How to Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone

by Rosie Garthwaite

  For Hoda Abdel-Hamid, who’s been in and out of Iraq for around 10 years, normality means indulging in small pleasures, such as smuggled Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, and having a pampering session when the gunfire is over: ‘I take face-masks, and even boys enjoy having them. We had parties in the war zone where I was doing facial scrubs and facials for big burly cameramen.’

  SYMPTOMS OF TRAUMA

  The American Psychiatric Association defines trauma as the impact of ‘direct personal experience or the witnessing of an event involving actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to a person’s physical integrity; or learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury experienced by a family member or close associate’.

  I arrived back in the UK on Bonfire Night and found the fireworks overwhelming. I sat under my table, telling myself how stupid I was being, but I had to stay there until the bangs stopped at three in the morning.

  For years I couldn’t smell pork without thinking of the burnt bodies I had been sent to check every day in the morgue.

  The week after I left Iraq my housekeeper was kidnapped by armed men who raided the house. It was my fault. I had known it was coming. A week before I left I had hailed a taxi as usual to get home, but before I could begin to pigeon my way through the directions, he said he already knew where I lived. He then told me how much he hated the British and that he supported the attack made on the army earlier that day. He had friends who didn’t like me either. Despite this hostility – and despite having a loving family and boyfriend back in England – all I wanted to do was go back to Iraq. I resented people at home for making me feel so guilty. I felt trapped in London.

  Mine were pretty everyday experiences. But it took me years to admit them.

  Others never really leave the war zone or disaster – it follows them for years, or becomes the only place they feel comfortable.

  /COPING STARTS BEFORE YOU GO

  Think about what you are about to do and calculate all the risks. Involve your family and friends in those thought processes and decisions. Know why you are going. As Dr Carl Hallam says: ‘War zones are terrifying. Bullets flying everywhere. Try to think about that – what it might be like – before you go. It will help you prepare your emotions.’

  For those you leave at home it’s difficult too. Their imagination is going wild. They aren’t sleeping. They need your support as much as you need theirs.

  • Make sure your friends and family know what you are doing and what you will be experiencing.

  • Make sure you know how to contact them and they know how to contact you.

  • Make sure the person who will be looking out for you in the war zone has their details and vice versa.

  • Try to give them an end date – something to look forward to. But make sure it is realistic and doesn’t keep shifting.

  Mothers, fathers, lovers and friends will be torn between wanting to be supportive, understanding why you want to go and feeling hurt and left out.

  During my short stint in Iraq my mother, Vicki, was in touch with another Vicki, the mother of one of my friends out there, Sebastian Walker. They struck up a Dear Vicki, Love Vicki e-mail relationship that helped fill in the blanks when Seb and I weren’t able or willing to talk about things. I know it helped my family to hear about others in the same confusing place. My mother didn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time for all six months that I was away. But she didn’t tell me that until about four years later. Talking to friends and family back home, I know that they are often in the more difficult position. It is hard to know how to get it right, how to ‘be the mother of a war correspondent’. Seb’s mother, Vicki Woods, explains her own struggle:

  ‘My son had been at the Evening Standard for a year or so when he rang me from their offices on a May afternoon in 2003. “Turn on BBC2 now. Now!” We both watched George W. Bush give his swaggering speech – “Mission accomplished” – on our separate tellies, and when he’d finished I said this thing was not accomplished at all. My son said, “No. It’s still the biggest story of my generation and I’ve got to get out there.” I did not demur. Nor did his father. This is a journalists’ household; it’s how we make our living. If I’d been 25 in May 2003, I’d have wanted to write the biggest story of my generation too. Neither of us ever said, “Don’t go, don’t go, we love you so.”

  ‘When he made contact with a couple of “young British entrepreneurs” who were setting up an English-language newspaper in Baghdad [the Baghdad Bulletin], we were very admiring that he quit his job immediately. Girls were going out there to join it, for heaven’s sake. The author of this book was one of them, and much younger than Sebastian. When people said, “Iraq? Are you nuts?” we said bracing things like, “Well, at least the shooting war is over,” or “Well, that new guy Bremer is making the right noises about the reconstruction.” How insane that sounds now. Not only did I not demur, I cheered him on, almost to the extent where his father could have legitimately blamed me for the rest of our lives if he’d been killed. I just didn’t think he could be killed. I didn’t think he’d be in danger. I just thought he’d be hot, hungry, dusty, uncomfortable, driven mad by electricity shortages, erratic transport and iffy communications, and asking himself whether he should have stayed in the high cappuccino country of Kensington High Street.

  ‘We bought things that would be useful: Tubigrip, rehydration salts, water purification tablets. I kept issuing reminders: “Don’t forget paracetamol, toothpaste, batteries.” I wondered fleetingly if he should take a couple of pints of his own blood. My daughter grew very sardonic as I rolled socks and packed sunscreen. “Hmm, I wonder if John Simpson’s mummy does his packing for him?”

