TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon everyone and welcome. I am Tom Putnam Director of the Kenned Library and on behalf of my colleague, Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation and all my Library and Foundation colleagues I thank you for coming. It is truly good to be here on this beautiful fall afternoon with all of you. This event had originally been scheduled on Patriot’s Day last spring – the same day as the marathon bombings in the city and a freak, yet very damaging, fire here at the Kennedy Library. In fact, I was in the midst of writing this very introduction when the alarm bells rang. Both our city and this Library have rebounded respectively from the fire and from the tragedy, and we are thankful to gather today with new strength and resolve.
On Veteran’s Day in 2010, we were honored to host a forum with Sebastian Junger – acclaimed author of A Perfect Storm, A Dealth in Belmont and Fire - and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert to discuss Mr. Junger’s book, War, and to watch a sneak preview of the book’s companion documentary film, Restrepo, which Mr. Junger co-directed with his friend Tim Hetherington.
Over the course of 15 months, Mr. Junger and Mr. Hetherington – an award winning photojournalist – were embedded with Battle Company of the 173 Airborne Brigade combat team in the Korengal Valley in Eastern Afghanistan that saw more combat with the Taliban than any other region of that war-torn country and was deemed at the time the most dangerous place on earth. Their film, Restrepo, was described by The New York Times as “an impressive, even heroic feat of journalism” and it won the 2010 Grand Jury Prize atthe Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar.
On April 20, 2011 shortly after the release of Restrepo, Tim Hetherington was tragically killed by mortar fire in Misrata, Libya, where he had been covering the civil war. His death ended a brilliant ten-year career as one of the most important journalists of his generation. As a tribute to him, Sebastian Junger has directed a new film which we are honored to share with you today:
Which Way is the Front Line from Here: The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington.
We thank Sebastian Junger for returning to the Kennedy Library to share his insights and artistry with us. At the conclusion of the film, Mr. Junger will have a conversation with Renee Loth, who currently serves as the editor of Architecture Boston Magazine and as a columnist for The Boston Globe, where she edited the editorial page for many years. As part of the program, our colleagues at PEN New England will be bestowing a special award to Mr. Junger.
And now, on with the show.
[FILM]
[Presentation of PEN New England’s Freedom To Write Award to Sebastian Junger and $1,000 check to RISC by PEN New England Chair Amy Macdonald]
CONVERSATION FOLLOWING HBO DOCUMENTARY WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT: THE LIFE AND TIME OF TIM HETHERINGTON and PEN NEW ENGLAND AWARD PRESENTATION:
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: You can get on an airplane and fly to Cairo, drive into Libya, drive into Syria, whatever. Some of these things are very dangerous, but you don't need credentials from anyone to go do that. And if your work is good and you send back photos or video or written stories and they're good, you'll get paid for them. Not a lot, but possibly enough to make a living as a freelance reporter and join this sort of small tribe of people that you probably admire because you wanted to be one of them. The fact that you can do that -- anyone can do that -- is an amazing thing about journalism. It's not true of the medical industry, the legal profession, many others, but for journalism it is true.
That same sense of opportunity -- which is so wonderful and draws very courageous, enterprising, young people into these war zones to sort of fill in the gaps where regular sort of corporate news can't cover -- also creates a risk. And the risk is that you have enterprising, courageous, young people, who by definition may not be that experienced, who are in active war zones and they are also underorganized, underserved, undersupported by the industry as a whole.
What I wanted to do with RISC – Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues – is train experienced freelance war reporters, not people who just want to be a war reporter or haven't done it yet, but experienced freelance war reporters in battlefield medicine. After Tim died – I was supposed to be on assignment with him; we were supposed to be there together for Vanity Fair. At the last minute I couldn't go, and he went on his own. I realized, had I been there with him, I might have been killed along with him. But had I not been hit, I almost certainly would have watched him die, because I didn't have any medical training whatsoever. Then I realized, I didn't even know a freelance reporter – most of my journalist friends are freelance – who had any medical training. That was true of all of us, and that was sort of outrageous and maybe preventable. So I started RISC.
The idea was we would do three training sessions a year. We train 24 people at a time. Up until now, it's been in New York City. We're doing our first overseas course in London. Eventually, I think we're going to do a course in Istanbul. It's completely free for the journalists. There's a long waiting list. It's completely free. We pay for the hotel in New York for four days, the four-day intensive training course is free, the medical kit is free. It's all free. You just have to get yourself there. The reason it has to be free is that freelancers don't have lot of money, and if we start charging for it, people will decide to not do it. And then all of a sudden there are people out there working who don't have medical training.
