Sadly, the man who saved us from our stupidity, Neil Davis, just like Tony Joyce, was later killed in a war. Worse, it wasn’t even a war worthy of the name.
In September 1985, a couple of years after our meeting in Beirut, while covering a pissweak little coup in Thailand, Neil and his soundman Bill Latch found themselves needing to take cover behind a small telephone junction box. Beside them were their friends Gary Burns and Daeng Kariah, filming for a different organisation. With no warning a tank fired in their direction. Neil and Bill were both hit. Neil’s camera fell to the ground, still rolling, capturing his last moments. His final shot was of his own body being dragged away by his great mate Gary Burns.
Tony Joyce and Neil Davis, two great Australian newsmen who had saved our lives, both lost their own lives doing stories nowhere near as dangerous as many they had covered before.
•
Meanwhile, back in Beirut, after a few days covering the west side, we took the long way round to East Beirut. We could have done it in five minutes but that would have meant driving past the snipers who murder women and babies. So we took the agonisingly long but safe route. Long because of the distance but also because every few kilometres we had to stop at sandbagged checkpoints to show our IDs.
What a mess. It looked like these guys in the east were well and truly losing the battle, but then again I had no idea what was going on, and frankly wasn’t interested. War is absurd, but civil war is fucking insane, and everyone we interviewed, from Phalangist Christians to the Syrian Socialist National Party (who were actually Lebanese), to Palestinians (who were actually Palestinians), all to a man, told us that with God’s help they would win. I wonder about a god who picks sides, because someone’s got to lose. Men have prayed for victory as long as there have been wars. Someone once said there are no atheists in foxholes. It may well be true, but someone else said it isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes.
Young men have always been the pawns in the game. There’s a great scene in the movie All Quiet on the Western Front when Katezinsky, a born leader who despised war but who still fought his heart out, tells his mates: ‘I’ll tell you how it should all be done. Whenever there’s a big war comin’ on, you should rope off a big field and sell tickets. Yeah, and on the big day, you should take all the kings and their cabinets and their generals, put them in the centre dressed in their underpants and let ’em fight it out with clubs. The best country wins.’
I couldn’t agree more, and probably every soldier who ever fought someone else’s battle thought the same.
The novel All Quiet on the Western Front reduced me to tears. The author Erich Maria Remarque did spend time at the front. So if a book about the horrors of war can reduce you to tears, why not the real thing? I knew they were all tougher than me, but why weren’t all these blokes sobbing their hearts out all day? Bashir Gemayel, Commander in Chief of the Lebanese Phalangists, a charming man with degrees in law and political science, told us he lost his daughter in a car bomb explosion and said with dry eyes, ‘I don’t have any hate more or less than what I had before.’
Where did all this hate come from? Bring on the generals in their underpants, I say, and speaking of underpants I needed new ones myself, after dashing with Bashir Gemayel down an alleyway full of snipers.
He looked up the alley and ran for cover. He then waved us on, one by one. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘How does he know we’re not going to be shot? This is stupid.’ But come my turn I put my head down, my arse up, and ran. I felt like I should just keep running all the way to Syria and beyond, but when I got to Bashir I stopped and stood as close to him as I could. I should have filmed as I was running, Neil Davis would have, and it would have been a great shot, but in times like that, I think of my arse and never the story. A few months after my run with my now good mate Bashir, he was elected president. A month later he was assassinated.
At the end of our first day in East Beirut, and still in shock at our mad sniper run with Bashir Gemayel, we still had nowhere to stay. And with shit happening all around us, driving round looking for accommodation was no fun. Not like the laugh a minute day we’d just had.
We eventually found a hotel, but had trouble hearing the receptionist through all the shelling outside. We think he said, ‘Do you know what to do if the hotel is hit?’ Depends who’s asking, I thought. ‘You take the stairs and head for the dining room which is on the lower ground floor.’ Sounded good to us.
