A Force that Moves Us
An Interview with Chris Hedges
A foreign correspondent for 15 years, Chris Hedges joined the staff of The New York Times in 1990, after working for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He has covered insurgencies in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, Columbia, the first and second intifadas in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil wars in the Sudan and Yemen, uprising in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae and other communist regimes in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, Gulf War, Kurdish rebellions in Turkey and Northern Iraq, war in Bosnia and Kosovo. He has been shot at in South Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held one week by Iraqi Republican Guard, strafed by Russian MiG-21s in Bosnia, shot at by Serb snipers, shelled for 4 days in Sarajevo. Hedges has recently written two books about his experiences as a war correspondent, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Public Affairs, 2002), and What Every Person Should Know about War (Free Press, 2003).
Lorna Tychostup - For me, reading these books were like taking a journey into a war zone. It was just horrifying statistic after another...you touched on a lot of things in both books. Was your purpose to scare people?
Chris Hedges - Yes, of course.
LT - But yet at the same you time you acknowledge that war is inevitable.
CH - I think war is inevitable. Of course, that is something many people debate. But I do want people to be afraid of war because war is a horrifying phenomenon. The devastation that war wreaks on individuals and societies I think is probably something that’s not fully understood unless one goes through it. Not only the greed that it causes, the psychological scarring that it causes, the way that it can deform and distort whole nations, and it takes generations to recover. So yes, I want people to be frightened of war. You know, I’m not a pacifist.
LT - People are annoyed about that.
CH - I know they are.
LT - They read your book and they expect you to be a pacifist.
CH - Yeah, but when you sit in Sarajevo as I did under the siege, with upwards of 2,000 Serbian shells coming into the city a day, constant sniper fire, 4-5 dead a day, 2 dozen wounded a day, and you know that Serb gunners on the heights above you want to exterminate you. You don’t sit around in those apartments and have discussions about whether or not you should be a pacifist. In fact those kinds of discussions would provoke gales of laughter. There are, unfortunately, times when you must fight for self-preservation and self-defense. I think those are probably the only times [war] is worth fighting unless it’s to stop genocide or atrocity. For me that’s the lesson of the holocaust. That if you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. I think we are culpable for the genocide that took place in Rwanda. I supported the intervention in Kosovo; it was done badly of course... I supported the intervention in Bosnia, which was also done badly. Those armed interventions are policing actions; it’s not the same as war. The tragedy of war is that war, I do believe at times is inevitable, but of course it stunts you, scars you, perverts you, even if it’s done for, let’s call it a legitimate reason. War is a very dangerous and powerful poison and if you imbibe it even in self-defense, it’s still a poison.
LT - In both books you talk about war. It’s bad, it’s addicting, it gives life meaning, it puts forth a myth to help us forget what war is all about as we go into it, the selling of the myth. How can you say all of this when we are never really told the truth about war?
CH - No, we’re not. Well, I think if people really knew the truth about war it would be very hard to get individuals to go to war and to get nations to support war. That’s first and foremost, secondly...
LT - But that’s contradictory to the preface of your book where you say, “the truth about war is hard to confront, especially if we have come to believe the romantic image of war. But the truth will arm us to wage war.”
CH - I want to make going to war a last resort. I want people to, if they have to pick up a gun, understand that this is tragic. There are times when self-preservation requires you to employ violence. What bothers me is the kind of euphoria and excitement and myth of war that’s used to sell war to an unsuspecting public and to young kids who think that somehow this is a test of their manhood, or a rite of passage or will ennoble them or this kind of stuff. I don’t know that it’s contradictory. I think it’s more that what I want to combat is this elixir, this myth where in our own society we somehow feel empowered by the use of violence. I think this is what took place during the war on Iraq. We watched these cable news shows where they talked about the you know the power of these weapons and for many people they saw it sort of an extension of their and or an inflation of their own personal power. It was never any understanding or recognition of what was happening on the other end of this. You know, the bodies that were being decapitated, eviscerated...the innocents, because when you send devices of that caliber, that power into residential areas there are always innocents, including children, who die. And when war is turned into a big video arcade game, when war becomes a celebration of us, then it becomes easy to wage war for the wrong reasons, which I think we’ve been doing.
LT - Who’s responsible for that?
CH - The media, well, the State puts it out, but the media is complicitous. The media and the reporting during the Iraqi war was shameful, as it was during the Persian Gulf war.
LT - And during the twelve years leading up to the Iraqi war?
CH - Well, during most wars. This is the problem. When a nation goes to war the press feels that it’s sort of its patriotic duty to boost morale and disseminate the message...
LT - Where does that come from? This floors me. Your book is an indictment of the press, but you don’t come right out and say it.
CH - It is an indictment of the way the press covers war and the way a national press covers war in wartime. Oh, it is very much so.
LT - You blame the public for not informing themselves enough...?
CH - No, I blame the public for wanting that emotional experience and not wanting to hear the truth. But the real, the most pernicious forces are the press and the State. The state, which manufactures the message and the press that, disseminates it, now in 24-hour news cycles, so that the state invents the language by which we speak in wartime. The cliches and the aphorisms that are used to describe the quote-un-quote experience. Of course it’s not real - these cliches - and it becomes very hard to think outside the box, to think differently. Especially when you have the electronic media pounding that into your head hour after hour after hour.