We've gotten our costs down. We can do all of that; we can lodge people in New York and train them and give them a medical kit for roughly $800 per person, which is pretty extraordinary if you think about just what four days in New York costs. We have a great deal at a hotel, a sort of group rate for 24 people. We did it, we figured it out. The website is risctraining.org, and if you're feeling generous, there's a big, huge DONATE button and we will use your money incredibly effectively if you choose to help us out.
RENÉE LOTH: I mean, just as a data point to underline this, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which keeps these kinds of statistics, reported that of the 104 journalists who were killed last year doing their jobs, 22 of those were freelancers. I think that's a number that will, unfortunately, only rise because traditional news organizations, even those that are still existing and surviving, don't have the resources that they once had. Boston Globe had five foreign bureaus when I was there, and we closed them all.
So traditionally, also, one of the things that these better resourced organizations do for their bureau chiefs and foreign correspondents, I know, is also to train them in language and cultural sort of sensitivities when they send them on these assignments -- their correspondents and their bureau chiefs. I'm just wondering if you can imagine RISC getting into that kind of work as well, or if you know of other organizations that do something similar.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: We're not going to … I mean, we have limited resources, and once you start adding things like that, you start adding days and the numbers get bigger. But, also, keep in mind that we're dealing exclusively with experienced freelancers who have on the job acquired a huge amount of cultural sensitivity; it's part of the job. So we don't need to train people in how to be journalists. We're only taking experienced people. They just happen to be freelance.
RENÉE LOTH: You know, Tim was described in the film -- and it comes through blazingly -- that he was as much a humanitarian as he was a photojournalist or a reporter. He was a noncombatant. But I feel that the situation on the ground in these conflict areas really has changed even in the last 20 years. Along with the collapse of journalism has been the collapse of a kind of unwritten rule that noncombatants -- the Red Cross, the journalists, diplomats -- are somehow in a kind of protected zone, or at least not considered to be active warriors.
Do you agree with that? And why do you think that's happened? Why has it become so much more dangerous for journalists and humanitarian aid workers and so on to be in these conflict areas?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I'm not sure it has changed. I mean, my first war was in Bosnia and I can't remember the number, but scores of journalists were killed. I mean, local press and foreign press.
RENÉE LOTH: Mostly, often, we should remember, mostly people from those countries are the more likely to be killed.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yes. That figure of 104 journalists killed last year -- whatever the figure was -- most of that would be local press as well. The 22 freelancers killed in that figure -- if you just took it as a percentage of foreign press -- I mean, of Western or US press, it will be much, much higher. Locals really do absorb the brunt of this violence because they're civilians in war-ravaged countries.
Going back to Bosnia, there were enormous casualties among the journalists in Bosnia, including a correspondent for, I think, ABC, one of the networks, who was shot by a sniper driving from the Sarajevo Airport into the city. He wasn't wearing a bulletproof vest – he'd loaned it someone else – and the bullet went right through the rear window between the T and the V that they taped on their rear window. So this has been going on for a long time.
Tim was killed I don't think intentionally. I think he was with a group of rebel fighters. They were a huge target. I don't know quite why they were moving like this. I think they were very inexperienced. The rebels were moving in a big group and made an irresistible target to Gadaffi's gunners, and a mortar team just dropped a mortar right in the middle of them. Tim happened to be there. I don't think anyone had binoculars saying, "Oh, there's Tim Hetherington, kill him." It was a tactical mistake by everybody.
RENÉE LOTH: I wonder if there is something about – now, this is not a prepared question, it's just occurring to me – if there's something about getting superclose to the action or superclose to the peril that a freelance journalist feels that he needs to push in order to be able to get the stories and the photos that possibly a journalist for a more established organization -- that'll get their paycheck no matter what -- needs to experience.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I think there is a little bit of desperation, but mostly inexperience on the part of young freelancers. Photographers, particularly, are incredibly competitive with each other. You can have established staff photographers for major news organizations, they're all competing with each other and they are all driven to really push the boundaries of safety and get very dramatic shots of the front line. So, actually, I don't think you avoid that problem by going with the established press either.
