By Sebastian Junger
I remember when I was younger thinking, if I was covering a war and I wasn’t in a situation where people were shooting in my direction, I wasn’t really covering the war.
A totally silly way to think. What you’re really doing is answering a personal need for excitement – and not necessarily a pure quest for information.
But we’re human. That’s going to happen. It’s an important thing to be aware of. I’ve been very lucky as a journalist, in the stories that I’ve covered, and in people’s responses to my work. I’ve also been very lucky, two or three times that I can think of, that I didn’t get killed or really badly hurt. It’s interesting, though. Looking back, what I find is that the situations that really disturb you psychologically aren’t when there’s danger to yourself. It’s the pain of others. Damage to other people. It’s incredibly traumatizing.
The event in my life as a journalist that fundamentally changed the stories that I would cover was the death of my good friend, the British photojournalist Tim Hetherington.
Tim and I were in Afghanistan together in a small American outpost called Restrepo. We made a film together called Restrepo. We were friends, brothers, colleagues – we were supposed to go to Libya together on assignment in 2011. And right after we were at the Oscars for Restrepo, just about at the last minute, for personal reasons I couldn’t go. Tim went on his own. And he was killed in the city of Misrata. I got the phone call in New York, and within about an hour of the shock of that terrible phone call, I realized that I was never going to cover war again.
Not so much that I was worried personally for myself. But I suddenly understood the effect on other people. I was married at the time. My wife, Daniela, loved Tim. I was watching the effect on her, and on Tim’s girlfriend. And in the coming days, I would see the effect on his family and friends. I realized that it’s absolutely possible to gamble with your own life. There are very good reasons to do it. What’s ethically way more complicated is gambling with other people’s happiness. Ultimately that’s what you’re doing when you go to a war zone.
I think there’s a point in your life where you do have to put the concerns of others before your own concerns or ambitions. I don’t think 20 or 30 – or maybe even 40 – is that point. Nearing 50 it certainly is. At least it was for me. So I stopped war reporting completely. Incredibly, I have never had even a passing regret about that decision.
But I’m incredibly proud of the people who are still doing it. It’s a very necessary job. What I wanted to do with my love of journalism and foreign reporting – since I wasn’t going to be engaging with it myself – I thought I could take that affection and take my energy and my time and continue to be involved by starting an organization that might help the journalists who are still working out there.
Tim died from a wound that was not necessarily mortal. He bled out. He died of loss of blood. He died in the back of a pickup truck racing to a Misrata hospital. He died minutes from help. And there were journalists around him and other rebel fighters, who conceivably might have been able to help him and slow down his blood loss. But none of them were medically trained. None of them knew what to do.
Just a quick lesson in this. If you’ve got nothing else, you just put your knee into the person’s wound and bear down as hard as you can. Even that kind of pressure into a wound can collapse the artery and slow down blood loss. So I’ve started an organization called Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues, RISC.
Its mission is to provide free combat training and combat medicine: frontline medicine for experienced freelancers who cover wars. We unfortunately don’t have enough funding to train people who are not reporters yet. We focus on freelancers, because they are the majority of people in war zones.
Their casualty rate has doubled in the past ten years. They are often very broke, and they can’t afford to invest in their own training. So we pay for four days of lodging for them, a four-day intensive medical training course, and a combat medical kit, for 72 freelancers a year. We exist completely from donations and people’s generosity.
We’re going into our fourth year. We’re very, very proud of RISC. If you have any interest at all in it, please look us up online – RISCTraining.org.
Junger is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and author. This piece was excerpted from a speech at the 2015 OPC Foundation Scholar Awards Luncheon.