LT - The press just regurgitates back the lie...
CH - They regurgitate. They allow the state to invent the language by which we speak about the experience and because of that we never understand the reality of war. The press has a shameful record in wartime. Even if you look at Martha Gellhorn in the Spanish Civil War-- you know, the lie in wartime is almost the always the lie of omission. But people feel the cause, whichever cause it is that they are supporting, somehow must take precedence over the truth. This is the great courage of someone like Orwell or IF Stone. These are singular figures who stood up and were ostracized not only by the public, but by their own, i.e.: the press. To get up and to speak the truth is very lonely. Look at Edmund Morrow the great pacifist in World War I in Britain. The man who exposed King Leopold’s crimes in the Congo. By 1917 he was in prison in Britain.
LT - This is what struck me about the whole premise of the book. Journalists... you all choose to go to these war zones and see the dead bodies and the bullets are flying and you’re all risking your lives, but no one is willing to take a stand against this sort of ostracism. I don’t understand that.
CH - No one is willing to take a stand against the ostracism?
LT - Yes. Look, I am not diminishing what you’ve seen or done. All the reporters...you all choose to go into war, you choose to go to these areas...
CH - You do choose it and it’s a mixture of reasons. There are many motives for doing it. Some of them are dark and some of them are good. Some of it is just outrage. I don’t think there was a reporter in Sarajevo during the siege who didn’t feel that one of the reasons that they took the risks that they took everyday- and remember that I think 45 reporters were killed in Sarajevo, over 60 in Bosnia - took that risk because they believed that this was a crime and their should be intervention by the international community to stop the slaughter. And that was the main reason why I volunteered to go to Sarajevo, and why I stayed there and did what I did. So I think that that is a motive, but along with that motive comes this kind of adrenaline-driven lifestyle, this sense of empowerment - because in a place like Sarajevo, as the New York Times correspondent you are a pretty powerful figure. You have a suite at the Holiday Inn, of course one side of it is sheared off by artillery shells, but you have a suite at the Holiday Inn, and an armored car and a lot of money and it becomes very hard after you do this for many years to return to normal life. You just feel alienated and distant and you fall into a kind of despair after the war is over. That’s why everyone, when the war was over in Bosnia, sat around and tried to figure out which war they were going to get to next-- Chechnya, East Timor, you know somewhere. So, they don’t know how to go home, it’s very hard... and because they can’t come home, it’s taken more than a few friends of mine.
LT - Yes. I once spent time in Mexico with professional cavers - people who go into caves for miles to survey them, risk their lives, they don’t get paid. One of them had recently died while diving into a lake deep in a cave. He was an expert diver who knew what he was doing. This last dive he went down too deep and died. A close friend of his told me in an interview, “Well, you know he was in his forties, he didn’t have a family, he didn’t anything to return home to, so maybe he thought he would go out in this way, doing what he knew and loved best.” So it’s not just war reporters. It is people who become so enmeshed and they get the adrenaline rush...
CH - Yes, I agree. War reporting is much like being a firefighter or a cop or a soldier or there are other professions that have these same…I would agree with that. I don’t think it’s unique to war reporting, although war reporting is probably a little more dangerous than most - not more dangerous than maybe than being a soldier, but it’s certainly right up there...
LT - I’m not diminishing war reporting.... So you come back and it’s hard to fit in.
CH - It is hard to fit in.
LT - I went to Iraq and it took me 3 months to get home. I still feel I can’t talk to people now, because I’m someplace where they’re not. I see that as a growth issue…
CH - Yeah. That’s right. But try 5 years in El Salvador. Then you never come back. Or like you leave Sarajevo and you go to a hotel in Paris and you just pace the halls. I literally look at the rest of the world in almost like the end of a long tunnel. You feel deeply alienated from a world not at war. But that’s part of war’s sickness. War is a God and demands of you not only the sacrifice of the other, but also ultimately self-sacrifice if you can’t break free and get out. And that’s what’s so dangerous.
LT - How did you get out?
CH - I willed my way out of it, but it was very difficult.
LT - How long did it take?
CH - Probably 2 or 3 years.
LT - What brought you back?
CH - Well, I did it longer than what was healthy. There were series of incidents. My closest friend was killed in Sierra Leone, that was a big thing for me... I got sent back to Gaza and got caught in a very bad ambush. In Netzarine there was Palestinian kid killed about 15 feet away from me. There was a series of...I realized I had to stop. I realized if I didn’t stop I was going to end up, you know, what happens, you know, war is necrophilia. And that in the end, if you don’t stop that’s the price you pay, one way or another. And so I did.
LT - And your family...?
CH - I have two children.
LT - Where did they come into this picture?
CH – Well, that was big. I don’t like being away from my kids.
LT - How old are they?
CH -13 and 8.
LT - When did you come home?
CH - Ninety-nine, but then I went back after the war in Kosovo, so that was 98.
LT - Did they help bring you home?
CH – Yeah, of course. I mean, that was, I had something to go home to.