RENÉE LOTH: And are Tim's photographs collected anywhere in a book or something? Just seeing them on the big screen made me want to have that.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah, his family set up a website, TimHetherington.org, I think it is. His photos are archived and managed by Magnum. So, yes, they are out there. I mean, if you just search his name on the Internet, you can see a lot of his images.
RENÉE LOTH: He was also clearly a seeker, at least as I see him depicted in the film. He wanted total immersion in the experience of covering these extremis situations. I'm wondering, he talked a lot about not wanting the camera to be a barrier, wanting to connect with people. I'm wondering how does one, how did he, how do you reconcile that very human impulse to want to help in these situations and what we're, at least taught in journalism school, needs to be a kind of, if not objectivity, then at least a kind of suspension of judgment about what's going on.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, I mean, as a journalist there are very few situations you can really help in. Everyone's caught up in tremendously powerful social/political forces. But I've never found a conflict between being able to help an individual person and my work. I've helped people while in country and afterwards.
I remember coming back from Liberia, and I came back and I raised a few thousand dollars and sent it – I mean, it's a drop in the bucket, but I sent it to a couple of families that I'd met that I was particularly touched by. Did it help Liberia? Not really. But it helped these families, and you know, whatever.
So I don't think there's really a conflict. Objectivity basically is the idea that you don't necessarily know the truth. And journalists -- a good journalist -- keep that firmly in mind. You stop being a journalist when you try to lead your readership towards what you believe. That's advocacy, and it's very important. I mean, advocacy is a crucial part of the public debate. But strictly speaking, it's not journalism. I think you can strive for objectivity and help people. I think it's a false conflict.
RENÉE LOTH: Yeah. It's something that I think a lot of us journalists struggle with, though. I'm reminded of a few columns that Nick Kristof wrote in the New York Times when he was exposing human trafficking and sex slavery in Asia somewhere. He wrote these very compelling columns. Of course, he's a columnist so he is about advocacy journalism. But he also purchased the freedom of an individual young woman who was being trafficked and it was a huge matter of debate among journalists about whether that was crossing a line, or somehow not appropriate, or maybe had unintended consequences because then it created a market for this kind of thing, and blah, blah, blah. What do you think?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, every action has a positive and a negative side. I contribute to NPR. You know what I mean? Am I losing my …
RENÉE LOTH: Oh, no! [laughter]
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Right. Am I losing my status as an objective journalist? I don't think so. I think you're not a journalist every moment of the day. You're a journalist until the point where you file your story and then you resume becoming a full human being. At that point, I think you can write a check to NPR or you can help a young woman who's trapped in slave trade.
I don't think it's a real problem. I think it's a problem when it affects what you write. That's it.
RENÉE LOTH: I actually know journalists who won't vote because they don't want to put themselves in a position where they have a view. But I'm not one of them, and I really don't agree with that.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: That sounds like an excuse not to go to the polling station.
RENÉE LOTH: Right. [laughter] Okay, thank you. So we saw these, in the film, some clips from Restrepo. This is the movie that you made, it says right there, at the end of 2010 with Tim, about … Was it a whole year that you spent embedded with?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah. I mean, we came and went. We couldn't stay out there the whole time. The military probably wouldn't have let us. But Tim and I did five one-month trips each, sometimes together and sometimes – which is why there's footage of me and footage of him – and sometimes apart.
RENÉE LOTH: I have sort of two questions here. Initially, I was going to ask you about – well, we'll get to them – about the stories from Afghanistan that still haven't been told. But we also saw the most extraordinary life that these men have entered into in this platoon. I'm not calling it glorification of war in any way, but it does sort of elevate the experience of these men, the intensity of their lives, the bonding, the trauma into kind of almost like a sacred space. Tim called it the Man Eden. So there was kind of a sacred aspect to it. So what do you say, how do you respond when people say to you war is not the answer and we shouldn't be somehow depicting this in a way that is elevating?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: There's a reason that a lot of young men come back from war and miss it, miss the experience and feel that, as traumatic as it might have been, it was also one of the most profound experiences of their lives. There's a reason for that. I think it's very important if society collectively, if society has any chance of ending war, it will only be after we have formed a very realistic and honest understanding of what war is. If you don't understand … It's easy to understand why war repels; it's harder to understand why war attracts. All the guys at Restrepo signed up voluntarily and they worked very, very hard to get into a combat unit. Every single one I talked to about it said they actively wanted to experience combat. Afterwards, many of them really missed the experience.