The shelling and gunfire was relentless through the night. Sleep was impossible, and as I showered and brushed my teeth in the morning, the shelling seemed to be getting closer. But I was reluctant to run to the lower ground floor, thinking I must be brave, everyone else is, and after all, this must happen round these parts every day. The shelling got louder and more violent then ... Bang! The wall of my room was hit with a huge explosion. My toothbrush nearly went through my gum. Shit, I’d call that a war wound. So with a mouth full of blood I took off. The corridors were eerily quiet with not a soul in sight. Maybe I’d overreacted. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe I should just go back to my room. What would Neil Davis, Tony Joyce and Robert Fiske have done? They’d all be outside getting a story. Not me, I’m wounded.
I raced into the dining room and there was not a spare inch of space. The place was overflowing with people, some even cowering under furniture, including my courageous colleagues who looked out from under their tables and said, ‘Where the fuck have you been?!’
It appeared that I was the last person in Beirut, maybe even the whole of Lebanon, to go diving for cover. How brave was I. And I had a war wound to boot. I wished Neil and Robert were here to see this. Maybe I could even join their brave persons’ club.
•
If somehow there was a clone of me in a parallel universe and I was to find myself in an army, in a trouble spot, give me the horrors and atrocities from the great Belizian–Guatemalan conflict. Belize had absolutely nothing going for it but beautiful timber, and there’d been arguments and wars over logging rights for hundreds of years. The great English writer Aldous Huxley once said of Belize, ‘If the world had ends this would be one of them.’
On 21 September 1981 the Poms pulled out of the last British outpost of the Central American mainland and handed over independence to the Belizeans, making it official at exactly midnight. At Government House, for a select few hundred, the Union Jack was lowered as the new flag of Belize was meant to pass it on the way up the flagpole. They met in the middle and got beautifully stuck, neither of them going anywhere.
The problem might have been lack of rehearsal but I suspect it was the huge tropical storm that hit at five minutes to midnight. I’d set up my lights to shoot the symbolic flag changeover, but when that storm hit, all my lights blew. Well, exploded really, along with everything else, and we were all left in complete darkness. I shot as much as I could, not seeing a thing through the viewfinder and knowing the film I was using was nowhere near fast enough, but I also knew there wasn’t film yet invented that could’ve helped. But still I lived in hope that I might fluke something. Perhaps the supercharged, highly dangerous lightning bolts coming at us from every angle might just illuminate the flags long enough for one perfectly exposed frame. My camera was full of water, as was the entire Gordon Highland kilt-wearing band trying to play ‘These Are a Few of My Favourite Things’. It was a complete disaster, but luckily for the politicians, dignitaries, bedraggled band and us, there was to be a second bite of the cherry the next day. For the masses.
Mad dogs and Englishmen. The official ceremony was bewilderingly planned for the middle of the day in 38-degree Celsius heat.
Having scraped the bottom of the royal gene pool, the numero uno Pom which the British came up with as their official representative was the hapless Duke of Kent, wearing thick red velvet pants held up by a belt supporting a large gold-handled sword that hung stupidly down his left side. Above his red pants he wore a white long-sleeve jacket dripping in med
als and sweat, white gloves and a red velvet cap with gold braid.
Presumably the higher-up royals had much more important things to do, like cleaning their shoes, and we could tell the bored duke was wishing he had better things to do as well, like sticking pins in his eyes. But he performed his royal duty and on behalf of Her Majesty formally recognised Belize as an independent nation.
The Guatemalans had trouble recognising Belize as anything, so continued to have a 15,000-strong army along the disputed borders, but the British also kept a small number of troops on the border, backed by helicopters, missiles and Harrier jets, just in case. Maybe they found it too hard to let go. This was their fourth-last colony, with only Gibraltar, the Falklands and Hong Kong left.
After all the pomp and ceremony, we had enough shots to make it look like we were at the official turnover so we headed up to the mountains in a British helicopter to get much-needed images of the border conflict.