LT - Were you afraid to go home? As much as you may have desired to go home, did you feel that after you had been where you had been and after what you had seen, were you afraid to...?
CH - No, I don’t think I was afraid. It was more of a feeling of disconnectedness, but not fear. I’ve tasted fear, it wasn’t fear.
LT - To your family and friends, did you feel like you had to explain your life to them...?
CH - No. I think with my son I speak quite a bit, so he has a pretty good understanding. When he was a small child, first or second of grade, he began to have nightmares. I was covering the war in Sarajevo. He would ask me on the satellite phone if I still had my legs because he learned about land mines. And he got a nervous twitch in his eye and we took him to a child psychologist. She spoke with him privately and then spoke with me and then said, “Is there a question you want to ask you dad?” And he said, “Yes. Daddy, were you ever in a war?” And I said, “Yes.” And I felt horrible... and I took him, this was after the war was over and I took him to Sarajevo and I showed him where I lived and where the snipers were and the Jewish cemetery and all the battlefronts. And I told him I wouldn’t go to war anymore. Now, I ended up doing the war in Kosovo, but you know, I, at that point, realized it was time to stop. It’s one thing to destroy your own life, it’s another thing to destroy the lives of your children.
LT - So family was a big determining factor...because you didn’t mention any of these things in any of the first reasons you just gave me. You didn’t mention your family at all.
CH - Yeah. It was big, but I think there were other things going on. When I drove over Mt. Igman into Sarajevo I knew it was enough. I had done enough. I had been doing it too long. I covered the war on Kosovo, and I did it. I grit my teeth and did it. But I wasn’t into it so I think I burned out on it. I think the kids were a big factor, but I felt differently by the experience by the end. I really was not as emotionally or physically resilient anymore and that played a big part in it.
LT - The physicality of it?
CH – Yeah. You just don’t stay...I’m 46. You just don’t stay. It’s not the same as being 25. Most wars are covered by 20-year-old kids, 25-year-old kids, and I was one of the oldest people in Sarajevo.
LT - You think it had to do with age?
CH - I think age has a lot to do with it if you keep doing it a long time, yeah. You know, it wears you down, it’s not a very healthy way to live, it’s a...
LT- Could someone start to learn at 46?
CH - Okay, you can start to learn at 46, but you can’t live around that kind of violent death for as long as I did and not have it effect you.
LT - Right from the get-go, in both books you come right out and state where you’ve been. It’s been an enormous history...
CH - Right. I do that because I want people to know. [Yet] I’m very…I’m a little reluctant to do it because there is a kind of self-aggrandizement in it. And I debated doing it, but I think it’s important so that people know that I know what it is I’m talking about. I do that up front. I say, “Look, here’s what I did.” And I try to do it as briefly and succinctly as possible. I’ve been here, I been here, I been there, these are not abstractions for me. I did that on purpose. There’s nothing abstract about this stuff, it’s all very personal and very real and very visceral, and I bear the scars of it.
LT - The brutality…there is a brutality in the knowing of [what you’ve experienced.] It plugged me in immediately. It took me a long time to read these books. It’s not something you can just take in in one...
CH - I think it’s because a lot of the concepts are new if you haven’t been around war. I noticed that. It’s something that I spent almost two decades of my life thinking about, living, reading about, but if you don’t come out of that experience, and because the way war is presented is a lie, that it is so rare that we hear about the reality of war. I think for a lot of people, the ideas are new for that reason.
LT - For me it was because you told the truth. It was intense for me to hear the truth because as you state, you know about the unwillingness of people - they don’t want to hear the truth. I don’t agree with that. I know I want to hear the truth. For me, there is something more solid about that, so when you were giving this truth, I plugged in. I really think the American public does want to know the truth. I was astounded that you said you think that they don’t.
CH - I don’t think they do. Having lived through war, people like that kind of euphoria that comes with belonging to the nation and having a cause and exalting yourself and it sort of defies logic. I think there does come a time, and it may be coming to us with the bloodletting in Iraq, that people stop and begin to ask the right questions. But as long as was is one big party and winning the war is like winning the Superbowl, [people] don’t ask questions. Not a lot of questions were being asked up until now. I really look at the democrats and I’m appalled. Finally now, they begin to raise questions. Well, they should have been raising questions last fall. And those of us that were, were really a tiny minority. And I think that there was a terrible moral failing...
LT - Those of us who were, or those of us who are?
CH - Well, the book came out September 3rd and the book was about war, I started very early on talking about the enterprise in Iraq and denouncing it. But there were not a lot of us out there doing that because it wasn’t politically...
LT - Who defines “us”? Reporters, journalists...
CH - Anybody who was out there speaking about Iraq. The numbers of people denouncing this enterprise were tiny. If you look at many of the quote-un-quote liberal voices: Michael Ignatia, Christopher Hitchens, they fell in line. Certainly the main stream press, the columnists...Krugman, he was great. But very few. That was very disheartening too. And I think it’s because they were responding to a public that liked it. They got off on it. I don’t think they’re getting off on it now. But this is the consequence of what we’ve done and it’s a very predictable consequence.
