera,’ Gazeta Wyborcza, 8 May 2004, 6. 94 James Crugnale, ‘Marie Colvin’s Final Interview With Anderson Cooper Before Her Tragic Death In Syria,’ Viewed 1 May 2013, http://www.mediaite.com/tv/marie-colvins-final-interview-with-anderson-cooper- before-her-tragic-death-in-syria. 95 Ibid. 96 Charles Walford and Nabila Ramdani, ‘She wanted one more story': Mother of veteran war reporter Marie Colvin said her daughter was due to leave Syria on SAME DAY she was killed in rocket attack,’ , 23 February 2012, Viewed 1 May 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2104711/Marie- Colvin-Sunday-Times-reporter-leave-Syria-day-died-says- mother.html#ixzz2RlbQLK7N. 97 Pérez-Reverte, Painter of Battles, 34. 98 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 238. 99 Fergal Keane, Season of Blood (New York: Viking, 1995), 191. 100 Pérez-Reverte, Painter of Battles, 39. 101 Ibid., 76. 102 Ibid., 12. 103 Hedges, Foreword, xii. 104 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 237. 105 Romano, ‘Trauma, Torment of War Reporters.’

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Magdalena Hodalska, PhD, was a freelance reporter and now is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Journalism and Social Communication at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Her research interests are media narratives, discourse and language, anthropology of media (myths, taboos, rites), media events, the art of war correspondence. She investigates the representations of fear in the media, social and cultural influence and the consequences of media coverage.