“It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.”
Guardian’s Q & A with Sebastian Junger
You’ve said that you won’t be returning to war reporting.
Seeing what Tim’s death did to me and my wife and others, a light bulb went on. I didn’t want to be the cause of that pain to the people I’m closest to. I’ve done this for 20 years and there is a point you come to where you’re repeating the same stunt. I’ll continue reporting from overseas but if I find myself getting shot at – this is how I explained it to my wife – I will consider it embarrassing and a personal failure in a similar way to as if I had a car accident.
What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a film about Tim and I’m starting a medical training program for freelance journalists, a three-day training course in battlefield medicine. It will be three times a year in New York, London and Beirut. We’re hoping to make the certification an industry norm in the next few years. Tim’s wound didn’t have to be mortal. He bled out but there are things you can do about that, but no one around him was equipped to do them and so he died.
Photo: Hetherington and Junger in Afghanistan, 2008. © Tim Hetherington
“It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”
“In a large number of cases, we sent reporters over on what we called ‘participatory journalism’ assignments. We’d carry guns. If we were shot at, we shot back. We didn’t hide behind a log.”
From a fascinating and completely insane interview with the guy behind Soldier of Fortune magazine.
(Thanks, Bidoun!)
“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out.”
