By Kathy Gannon
In December last year I returned to Pakistan.
It was just for two weeks, but it had the effect of helping me reconnect with the person I had been before the April 4, 2014 shooting in eastern Afghanistan, when a crazed gunman stole from me one of my dearest friends, the award-winning photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus, and changed my life.
The last time I had been in Pakistan was in early March 2014 – almost a month before the shooting. I had originally gone to Afghanistan to fill in on the AP desk and then to cover the presidential election. Then I was strong. I could type with both hands.
Doing up the zipper on my coat wasn’t a near to impossible chore. I wore shoes with laces. I didn’t wake every morning giving myself a pep talk or a berating – depending on the day – about coping with the pain and the value of putting a positive spin on the progress I had made.
So much, it seemed, had changed.
I have been humbled by the outpouring of kind words, and the talk of courage and bravery. Still, most of the time I have felt neither brave nor courageous. Instead my time seems to be preoccupied with keeping fear at bay, not thinking about the next surgery, nor dwelling on questions for which I have no answers: What will the future hold? What will I be able to do? Will I be able to type with both hands? How do I massage the physical and emotional scars so that I am not forever a walking wounded? How do I ensure that the shooting doesn’t define me, that one horrific incident doesn’t overshadow a career that has brought me such joy and pride?
People often ask whether the shooting has changed me. The honest answer is that I am really not sure, having focused so much of my energy on healing physically. I do know that I am as impatient as I ever was. I am still stubborn and opinionated.
I also feel incredibly lucky that I always loved my life. I was doing what I wanted to do, living in a region that offered glaring examples of the very best and very worst of us. When the gunman stopped firing that horrible day last April and I looked down to see all the blood and my near-severed hand, I was sure I was dying. The recurring thought as I prepared myself for death was that I had had an amazing life. I had no regrets.
I looked to my left at Anja, not sure whether she was alive or dead, taking comfort in having her by my side.
Since I survived – thanks in no small part to the emergency surgery performed by an Afghan surgeon at the struggling Khost Hospital – I have taken a closer look at many things that I previously gave only a passing thought to, including our profession.
Dozens of journalists have been killed in the last year. The world has lost videographers, photographers and writers, all of whom believed in the value of telling the story. Others have suffered horrific life-changing injuries in pursuit of the story.
More than ever before we struggle with the question of what constitutes acceptable risk. No story is worth dying over, but are there stories that are worth the calculated risks we take whenever we go into a conflict zone? No matter how much you seek to mitigate the risk – and we all do – risk remains.
For me the answer is in the hearts of those journalists who have paid the price either with their lives or their once healthy bodies.
I think of Anja, my friend who died at my side. Her pictures captured the souls of the people, and the many conflicts she covered laid bare those souls. The misery of war brings out the worst and best of people and everything in between, and Anja captured it all. She made us see. We didn’t see only tanks and mortars. In her images we saw people, their pain, strength, courage and even their hope in what often seemed to the outsider a hopeless situation.
Anja and I would often talk about why we did this job. Her belief in the rightness of what she did and the absolute necessity of getting out, leaving behind the safety of an office, to tell the story, was unshakeable. It was never about her. It was always about those whose stories she wanted to tell through her pictures.
She was smart in how she approached a story. She understood the risks, always had a back-up plan, was never foolhardy or cavalier about the dangers involved. But she also never ran away from the risks to leave the story untold.
Anja represents all of us who do this job. None of us wants to die or be hurt, but neither do we want to be held hostage to fear nor debilitated by the question: “What might happen?”
What we want is just to tell the story.
Gannon is the Associated Press Regional Correspondent for Afghanistan and Pakistan.