Taki's Mag

Tim Hetherington

When journalists die in some foreign field, they die for you. Without them, your knowledge of the world in which you live would come from government spokesmen, corporate flacks, and pundits who don’t leave their television studios or think tanks. Two frontline photographers, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, have just been killed in Libya. Hetherington was forty and Hondros forty-one. Both were first-class journalists who went by sea from Benghazi to the frontlines in Misrata. After another of the endless skirmishes between Colonel Gaddafi’s army and the rebels, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in their midst. It killed both men and severely wounded their colleagues Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown.

The Oxford-educated Hetherington had a brilliant career, now cut lamentably short. His film on Afghanistan, Restrepo, earned an Oscar nomination last year and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival. He won the World Press Photo of the Year Award for 2007 and had also taken a prize named for another photographer killed in the line of duty, the Rory Peck Award.

Hondros, who worked in Kosovo and Afghanistan among other wars, was responsible for a startling series of photographs of a family that failed to stop abruptly at an American checkpoint in Iraq. US soldiers shot the parents dead and wounded one of their five children in the backseat. The armchair warriors would say it’s an everyday occurrence in war, as if that provided absolution. Hondros explained later:

Almost every soldier in Iraq has been involved in some sort of incident like that or another, I would say. Their attitude about it was grim, but it wasn’t the end of their world. It was, “Well, kind of wished they’d stopped. We fired warning shots. Damn, I don’t know why the hell they didn’t stop. What’re you doing later, you want to play Nintendo? Okay.” Just a day’s work for them.

Such testimony makes it all the more difficult to believe that sending in the Marines will solve all problems everywhere.

Photographers and the people who record the news on film or video cameras take more hits in conflict than mere scribes such as myself, who enjoy the luxury (or the excuse) of staying a little back from the fighting in order to observe it better. The photographer and camera operator must go to the coalface to record the sights and sounds of combat and make warfare’s impact visible. The toll of fallen photographers lengthens each month. None of those I have known or worked with could be called “war junkies.” Their vocation was to bring home the bloodshed so blithely endorsed by people in the imperial centers without whose weapons and financing most wars could not take place. One of the finest photojournalists of the twentieth century, the proud Welsh patriot Philip Jones Griffiths, once criticized some of his colleagues for making profits out of America’s war in Vietnam. They countered by asking him what he was doing in Vietnam, from where he produced one of the best books to come out of that conflict, Vietnam, Inc. He answered, and I paraphrase from memory, “I was gathering evidence for the next Nuremberg Trials.”

With brave documentarians as our witnesses, we cannot plead, as so many at Nuremberg and subsequent war-crimes trials did, that we did not know what was going on. We know full well what happened in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia largely thanks to them and the whistleblowers who helped them. We know also what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya due to their efforts and the risks they take. Without them, the official history would tell our children that these were righteous wars, nobly fought and honorably pursued. Actually, the official histories usually teach just that. But the eyewitness accounts, the photographs, and the other visual and aural records of the conflicts provide the basis for more thorough histories. These are the accounts that all of us should read when we leave school and begin our real education.

About twenty years ago, Peter Jennings, then ABC News’ anchorman with endless war experience of his own, presided at the unveiling by the Overseas Press Club in New York of a tablet on which were inscribed the names of journalists killed in the line of duty. After the ceremony, I remember Peter lingering for hours speaking to the spouses, children, and parents of the people whose lives and careers he had been praising. To them, it was hard to justify the choice to face danger head-on. Peter would never have been reduced to platitudes such as “Their deaths were worth it” or “Those are the risks we all take.” Rather than justification, he offered sympathy. This took place before the ranks of slain journalists grew exponentially in the Balkan Wars and the past generation’s many other conflicts. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 861 journalists have been killed for their work since 1992.

Phillip Knightley entitled his great history of war correspondents The First Casualty based on the statement, alternately attributed to Aeschylus and Senator Hiram Johnson, that the first casualty of war is truth. Thanks to people such as Daniel Pearl, whose young life was taken by fanatics, and David Blundy, murdered by a sniper in El Salvador in 1989, the truth occasionally breaks free of propaganda and orthodoxy. It is partly to honor them that I have commissioned a book from Phillip Knightley that collects the year’s best war reporting in one volume, which Charles Glass Books will publish annually. (Please email your 2011 entries to me, and I will pass them along to Phillip.)

The Guardian’s obituary of Tim Hetherington commented:

He died with them: an explosion on the town’s mortally dangerous Tripoli highway – the frontline in the battle between forces loyal to the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the rebels trying to unseat him – killed him and his friend, the US photographer Chris Hondros. At least eight other civilians were killed in fighting that day, a fact Hetherington would have been at pains to ensure was not forgotten.

That speaks well of Tim Hetherington and other people like him who are trying to tell you that the wars you pay for and believe in are not all you imagine them to be.