It looked like a war to me. Snipers in watchtowers covered in camouflage netting, trenches with machine guns positioned hundreds of metres along the border, and troops searching through the forests for any Guatemalans who may have crossed into Belize. It was all great footage for us, but it was really just a peace-keeping exercise.
With heaps of ‘war’ footage in the can, we headed back to our chopper for the short trip back to Belize City. Just as we climbed into the helicopter, the pilot told us he had a problem and it’d take some time to fix. All the other choppers were out, so we’d have to stay the night. I was happy with that, better to find out there was a problem with the chopper on the ground than at 2000 feet. But again I was wondering how I could make it known across the border that, ‘I ain’t got no quarrel with them Guatemalans.’
We were standing around, wondering what to do next, when the commanding officer asked if we’d mind bunking in with the troops for the night, and also invited us to the officers’ mess for dinner at seven.
A young recruit showed us our bunks then took us to the bar for a few beers and a game of darts. Great war so far. Most of the troops had tattoos and missing teeth but all looked as tough as nails and had difficult-to-understand accents, from Irish to Cockney to Yorkshire, and were very funny. They were comfortable in their surroundings, as if it was a training exercise, which I think it was. They were being tested in the heat and jungles in preparation for the real thing some time in the future. After our darts game they asked us to join them for dinner. When we told them we’d scored an invitation from the top banana officer, they laughed and slapped us on the backs. One of them said, ‘Fuck off then, you’ll be so fucking bored you’ll be back here in no time.’
The officers’ mess was a huge tent any circus would be proud of. And if I hadn’t been out all day shooting what looked like a war, I would have thought we were part of a circus, or maybe a Monty Python sketch. As soon as we entered we were approached by a dark-skinned local guy dressed in a white shirt and black bow tie, offering us the choice of gin or cold beer.
I grabbed a beer and checked out the scene. It was extraordinary. We were surrounded by a bunch of upper-class twits, wandering around in either a dinner suit or some over-the-top formal army uniform, presumably the one kept for a meeting with a bottom-of-the-ladder duke. But he’d already left town. Most had neatly trimmed moustaches and accents just as neatly trimmed. The British class system was alive and well in the alien mountains of Belize.
The hors d’oeuvres had arrived along with my first freezing cold beer. Ten minutes later we all sat down at a huge dining table with a white linen tablecloth and an array of knives and forks that hinted we were in for a bloody long meal. The soup was superb, not too hot, not too cold, Goldilocks would have approved. An army of waiters kept the red and white wine flowing, and as the night wore on I witnessed the spectacle of the waiters being treated appallingly. After the entrée we dined on a main course of succulent beef and vegetables, washed down with copious amounts of expensive wine. The general conversation was unbelievably self-indulgent, continuing through the dessert and on to the cheese and biscuits where it became no less boring but much louder through the coffee and gallons of port. I suspected the only things killed by British officers around here were brain cells.
As Hitler once said, ‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,’ so I knew those poncy officers would go home with tall stories of the horrors of war. Much taller than mine.
•
Reporting on wars has been around as long as wars. Thousands of years ago some lucky foot soldier was sent home to report on the success or failure of the battle, but the general populace were never let in on the secret. I don’t know what came first, the people’s need to know, or nosey correspondents who figured living on an expense account was like Christmas every day. One of the first journalists to go to war was Crabb Robinson, covering Napoleon’s battles for the Times of London, but the first picture man was the Dutch painter Willem van de Velde, who in 1653 went out in a boat to observe and sketch naval battles between the Dutch and the English. Talk about a death wish. Brave or mad, I don’t know, but I suspect the latter.
Today war news is instantaneous and TV reporters are instantly famous. Some television reporters love to be in wars, they are seen to be really, really brave ... and they can get all dressed up. The latest fashion accessory for the modern ‘war correspondent’ is the flak jacket. The TV reporters who love to wear them are the ones that don’t need them. They go nowhere dangerous but insist on wearing their bulletproof vest for every appearance on camera.
