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Shot in the head Ian Stewart believes his deeper war wounds are the psychological ones Former Associated Press Africa correspondent Ian Stewart, author of Ambushed: A War Reporter’s Life on the Line, struggles with the aftermath of a job he’ll never forget. I had no idea that my work had taken a toll on me before the ambush, but it had. I covered conflicts in Cambodia, in Afghanistan, in Kashmir, and by the time I got to Africa there was this whole buildup of trauma. Now, looking back, I see that my behavior with my girlfriend at the time, and with friends and family, was just horrific. I had very little patience. I was angry all the time. I was just a nasty person to be around. The smallest thing would set me off. Little inconveniences of life that we normally just blow off became a really big, annoying deal for me, and I would take everyone down with me because I no longer knew how to deal with my emotions. It was always the children that affected me the most, and that’s everywhere from Cambodia to Afghanistan. I saw so many children walking around with prosthetic feet and legs because they had stepped on land mines. In Africa, one child I remember very distinctly. His mother had been killed by a sniper and he just stopped feeding. He was not nursing anymore. He would not take a wet nurse. He would not take a bottle and was basically starving himself to death. His face and his image are so ingrained in my mind now that he’ll be with me forever. Maria was a little girl in Sierra Leone who had her hands chopped off by a rebel from the Revolutionary United Front. I can remember when I was sitting with her and her mother and her arm was bandaged up. And she was basically looking up, in total innocence and misunderstanding of what was going on, asking if her hands would grow back. In moments like that, how do you make sense of it? How do you explain that to a child? And then try to get that across to a population in the rest of the world that has no real experience with that kind of absolute barbarity and evil kind of violence. In the mid-’90s, Africa became the hot story, with Tutsis traveling across the Savanna to take over Kinshasa and overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko. I got really interested and asked my editors in New York if I could get transferred from Vietnam to Africa. They agreed and then sent me over to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast. It was nothing like what I expected. It was a much more intense experience—one conflict after another. I bounced from the Congo to the Republic of Congo to Guinea-Bissau to Liberia to Sierra Leone, one war after another, and it was just exhausting. The final assignment that I had was in Sierra Leone covering a rebel assault on the capital Freetown, and we got caught up in a convoy traveling through the city. At a rebel checkpoint, one of the rebels was at the side of the road and he unloaded his AK-47 into the back seat of our car. My colleague Myles Tierney was killed outright, and I took one bullet in the middle of my head. I was left for dead for about 36 hours until they actually got me to a hospital in England. I went through two rounds of surgery to clean out my brain and get the bullet removed. I guess you could say I spent six immediate months of recovery, but you could argue that I’m still recovering and will be for the rest of my life. I had never even heard of post-traumatic stress until I had dealt with psychologists in the wake of my injury. You don’t have to be a war correspondent to encounter this. You could be covering the tsunami. You could be covering a terrible fire in downtown San Francisco. The reporter has to stand there and look at this great suffering and loss. It’s human tragedy that takes a toll. People do mask it. I’ve worked with so many photographers who act as though nothing’s happened, saying, “Oh no, I’m fine.” There’s this super culture of machismo that they’re not affected by it. They don’t realize they are affected by it. I was aware of the physical dangers of being a war correspondent, you know, bullets flying and shrapnel, whatnot. But I don’t think very many people are really aware of the psychological dangers. It never goes away completely. —Interviewed by William Drummond, professor of journalism,
and Sheila Kaplan. |
Photograph by David Stewart 
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