A seminar for editors sponsored by The Crimes of War Project and The Freedom Forum

Day Two, Panel Four: The Psychological Impact of Covering War Crimes

Moderator/Discussant: Frank Smyth, Washington Representative, Committee to Protect Journalists

Introduction

FRANK SMYTH: I appreciate everybody sticking around for this. To my left is Frank Ochberg, who is one of the founders of the Society for the Studies of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, something that was developed largely with Vietnam vets coming home after the Vietnam War. He's also the director of the Dart Foundation that provides fellowships for journalists to learn more about post-traumatic stress syndrome. And he's been a pioneer in this field, not only in terms of the research, but also in terms of reaching out to groups like the FBI, the Secret Service, and the National Security Council in terms of helping them implement programs on how to have their people deal with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Sherry Richiardi is a journalist and a contributing writer for the American Journalism Review. She's spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe. She's also covered the Balkans and the conflict in Bosnia. And she's one of the few journalists that began to write about the impact of post-traumatic stress syndrome on journalists covering trauma. She did a piece last year in AJR and she has another one coming out.

Dr. Anthony Feinstein is a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto. He's also done some post-doctoral work on Namibia and he's one of the people that's actually begun to do research in coordination, as I understand, with the Freedom Forum on the impact of PTSD on journalists and how they're coping with it.

And at the end is Chris Cramer, who's the president of CNN International. And he's one of the people -- before he was with the BBC -- who was a pioneer in implementing both security training, physical security training of -- like the presentation we had yesterday by the gentleman from Centurion. And also, Chris is one of the pioneers to implement mandatory debriefings for BBC war correspondents coming back from the field.

So, I think we've got a rare group here. I think it's a great opportunity. We're going to try to keep this brief. We're each going to speak for hopefully not more than 10 minutes and then open it up to questions. And I'm going to start off by telling an anecdote and then passing it along to Frank.

I think PTSD is a process. I think we have to look at in terms of a process. Most journalists, I think, deal with it in a very simple way. When you interview a torture victim or someone who's a victim of violence or you take their photograph, I think it's a natural process that you write the story, you tell the story, you get a certain amount of satisfaction of conducting the interview, interacting with that person, and then getting their story out there. I think in most cases it's a very clean process, and there aren't many complications with it. Sometimes, you get frustrated. Where you're interviewing people or taking their photograph and, for one reason or another, it may not make it into the paper or the magazine. Maybe there's just too many cases and you have to pick one or for whatever reason your editors don't think it's a story or there's no U.S. angle or Western angle that makes it a story. And I think in those cases, it can be a little more frustrating, a little bit harder for the journalist or the photographer who's interacting with that person because, of course, you want to treat everyone with respect. You want to have a human connection with them as well as professional connection and you want to have some kind of empathy. And if you can't then put that out there in a way that does them justice in terms of telling their story, I think that can be frustrating.

And, of course, we process this by doing various things like contributing to the Crimes of War Project and finding other ways of making a greater contribution. There are also cases, I think, that are extreme, that go off the map that are much more problematic. And I think the case of Andrei Babitski, who was in prison and missing for a while in Chechnya, there was a time when he was, as I understand it, when he came out of prison one of the Radio Free Europe people said that he was in shock from the experience of watching other people being tortured. That's the kind of experience -- I'm going to try to tell you my experience with that and show you the sense of the process. And I think the key thing is what can we do about the process and how can we accelerate the process rather than continue it.

Back after the Gulf War, I was 30 years old and a stringer and I was working for a number of papers, including the San Francisco Examiner. And I wound up sneaking into northern Iraq after the Gulf War during the time of the Intafada, or the insurrection, in Iraq against Saddam Hussein. It started in the south and then spread to the north. And we went in -- there was group of three journalists, myself, Gad Gross, who was 26 year old photojournalist working for Newsweek, a freelance photographer like Ron and Steve and Gary. He also, as we were going in and made the connections with the Kurds going in northern Iraq, he invited in a gentleman by the name of Allahn Boo , who was a 30-year-old, another freelance photographer who was working for Time Magazine. We wound up sneaking into northern Iraq and traveling to our -- traveling south about 150 miles to Kirkuk. And we didn't see any fighting along the way. Gadd and Allahn, of course, wanted to get photographs and I was, in addition to filing for the Economist and the Village Voice, was filing for CBS Radio. And also as I was going in, CBS television said, “We'd like you to bring along a video eight. And we'll consider buying the footage back from you on a right of first refusal basis.” And I had many regrets about this whole adventure. One of the regrets I have, of course, was taking that camera.

We wound up in Kirkuk on March 28, 1991. The night before, Geraldine Brooks of the Wall Street Journal had been with us and she decided to follow a family back to Erbil and do the human story of them fleeing north from the city. We decided to stay because we hadn't seen much resistance and we thought the Kurds would be able to hold. And it seemed like at that point that Saddam was going down. We were going to go forward to Baghdad. To make a long story short, there was a battle that began around 8:00 in the morning and by about 12 noon, we knew we were in big trouble and it was unclear if we were going to make it out alive. We were pinned down with a lot of incoming fire and at one point we see a tank. And Allahn says, “A tank's coming.” We turned around to see this tank coming at us and at that point there's rockets coming in. A lot of incoming fire.