LT - I disagree with you, and I’m just trying to be clear about why. I feel the press didn’t do their job.
CH - Well, I agree, I don’t disagree with that. I feel the press didn’t do their job.
LT - I think that you can’t blame the people if they are not told the truth. I was in the city on Sept. 11th, I just happened to be here. I came back down five days later, brought my daughter....to witness. We went to lower Manhattan and then went to the Brooklyn Promenade. Within five minutes of our arrival, it was a Sunday, there were thousands of people who filled the promenade with a peace march. They were saying they wanted peace.
CH - But you have to remember, this is NY. And as I learned in Rockford College, New York is very different from the rest of America.
LT - There was nothing on the radio on the drive home. There was nothing in the newspaper. There was no mention of it... later after I got....
CH - Look, look, I’m not arguing with the mainstream media, including the New York Times, completely failed to cover the opposition. Completely. The first story about Leslie Kagan who organized this march, it was a column I did in the paper - 100,000 came. Because they’re out of touch-- I mean they’re elitist, they’re not in touch with the grassroots. There is a significant opposition, yes, but I guess I disagree. I feel it’s not the majority. I think it’s an important element that should be covered within the society, but I believe, unfortunately having traveled all around the country, there is a huge swath of middle America that believes a lot of what it hears on Fox and MSNBC. I think that our democracy is in very grave danger because of it. I think that because we have politicians who essentially govern by polls, that’s why very very few were willing to take this on. Wellstone, Dean, but there are not many. And that’s because their pollsters told them it wasn’t a good idea and they all fell in line. And they gave the power to Bush to wage war without essentially getting congressional approval. I think that was done because everybody was high on war. Most people...
LT - But all [the press] had to do was report the facts. There’s no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda...
CH - Yeah, I know, I know, I know that.
LT - It’s not a big thing. It’s not like you have to be a genius...
CH - Right, the press completely failed us and the political opposition failed us and we were failed in many many ways and we’re paying for it now. I agree.
LT - Is the press going to wake up now? You can blame it on the politicians, but the bottom line is, if you have a government, and the government is spewing you whatever story it’s spewing you, the press-- unless I’m too idealistic, should be the barrier, the filter...
CH - Well, yeah it’s supposed to be. It wasn’t.
LT - So what happened. Where’s the filter?
CH - Well look, for most of these, especially with these cable news networks, this is a business. It’s about ratings and it’s about entertainment. War is entertainment. And war, if it’s presented as myth and empowerment and a crusade, it’s great entertainment. And if war is presented as it really is, which is brutal and venal and perverted and sick and dirty and cruel, people don’t want to see it. There is no shortage...CNN’s lifeblood is essentially conflict to conflict. But it’s not reporting the conflict as it is, it’s reporting the conflict as we want it to appear. Reporting the conflict as myth. This is how William Randolph Hearst built his empire - off the myth of war, creating a war in essence.
LT - I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that people wouldn’t watch if they saw themselves on TV having a peace rally. That was not ever shown on TV. You don’t think the ratings coming from the under represented population would be there? I don’t really think it is a majority of the people.
CH - I’d love to believe you’re right, and again it’s sort of an unknowable. But having lived through a lot of societies at war, I’ve always found that the vast majority of people, certainly at war’s inception, become very swiftly intoxicated by the enterprise, even the so-called social critics and intellectuals. Those people who stand out and oppose war are often very forlorn figures. Let’s also remember that if we get hit with another terrorist attack, it’s going to be very difficult to speak out because fear has a way of propelling people towards those black and white, hard-lined, messianic forces that promise that they can save you. This is what happened in Israel for instance. I think that now there are the right questions being asked about the war in Iraq.
LT - Doesn’t what you just said fly in the face of the American myth? The American myth is not this frightened little child screaming for daddy to take care of it because it’s just been knocked down...
CH - I think Americans are some of the most spoiled people on the face of the Earth, having lived all over the world. Look at Americans when they go abroad. The slightest inconvenience and they fly into rages. Having lived in Cairo, all the expatriates did was sit around and complain about how Egypt wasn’t the United States. They made me sick I wouldn’t hang out with them. America is one of the few countries where you can be a forty-year-old and have the maturity of a 12-year-old because you’re so coddled and protected and pampered. We live in a very artificial garden for the most part.
LT - I am happy you said that. Do you really think it’s the majority?
CH - I think most people don’t want, I mean, let’s face it, we live with phenomenal opulence, luxury and wealth, and we’re quite content to live with that and think of ourselves as good people. But the only way to do it is not ask the hard questions. Not really ask or understand what was done in our name in Angola. Or Nicaragua. Or the host of other countries in the developing world that I have covered over the last two decades. We prefer to turn away and not see it. We don’t want to see it.
LT - I don’t know. We’re not shown it. When we were shown the body of the young girl with the napalm running down the road...there was outrage.