  ‘He flew to Amman, Jordan, in late June 2003 and sent a long, chatty e-mail headed “To Baghdad…!” I looked at a map for the first time and thought, bloody hell! That’s a long drive over the desert. I knew there wouldn’t be another e-mail for about 36 hours. When it came, it said: “Am in Baghdad. Am fine. Will e-mail later cos this place is v expensive.”

  ‘Iraq was the first Internet war. In the Gulf War of 1991 (only 12 years earlier) wives and mothers waited for airmail, not e-mail. Whether that made things harder for them is arguable, I think. The shrunken time-gap between seeing something hideous on the telly news and reading words from one’s loved one in real time is disconcerting. My son’s e-mails were sent from Baghdad’s Internet cafés, which I airily imagined would look a bit like the Greek Internet cafés I’d used on holiday, but fronded by date palms instead of olives. They read exactly like the ones he’d sent from his office: laconic, factual, properly spelt and punctuated, jokey, sometimes sarcastic. “Oops, getting close to curfew, better run,” he’d write. I would think, “Oh bugger, I wanted to tell you what your sister’s doing in Spain.” I didn’t think, “Oh Lord, keep him safe as he slips through nervy streets packed with a) gun-toting teenage American troops, b) Ba’athist bitter-enders and c) Shia militiamen.”

  ‘Looking back, I don’t understand my blithe Pollyanna-ism. I was skimming enough websites, watching enough news, reading enough online reports to understand what a war zone was, surely? Sometimes his e-mails actually beat the news. In late August of 2003 I didn’t get to my computer until after lunch, having spent the morning at the dentist. His first e-mail (received at 8 a.m., which was midday in Baghdad) was a brief moan about his broken laptop. The second (received at 2.30 p.m., i.e. 6.30 in Baghdad) said, “Don’t worry, I wasn’t at the press conference that was taking place just as the car bomb exploded at the UN building this afternoon…” I pinged back, “Bloody hell, was anybody else, d’you know?” – a response so unspeakably mindless that it makes my armpits prickle. Then I saw the horror on the evening news. Even so, I didn’t know until a year later that his colleagues had thought he was at that press conference. He’d set off in the office car, but was held up. They’d thought he was blown to pieces. That was his point; I might have too. That’s w
hy he e-mailed.

  ‘When the Baghdad Bulletin folded, he stayed on in Iraq and became a stringer for Reuters, who sent him to Mosul in the hope that he might find Saddam Hussein. Agence France-Presse and AP both had stringers there, but they were both native Arabic speakers from the Middle East. He was the only Western journalist for miles, living in a rented room on his own. He e-mailed that Mosul was “very quiet” and he wouldn’t have much to report, but Black Hawks started falling out of the sky almost immediately, and it became more and more dangerous. A man I knew who worked for a security company started sending me alerts about the “Ramadan offensive”, which I passed on. Ansar al Islam began targeting Westerners (oilmen, contractors, Red Cross workers, as well as the military), and also the Iraqis who worked with them – drivers, translators. I began to be really, really scared when I didn’t get e-mails every day.

  ‘I would send jokey e-mails, links to stuff I’d seen on the Net, political news. I didn’t send anything that I thought would make him miserable. In January I got a terse message saying, “Am on a fleeting visit to Internet café” and a link to a really chilling piece he’d done about targeted assassinations all over Mosul, of academics, newspaper editors, broadcasters, prominent businessmen. Then nothing for 48 hours, after which he was back in Baghdad.

  ‘He came home in February 2004 for a couple of weeks. We hadn’t seen him for months and months. He woke up all through the night every time the beams creaked. I was quite surprised he didn’t pile furniture against the door.

  ‘Few people in the UK have ever seen a dead body, even the tidily dressed body of a family member, let alone witnessed violent, multiple deaths. I was in Auberon Waugh’s Soho club once, when he was talking to a 20-something war correspondent just back from his first war zone. Waugh (who’d covered the 1960s’ Biafran war) said: “It is extraordinary, the smell of death. Rank, sweetish. You’ll never forget it.” What’s extraordinary to me is that my son, half my age, knows the smell of death – lived with it daily, like the hundreds and thousands of Iraqis living under the occupation. He told me, “The threat in Iraq is not being ignorant of what to do if a firefight kicks off around you. That threat exists, but it’s dwarfed by the threat of being targeted, for which neither experience nor training is a great deal of help. Hardened war hacks who have survived the Balkans, Chechnya, Afghanistan, etc. have been killed here.” Yes – I know.

  ‘A hardened war hack greeted me with, “How’s it going? He still over there?” When I said yes, he laughed. “My mother has only just told me that she didn’t sleep for 20 years.”’

  /HOW TO REMAIN SANE

  Jonny Harris, a captain in the Light Dragoon regiment of the British Army, works closely alongside the Afghan Army. In fact, he wrote his advice for this book from an Afghan Army compound somewhere near Lashkar Gah. After some sad and bad times, he has found various ways to put his mind at peace in the midst of chaos.

  ‘On my first tour in Afghanistan I witnessed at first hand the effect of the stress of combat on people: one of my soldiers suffered a breakdown, was returned home from theatre, and was eventually, sadly, invalided out of the army. While I wouldn’t claim that my advice could, or would, have prevented such a mental collapse, I have developed some personal tactics that have kept me going through some fairly dark times.