There have been some genuinely brave reporters and some very unlucky ones. According to the managing editor of the World Press Freedom Review an awful sea-change has happened. Conflicts in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Pakistan are seeing ‘the deliberate targeting of journalists’. Now Syria can be added to the mix. From 1992 to 2015, 1140 journalists have been killed in conflict areas.
Smart journalists don’t take risks, but can still be caught out. Fiske’s Hotel Room Journalists hardly leave their expensive suites, and if they’re on TV the viewers at home are led to believe their every move is fraught with danger due to the ubiquitous flak jacket worn over the ‘look at me, I’m in a war zone’ suit. The type of suit that has been de rigueur for the phoney journo since Vietnam, and so beautifully described by Michael Herr in his amazing book Dispatches: ‘He was in his late thirties and he was dressed in one of those jungle-hell leisure suits with enough flaps and slots and cargo pockets to carry supply for a squad.’
And though Herr’s suited journalist appeared 45 years ago, I saw a lookalike in the West Bank after the Israelis had bombed the shit out of the place, leaving it awash with rubble and wailing women. The young reporter from one of the British commercial channels donned his flak jacket over his jungle-hell leisure suit, leant right in, using the camera lens as a mirror, then spent the next ten minutes adjusting the collar of his jacket as if it was the latest Armani suit. He tried it fully extended, then totally flat, then settled on the halfway look. Another ten minutes on his hair and he was ready to ‘report’. The poor cameraman struggled desperately to find a clean shot. One that didn’t capture any of the other nearby members of the media who were looking on wearing jeans, T-shirts and grins.
•
The biggies of the last ten years, Iraq and Afghanistan, I deftly avoided. Simply by saying I wouldn’t go. A huge risk, after all it was my job, but I had a wife and two kids. Why would I risk that for a TV show? Mind you, there were times when I was called a coward and threatened with a job in the studio, but luckily for me there were always other people keen to go.
People such as Jon Steele, the American-born cameraman working for the UK Channel ITN. This bloke has to be mad. His book War Junkie is absolutely extraordinary. For twelve years, he covered every war and shithole that existed, and revelled in it. The subtitle of his book is, ‘One Man’s Addiction to the Worst Places on Earth’. We need people like him so that people like me can keep the
world balanced. My addiction is to the best places on earth. But Steele did finally crack. He had some sort of breakdown and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. And why wouldn’t he? How he managed to last as long as he did shows just how tough and a little bit mad he really was.
15
Kings and Wannabes
Gliding effortlessly over the hills like a serpent on a summer’s day they came at me, a wave of them swaying to a mesmerising beat. Beautiful bouncing breasts, thousands of them. Now, I’ve seen a thing or two in my career but this was astonishing. Breasts of all sizes and shapes, and all belonging to virgins, the prerequisite for appearing in this show, the coronation of the new King of Swaziland.
To cover the coronation seemed like a very romantic National Geo thing to do. Swaziland, a small landlocked monarchy in southern Africa, was a stable country with ancient traditions. How could I lose? Then I saw the media contingent; hundreds of crews from around the world. How to get something different from the rest of them was going to be a real challenge, though just getting to Swaziland had been a challenge for us.
The only way of getting to Swaziland was through South Africa, and Australian journalists were not welcome in South Africa in 1986. The Australian government, in condemning the repressive policies of the apartheid system, was very much on the nose to the South Africans, so we were banned. But the South Africans knew there were very few routes into anywhere in Africa from Australia and they weren’t about to miss out on the lucrative flight path. So they were nicely prepared. They built a hotel on the arrival side of customs. We could land and take off to other destinations in Africa without setting foot on South African soil.
When we arrived at dusk in Mbabane, the Swazi capital, we saw a wonderful sight. Half a dozen men, thoroughly enjoying themselves, walking along the road wearing full traditional gear, feathers, animal skin, spear and shield. It looked fantastic. I couldn’t wait to get stuck into the pictures.
All This in 60 Minutes Page 21