CH - But that was not what caused the outrage. What I believe caused the outrage in Vietnam was when middle class kids started to come home in body bags. And I can tell you right now that if there was a draft and these people - all of our politicians in Washington, who, for the most part, I think there is one or two that have kids in the military, if we thought our children were at risk, we might not be so eager to wave the flag and jump up and down and cheer on a war. But since it is poor kids, minorities, who are doing the fighting and the dying, a large part of those disenfranchised from the society and we don’t feel threatened, it is very easy to support this enterprise. I think something that disturbs many people in the military is this notion that somehow, because it is a volunteer force, their lives are more easily expendable. You know, “Oh well, it is all volunteer.” As if somehow the fact that because it is all volunteer, we don’t have to ask the hard questions we would ask about war if there was a draft. So the elite of this country, the middle class, all these kids going to college, they’re not going into the military.
LT: We are now in Iraq. The press has been reporting the administration’s line that the attacks on coalition troops are coming from leftover loyalists of Saddam’s regime—Baathists, as opposed to a general unified uprising of Iraqis who want to shake off occupying forces. What do you see happening?
CH: Although I spent 7 years in the Middle East, I really look more to my time in Central America and my experiences there to understand what is happening in Iraq. Building an insurgency you pay a high price for mistakes. You are usually killed. But over time, which is certainly what happened in El Salvador, over months and a couple years, with the will and anger and determination and access to weapons, you end up creating an organization that adapts itself to, essentially, guerrilla warfare. The most powerful or the most effective guerrilla leaders sometimes came out of the university. They weren’t always people who had military training. They had to be trained. But there is kind flexibility, adaptability and creativity...insurgencies are fascinating to study and watch because oftentimes you have to accept military defeat for political victory. It is very interesting.
What I see happening is, yes I am certain there are elements [of some former Saddamists], they are the people that have the expertise and everything else. But I think that what we are seeing is a resistance movement being built against American occupation that is just beginning to find its...who wouldn’t be pissed off? Having spent a lot of time in the Middle East and in Iraq, I always felt that Iraqis would never accept a foreign occupying power at all. Especially Iraq. Iraq is not Egypt. There is a hardness in Iraq and violence has always been form of political expression in Iraq in a way that it hasn’t in Egypt. The national characteristics of Iraqis, they are harder... it just wasn’t going to work. I believed...and I think what is happening now certainly justifies my earlier predictions that this was just going to go very badly very quickly.
LT -In both books, you set up an argument that Iraq is a worse case scenario for war. You talk about urban fighting...?
CH - Oh, it is the worst case scenario. It is horrible because all the cruise missiles in the world won’t help you when you want to take a city block. It becomes very frustrating - the Israelis go through this on the West Bank - when you have this elusive enemy that melts into the woodwork. It is what Robert J. Lipton calls, “atrocity producing situations,” where because you can’t find your enemy, because you live in a hostile populace, everybody becomes the enemy. So that you end up with a situation where you murder the woman in the rice patty as somehow revenge for that booby trap that was set off in your unit three days before. That is certainly what has happened in Gaza, between the Israelis and the Palestinians. You lash out at everyone like a wounded animal. And in that, of course, you only fuel the violence, further isolate yourself, and set the ground for the indiscriminate abuse, if not murder, of innocents.
LT - According to your books, that is pretty much who get killed in war.
CH - That is pretty much who get killed in war. Innocents.
LT - Civilian deaths outnumber military deaths...
CH - Look at modern warfare like the Balkans. The percentages are staggering…its in the book, I can’t remember...
LT - In the book you wrote, “In the wars of the 1990’s, civilian deaths constituted between 75 to 90 percent of all war deaths.”
CH - The number is huge. That is mostly who die. In the war in Iraq, who died? It was mostly civilians.
LT - But no one cares. We don’t get that statistic.
CH - Right. We all talk about the scars of Vietnam but do we talk about the 2 million Vietnamese who were killed in the war? No. Nations always care about their own and have pity for their own and seem to be phenomenally indifferent and callous toward the “other.”
LT - That is too easy an explanation. If I don’t see the picture of the person’s face I am going to kill, or my country is going to kill, it is easy for me to kill them. Even you say this in, “What Every Person Should Know...” The closer you are the harder it is to kill...[The actual passage in Chapter 6, “The Moment of Combat” poses the question, “What will make me fire [at the enemy]?” The answer states, “You will fire based on commands from your leader, enemy contact, or the sudden appearance of a target. The farther you are from the enemy the easier it will be to pull the trigger. At close range, or in hand-to-hand combat, you will seethe enemy as another human being and it will be harder to kill.]
CH - Yes. The closer you are the harder it is...
LT - And we are talking about civilians. If we have a press that doesn’t show us the face of the people - the press with all its big money, satellite phones, laptops, expense accounts, and your insurance so that if the shit hits the fan the paramilitaries will come grab your ass out of there. I went to Iraq; I’ve got two kids in college. I got on a plane. I went with Voices in the Wilderness and shot 75 rolls of film. The thought was that if I brought home their faces - they look just like us - that the people in this country wouldn’t be able to follow so blindly in the war...?
CH - But they are. But they did.