We wound up running. And Gadd and Batiar, who's an armed Kurdish guerilla, go running off towards some houses in front of Allahn and I. And we see them going off towards some houses and Allahn and I are running along. We look back and we see the turret of the tank moving so we think the tank has seen us, which was probably a misconception because, of course, you have poor visibility from within a tank. But we didn't know. We see the tank turret moving so we dove into a ditch. We're pinned down then for about two hours and the Iraqi Army wound up taking over the road right behind us. And they're very close to us. So we decided -- we're not sure what happened to the other guys, they went running off towards these houses -- we decided we're going to sit there, we're going to wait until it gets dark and then we're going to sneak away. Well -- and we're still hearing, you know, mop-up, occasional gunfire. There's a lot of wounded Kurdish guerillas around, and the Iraqi Army, violating the rules of war, is killing people pretty much as they see them.

We wound up staying in this ditch and then right before sunset, when we're hoping to sneak away, the Iraqi Army comes back and camps literally on top of us. We spend the night hiding in this ditch. In the morning, we hear some commotion coming from these houses. We hear a machine gun blast, there's a pause, there's a scream, which I believe was Gadd screaming, and then another machine gun blast. Now, at this point, you can imagine or maybe you can't image, what was going through our minds. I have a snippet of it that Roy pushed me to put into the piece as an editor, which I'm grateful for. Feeling like a little boy, right. I mean, you're not sure what happened to these guys, we hear these sounds, we have this incredible feeling in this ditch that we're about to die. We peek out over the ditch and we get confirmation. We see them carrying Gadd's camera bags. So we know that it was them that was killed. And we're in there about an hour and we're both looking out in different directions hoping we can surrender before they will kill us, and then Allahn jumps up and says and yells, ÒSahhaffi, journalists,Ó in Arabic and surrenders. And I looked at him, what are you doing? And then I jumped up and they came over.

They were going to kill us, but a military intelligence officer was on the scene that I don't think was there an hour before when Gadd and Batiar were killed, and then they had an argument with a number of different officers about whether to kill us to cover up the fact that they had killed our colleague or to interrogate us in order to get information. Of course at that point, I was all in favor of the interrogation.

We then went through this process of being debriefed. They never tortured us. In a machine like Iraq, once you have a situation that's sort of a dilemma only Saddam can really make the final decisions. They kept us in a safe house for a while. They eventually put us in a prison. And in prison, we had the experience of -- we weren't being tortured, but we watched and listened as they tortured other people, including a 16-year-old boy. And, of course, when you're watching people getting tortured, your first instinct is “Thank, God, it's not me.” And your second instinct is you feel terrible and feel guilty for having had that first instinct, right? After 18 days, Saddam, you know, a number of interrogations, they let us go.

Now, the point of this, the PTSD, is I got out and I thought, well, I'm okay, relatively speaking. I went to some other conflicts. I went to Guatemala, went to Rwanda, Colombia, and six years go by. Six years go by and then I start working on this novel, which is a composite of fictional and non-fictional elements set in Guatemala. In the novel you have a journalist who's in prison and next to him•they have a young guerilla boy that they've captured. And what they do is when they meet one of the
journalist's needs, like letting him go to the bathroom, they let him go to the bathroom in a bucket. They bring the bucket in and then they torture the guerilla, the prisoner, by dunking his head in the water, right? So, I'm trying to recreate the feeling that I had in prison through a fictional element. They then, in this fictional account that I wrote, they then took the boy around the corner of the cell so the journalist couldn't see it and you hear a gunshot. Right? The journalist hears a gunshot. The journalist then smells the gunpowder after a few moments and then has this similar sort of emotional breakdown that I wrote about in the Crimes of War chapter. And it was triggered by smelling the gunpowder.

Now this is six years after the original event that I'm writing this fictional account that I'm putting in this element that I smelled this gunpowder. And I thought that I had made that part up about smelling the gunpowder. A year later I rewrote a non-fictional account of the piece. And in the process of rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it, at a certain point I remembered what triggered the emotional reaction in the ditch was not hearing Gadd and Batiar being killed or even seeing them carrying the camera bag, it was smelling the gunpowder from the Kalashnikov, which took, I don't know, maybe 30 seconds to a minute to actually reach my nostrils. And what I've learned since then, of course, of all your senses your olfactory gland is hot-wired to the emotional part of the brain. I then wrote this out in the non-fiction account -- this is seven years after the fact -- and I then had the emotional reaction that I would have had, if I could have had it, upon realizing that they had killed Gadd and Batiar. A crying, wailing experience.

And I think the point of that for this panel is PTSD is a process. It can be a very simple process and an uncomplicated process or it can be very disjointed. But the point is, it very often in extreme cases is much more complicated than the person experiencing it realizes. And the point is that you have options available to you to accelerate that process, to get it, to go through it, have that cathartic -- I'm very grateful to that cathartic experience. I wish I had had it, in hindsight, earlier rather than later. And had I been in contact with people like Frank and the Dart Program, I would have had it earlier. But I'm grateful now that we can have this discussion.