  ‘Escapism. Each day, take some time that is exclusively yours, be it five minutes or 30. Do something that takes your mind completely away from what you are doing. Small luxuries from home can provide great comfort – fresh coffee, a cup of decent tea, a cigar, a dram of whisky, olives, favourite sweets – and the associations of taste and smell can offer a mental sanctuary in the most inhospitable places.

  ‘Understanding. Make an effort to understand the context of the situation you are in – historical, social, cultural – and interact with the local population wherever possible. It can be easy to lose perspective when there are elements of that population trying to kill you, but it is important to realize that there are a great number of people in the local area who are just trying to get on with life.

  ‘Discussion. The sensations experienced in dangerous situations, especially in combat, combine to create a heady cocktail of emotions that, if left unexamined, can cause great confusion. You can be certain, however, that someone else has experienced thoughts and emotions not dissimilar to your own. Talk.

  ‘Exertion. Exercise is a great reliever of tension. Even in a confined space and with minimal equipment, you’re limited only by your own imagination. The simplest exercises are those that use your own body weight, such as press-ups, sit-ups and chin-ups.

  ‘Anticipation. If you find yourself in a war zone, you will almost certainly find yourself in some rather unpleasant situations. It is important to remember that the unpleasantness will cease eventually, and that the state of affairs will most likely improve. You must maintain the ability to look beyond the immediate circumstances to a more pleasant time.’

  /HEALTHY BODY, HEALTHY MIND

  This is the advice your mother would give you. But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. If you eat well and sleep well, you are more likely to be able to deal with your extraordinary everyday experiences in an ordinary way. So I’ll say it again – eat well, sleep well. And in order to do that, it’s a good idea to stay as active as you can, especially if you are stuck indoors all day (see Simple Ways to Stay Fit).

  Stick to a routine

  The routine you follow in a war zone might not be the same as the one you follow at home, but it is yours and you have chosen it. The important thing is to find one and stick to it. Ring a friend at the same time every day. Take a break – chocolate or cigarette or water – after every dangerous drive across town. Have a sleep after eating. Watch the terrible local music channel while you drink your coffee in the morning. Pray, smoke, walk, arrange flowers, do your neighbour’s laundry, build paper planes – everything and anything in moderation.

  Regular visitors to war zones each seem to find their own poison. The key is to choose a healthy one.

  Leith Mushtaq told me: ‘I was born in a war in Iraq. This is my natural background. I saw people killed when I was a schoolboy, and only 12 of us out of 2400 people who went to fight the resistance returned. I write about my experience. That helps me a lot. My writing is my doctor. Damage happens inside. It is difficult for me to be happy now. I have travelled the world for work and holidays. Seen everything…but nothing compares to that experience.’

  Know when you need to say no

  How much sleep do you need to function on a regular basis? How long can you go without food and still be able to do your job? What situations can you cope with and which ones are a step too far? Which rules don’t you want to break? Where do you draw the line when it comes to people? What lies won’t you tell? Which people don’t you trust? How much alcohol is too much?

  These are decisions we make every day in the normal world, but when it’s falling apart we sometimes forget our limits – push ourselves beyond what we are prepared for.

  Talk

  According to Dr Carl Hallam, talking is vital: ‘Conversation, conversation, conversation…even if you all end up speaking at once. It is when people stop talking about what awful things happened to them that day that you have to worry.’

  Develop friendships within work and outside. Find people you can talk to. Before an event talk about what you are expecting to see and feel. You can learn from others’ experience or teach people who don’t have any. After an event tell people if there were any surprises. How did everyone cope? If something went wrong, why did it go wrong? There is a reason the military put such an emphasis on preparation and debriefing. Dealing with events in the present is a lot more effective than when clarity has faded a little. Learning how to talk and make decisions under stress is vital to being able to do your job in a disaster area or war zone.

  Hoda Abdel-Hamid says: ‘When I know it’s going to be a bad day in the news I call my family early and tell them I
am fine. Then I call immediately after the bad news and I tell my mum and husband I am OK. It’s very difficult talking to your loved ones because you are in such different realities. You have to play the game, put on an act.’

  There is one exception to this, pointed out by Laura Tyson, who has spent most of the last 10 years working with children recovering from one disaster or another: ‘Children who have been through extreme situations just want to get back to being children again. Take some pencils and small notebooks, yoyos or bouncy balls to give out. If you’re a journalist, don’t push them to describe their experiences, even through play. You could have a negative impact on their recovery.’

  Know when you are stressed and find a way to deal with it

  This is about awareness. How do you respond to stress? Do you go quiet or become manic? Look at your sleep pattern – it’s usually a good indicator. Getting less sleep than you need means you are less able to cope with stress. It’s a vicious cycle.

  Learn what triggers your stress and what you need to change in your life to cope with it. Maybe it means giving up that quick glass of wine before bedtime rather than taking it up with you. Maybe it means putting on the radio so you can hear a calm voice above the rest of the noise outside. Maybe it means keeping some music with you that you know will calm you down if you have a long time to wait.