LT - I went around and did presentations, and there were people who changed their minds. I thought to myself, “How come the American press isn‘t doing this? How come if I’m Baghdad, on Feb 14th, the day the world marched for peace, and as [200 internationals] march down Abanuas Ave, an Italian international asks, ‘Reuters is here, the AP is here. The world’s press is here. How come the American press isn’t covering this?’” So I went to the press center and asked. ABC said they weren’t interested in covering the event, CBS said they were going to buy footage from another agency. At the NBC office I asked the reporters, two men our age, “What is the problem?” They turned around and said, angrily, “We get 3 hours of sleep a night. We are out there shooting stories all the time. When you get home why don’t you go and ask the president of NBC why he won’t show these images on your TV?”
CH - To defend those guys, a lot of time the reporters on the ground have those sympathies. But when you work for these big media organizations, they set the agenda. Especially for TV. What images they want, what pictures they want, what mix they want. You are sent out to get it. If you don’t get it they will send someone else to get it.
LT - So how do we combat this?
CH - Well, you combat it...how did I combat it? I wrote two books. And I speak. That’s how I do it. Everyone has to find their own way of combating it. But I have a much darker view...of the possibility of communicating the message. I think it is very hard. And that come from watching, in many countries, people, who, I believe were trying to tell the truth - whether in Serbia or anywhere else - watching how reviled they were for standing up and speaking the truth.
LT - Yes. There was a report last night on PBS about Al Jazeera. They showed an Al Jazeera main office [during the early days of the war], there were screens all over the place and they were showing the feed and suddenly it shows the [captured American POW’s]. It’s frightening. Within 24 hours Al Jazeera is being lambasted [by our administration]. Within 3 to 4 days they are being lambasted by BBC... by everyone else. It was amazing to watch these guys sitting in the studio saying, “We are just doing our job. How could this be wrong?” Then the American press shows the Iraqi POW’s on TV and this is OK. But to me the most important part of the whole scene - it is a very modern room, everyone is watching these screens. They slip a new tape in and suddenly there are images of a bombing, this was very early on in the war, of a marketplace, and the [civilian] victims arriving at the hospital. You could have heard a pin drop. Men, women, the people at Al Jazeera had tears in their eyes and I thought to myself, if we would have seen those images...
CH - But nations at war don’t show those images. They don’t. Yes, if we would have seen them. The press feels that its role is to support the war effort and that its job is to...
LT - You believe that? You don’t think they are afraid of losing their job?
CH - But you have people on the ground who are upset, but the people calling the shots...No, I think even on the ground. Look at the embedded reporters in Iraq. I really think they thought they were doing their bit for the effort. Look, they were praised by Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney is hardly a friend of the free press. He tried to throw myself and several of us who were not in the press pool out of Saudi Arabia during the first Persian Gulf War.
LT - The job of the press is not to be beloved to anyone…
CH - Yeah, well I understand that. But I’m just telling you how the press works in wartime. I am not arguing with you I am agreeing with you.
LT - There are schools for journalism and there is an ethic about it, an objectivity of some sort. Does it come down to that these [journalists] just don’t want to lose their jobs? How come they can’t fight and set up their own system?
CH – No, I don’t think it is just a job. But I think a lot of them think they should do their bit for the effort. In the Persian Gulf War the press pool system that only allowed 100 reporters and photographers to go out with the military, out of 800, was administered by the press. The military pool system in the Persian Gulf War could have never existed without the complete collusion of the press. I think they felt that...there is a kind of identification with the effort of the nation at wartime. And this has just been true since the invention of the modern war correspondent in the Crimean War. And I don’t see that any way is any different including this one. There is a long sad pathetic tradition of boosterism on the part of the press in wartime for 200 years. And those journalists that have the courage to speak out are very swiftly shunted to the side.
LT - So fear keeps them...?
CH - I don’t think it is fear. I wish it was fear. I don’t even think they are that conscious of what they are doing. I think it’s a kind of belief that they should do it. That it is their role. That they need to find that hometown hero. There is a kind of yearning for that Jessica Lynch story - which of course now turns out to be untrue. The press wants to report it because they want to believe it and because they know that is what their readers or their viewers want to see. And they give it to them.
LT - I would think they would be reporting on how the government manipulates the story. The lie of the government…
CH - Well, journalists do. Sy Hersch is good. There are a few out there. Sy Hersch is great. He has done groundbreaking stuff in the New Yorker. So there are people out there but they are a minority. And that’s the way it is.
LT - Are you setting the example?
CH - I think a lot of journalists, even at my own paper, would say that I am an activist. I don’t agree with them. But I don’t think I am setting an example.
LT - In my very topical experience, reporters that I have run into seem to want to do the stories about the peace movement, about the war…
CH - I think that is true, on a ground level. Let’s not be naive about who runs these corporations - Viacom, GE, Disney. It is news as entertainment. War is entertainment and stories are judged on their entertainment value, not on their worth, not on the value of the story itself. I think that the Times, for all its tepidness is still a good paper. They will run stuff based on its news value, not on its entertainment value. But now, the networks are completely corrupted. Not only just the cable networks which are just trash TV, but even CBS, NBC, ABC. And that is a change. When I began 20 years ago, these people all had bureaus abroad, their correspondents, say in Central American, spoke Spanish, they went out, they reported a story, they produced a 3 to 5 minute piece and they reported. That’s all gone. It has vanished.
TV reporters were really reporters. They tend to be restricted by that 22-minute format, but they reported, produced real stories. Now they don’t report anymore. It’s all chat - it’s garbage. And that corruption has seeped into papers. There are still a few good papers. I wish they had a little more backbone.
LT - Which would you suggest to our readers?
CH - I think you’d better read the foreign press, the French press - Le Monde. You have to search out more alternatives. You have Harper’s. Harper’s magazine is amazing. I have problems with the Nation. I like the Nation but it tends to be too much rhetoric. Harper’s still reports. The Atlantic is useless. The New Yorker, with the exception of Sy Hersch, doesn’t have much bite to it. You have to make an effort. Those people that care you can find it. But you just have to make more effort to find it.
LT - OK. Enough press bashing. What about you? How did you come to be a war correspondent?
CH - I was a seminarian. I was very interested in Latin American. Very influenced by Orwell and became very close to a guy named Robert Cox, who was the editor of the Buenos Aries Herald during the Dirty War in Argentina, who was eventually imprisoned and expelled from Argentina. He was British. And everyday at the top of the paper in a box he would print the names of the Argentines who were disappeared by the death squads the night before. That was the kind of example for me of what I wanted to do. I didn’t go to journalism school. I didn’t go work on a paper when I finished Seminary. I went straight to El Salvador to cover the war because I wanted to be in Latin America in the early eighties when a series of rapacious military governments in Chile under Pinochet, or Argentina, or in El Salvador, were carrying out egregious human rights violations, crushing popular movements and I wanted to be part of that as a journalist. And that’s what propelled me into journalism and propelled me to Latin America.
LT - How old were you?
CH - 25...24.
LT - You just got on a plane?
CH - I could only afford a one-way ticket.
LT - Did you know anyone?
CH - Not many people. No.
LT - Did you have one contact there?
CH - Yeah, probably. But not much. I just went.
LT - And where did you go?
CH - I went to San Salvador and I started reporting stories for the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio.
LT - They just hired you?
CH - Well, I had covered the Falkan War for NPR from Buenos Aries before. I had taken a year off from Seminary and gone to Argentina. I arranged to string before I got there. I published my first story in the Christian Science Monitor when I was in college. And I always wrote. I was editor of my HS paper. I wrote all the time. And I wrote a lot while I was in Seminary for National Catholic Reporter, but other publications as well. So by the time I wanted to get a string, I was pretty well published.
LT – That is remarkable.
CH - Yeah. I was driven.
LT - And now you teach at the Columbia School of Journalism?
CH - I did. I taught there, but now I’m teaching at Princeton in the fall.
LT - How does that feel?
CH - I haven’t started at Princeton. That might be a little too upscale for me. But we’ll see.
LT - You just threw yourself into it, you didn’t take any classes and now you are responsible for teaching people how to be journalists.
CH - I think that is a good thing. I think people like me who weren’t conventional in that sense, it is probably good to see a few people like us, rather than the person who went to journalism school, worked at the small paper, worked there up to the medium paper, got a job as a metro reporter at the Times...I didn’t go that route. I just went.
LT - It took a lot of courage. Were you scared?
CH - I was very willful. I wouldn’t say that I was scared. I was scared being in combat.
LT - It seems to me, the biggest step is that first step.
CH - Yes, it’s a big step. And when you first do it, it is quite daunting. But having done it all my life it’s easier. It was daunting, but I was also excited and driven. It was exciting too.
LT - Was it also the beginning of your addiction?
CH - Yeah, because I spent so long in El Salvador it became very hard for me to adjust outside of a war zone. That’s why I tended to keep leaping from war zone to war zone.
LT - It seems you went with a sense of social...?
CH – Yes. Very much a sense of social justice.
LT - It wasn’t about adventure?
CH - It was about adventure too. It’s not one thing but the primary [reason] was social justice.
LT - For someone to go to a war zone, it seems there must be something in their life that opens for them and allows them to see it. Was it a gentle opening for you?
CH - No. But my parents were social activists. My father was a Presbyterian minister who fought in WWII and for all intents and purposes became a pacifist after the war. He was very involved in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and he ended his life as one of the leaders of the gay rights movement. So I came out of a tradition of social activism. When I was about 12 my father told me that if the Vietnam War was still going on and I was drafted, he would go to prison with me. There was no gay student organization at my university at Colgate - so my father brought the gay speakers to college. And I would have to sit up on the rostrum with my dad and Bob and Harry Freeman Jones, probably one of the most committed heterosexuals at Colgate. And then finally my dad said, “You have to found the gay students group because nobody will come out of the closet. So I founded the gay and lesbian group at Colgate that met under my name. I never went but when I went into the dining hall for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the guy would check off my card and say, “Faggot.” So I made it my undergraduate mission to seduce his girlfriend.
That was my dad. He was great and he taught me a lot. My dad also got his undergraduate degree at the University of Missouri in journalism so there was that twin - he loved writing and reading.
LT - Your mom?
CH - My mom was an English professor. So I was well prepared. I grew up in a small farm town in upstate NY.
LT - Are you done now, with the war reporting?
CH - Yeah, I’m done now. Well, I am going to Israel in 10 days. But I am done with war reporting.
LT - Are you in a state of denial?
CH - I don’t know. I have to admit that I am going, but I also have to tell you I am done with war reporting.
LT - What are you going to do in Israel?
CH - I am going to do a story on the wall for Harper’s.
LT - You say the attraction of war, despite its destruction and carnage, gives us this meaning, gives our lives purpose.
CH - It’s not real meaning, it’s the illusion of meaning. Ultimately, there is no meaning in it at all. The only thing that gives you meaning is love, in any ultimate and real sense. But people seek to find meaning through war. They are betrayed.
LT - Or betray themselves?
CH - Yeah. Or they’re betrayed by war itself. By the belief that they can find meaning for that experience. Because they can’t.
LT - In “War is a Force” you end with this issue of love. You talk about being in a war zone and in the homes of these couples who were in love as a significant force:
“There are few sanctuaries in war. But one is provided by couples in love. They are not able to staunch the slaughter. They are often powerless and can themselves often become victims. But it was with them, seated around a wood stove, usually over a simple meal, that I found sanity and was reminded of what it means to be human. Love kept them grounded...Love, when it is deep and sustained by two individuals, includes self-giving - often self-sacrifice - as well as desire. For the covenant of love is such that it recognizes both the fragility and the sanctity of the individual. It recognizes itself in the other. It alone can save us.”
Do you really feel that that is true?
CH - Yeah. Completely. You only save the world one person at a time. I wouldn’t despair over that. The story about the farmer with the cow. That little Serbian girl will grow up knowing that she was saved by a Muslim farmer. Those Serbian grandparents, even though their son was murdered by the Muslims, can never condemn all Muslims, without talking about [name]. The reverberations of that act are staggering. Not only because what he did directly, but because in the midst of wartime he bore witness to his neighbors about the proper way to behave and was reviled for it as he walked up those steps and was spat upon and jeered and attacked by his neighbors. But came back every day to give milk to that small baby. That is a momentous act and I think that we are wrong to diminish its power and effectiveness. And it is immensely powerful.
LT - Is this love?
CH - Yes, of course it’s love. It is love for a child. For a small child. It’s that compassion and care and concern and that ability to see in that baby, in that infant an infant. Not a Serbian infant, but an infant. Love is a powerful force and the only force that can save us. It is the only antidote to contagion of war.
LT - I had a little problem with how you defined love. Some of the examples you talk about, in terms of giving life meaning... some people say they are in love, or say they love each other but it is a security need.
CH - I don’t care what people say, I care what people do. When you have the courage to stand and protect the “other”, especially the “other” who is reviled in the midst of wartime. That is an act of love. It is very hokey and stupid. In America it is easy to love when you are comfortable. It’s very hard to love when you feel fear and you are threatened.
LT - I don’t think it is ever easy to love.
CH - But it is easy to pretend to love when you are comfortable. It is easy to love everybody. It is not real love. It is easy to fool yourself, thinking that you exude qualities of love when there is no risk to it. When there is a risk to love, that is, of course, when you find out what a person is worth.
LT - Is that a purpose of war?
CH - No. The purpose of war is annihilation. The essence of war is death.
LT - If people are living a calm life and everything is hunky dory and we forget the horrors of war after a while, how will they be able to experience that kind of love?
CH - Well, I think most people don’t experience that kind of love. That is the attraction of war. People who have that kind of love are terrified of war. But most people don’t have it. Most people, I think, are very lonely on a very deep level. Most people are deeply alone. And that is the attraction of war. They don’t have to feel alone anymore.
LT - They are part of a group. But isn’t that true of any entity you are involved with?
CH - That’s true, but war is the supreme drug
LT - Because death is involved?
CH - Yeah. And also because you don’t have to face death alone any more. You face it as a group and it becomes a lot easier to bear because of it. That’s part of war’s attraction. If you stop and look at what it means to die for a friend, it is frightening. Losing that friend means losing that dialog you may never be able to recreate with another. And friends don’t exalt death and self-sacrifice the way comrades or nations at war do. They don’t hold up self-sacrifice, they fear it. Because they know they may never be able to recreate this with another. Friendship, at its core, is the opposite of comradeship. Friendship is about self-awareness, self-possession. Friends, unlike comrades, fear death. And that is why love, or friendship at its most profound level is love, is such a powerful antidote to war. But I think many of us are very atomized, very alienated, very alone, and that war has a kind of attraction because of that.
LT - You say, “The ethnic conflicts and insurgencies of our time, whether Serbs and Muslims, or Tutus and Tutsis, are not religious wars. They are not clashes between cultures or civilizations, nor are they the result of ancient ethnic hatreds. They are manufactured wars, born out of the collapse of civil societies, perpetuated by fear, greed and paranoia, and they are run by gangsters, who rise up from the bottom of their own societies and terrorize all, including those they purport to protect.”
Who are today’s “gangsters?”
[Silence]
LT - Right now we are involved in a war. Who are today’s gangsters?
[Silence]
CH - I’m going to pass on that question.
LT - I sense a lot of anger in the book.
CH - Yeah. There is a lot of anger.