We need a realistic understanding of that phenomenon and it goes way, way back. I mean, the US military didn't invent this. It goes back to the siege of Troy. War is, in a very odd way, it's a hard thing to give up not because people enjoy killing, but because they enjoy being needed. And you are absolutely needed by your brothers in the platoon, absolutely. You're needed way more than you are needed in your office or even some ways in your family. And it's an intoxicating feeling to be that needed and that crucial to a small group.
I think the dynamics of a platoon in combat duplicate quite accurately our evolution as a species living and surviving in groups of 20, 30, 40 people in a very hostile environment for the last 100,000 years. I think that's why it resonates so deeply with soldiers. So when someone says to me, "You shouldn't be portraying anything positive about war," my answer is, I've spent my whole life also portraying the horrible things about war. And anyway, I'm not an advocate for or against war. I'm an advocate for all of us collectively having a realistic understanding of the circumstances in which we live. And, unfortunately, war is one of those circumstances.
RENÉE LOTH: A similar question I have about the journalists: What is it you think that drives these – I called them earlier a special breed. I've known many war correspondents; I believe when I say that they're a special breed. But what is it that drives them back into harm's way? I don't think the word addiction appeared in the film, but I think in some other recording I saw of you, or somebody mentioned it. Is it an addiction? Is it something that is so compelling? I mean, perhaps you just answered it. But is it similar for journalists?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: There's an equivalent phenomenon, I think. There's a huge amount of adrenaline in combat and adrenaline is a chemical that feels good afterwards. You can get kind of used to that and feel like you need it. I think much more important, though, is a question of identity. If you're a war reporter, frankly you get a lot of admiration and kudos for it. And if you're a young person in your mid-20s and you could be a copy editor at a local paper or you could wait tables, like …
RENÉE LOTH: [laughter] Oh, the horror.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Right. I mean, whatever, there are a lot of jobs that need to be done. I was a waiter when I was in my mid-20s, and then I graduated to being a climber for tree companies. There are a lot of things you can do in life, right? If you're a war reporter, you get a lot of positive reinforcement for that, and that's incredibly important for a young person, for anyone.
I think one of the things that keeps people going back is that they form their positive identity around this idea that they are a war reporter: they're brave, they're noble, they're whatever. After Tim died, I stopped covering wars. But I think what's quite complicated is the idea, the question, what am I if I'm not doing that? Can I still admire myself? Will other people still admire me? What am I even doing here if I'm not doing something that dramatic and noble? How do I feel about myself? So it's a question of identity. I think that's what's hard to give up.
Also, journalists are ambitious. It's a sort of a quick route to the top, in some ways, to do this. Finally, there is a true humanitarian concern about these wars and disasters. I mean, the most anti-war people I know – I grew up in the '60s and '70s in Cambridge. There was a lot of anti-war sentiment among people who really had never been to war, but they had formed ideas about it. That's nothing compared to the anti-war sentiment among the press, other journalists I know who've seen this stuff up close.
And one of the reasons you get very complicated opinions about military intervention among the press is, on the one hand, they're anti-war because they see what war does. On the other hand, they know it has to be stopped by all means and sometimes that means a military intervention.
When you get these very complicated opinions about Syria, about Libya, about Bosnia, about Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, and it does not fall into a neat, sort of pacifist camp at all, the reason that it's so complicated is that because the press has seen this stuff up close and they know it's the worst thing there is, and you can't just close your eyes and say, "I'm a pacifist, I'm not going to think about this."
RENÉE LOTH: Hetherington talks in the film about how he's not interested in war reporting so much; he was interested in humanity and in the people. I think that goes to what you're saying. He also talks in the film about being concerned about growing inured to the tragedy of war after witnessing it for a long time. How do you respond to that?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I never got to that point. I think the pain of other people, I actually don't think you can become inured to it. I may be wrong; I think sociopaths are. The most traumatic things that I've experienced as a war reporter absolutely has been the pain of other people, the suffering of other people. I'm not trying to sound noble here; I'm really trying to give you an analysis of my experience.
I've come close to losing my life a few times. I've been very, very scared a few times. None of it comes close to the emotional effects of seeing people suffering. Frankly, I think what happens is you can sort of repress it and repress it and repress it, and then eventually there's a kind of cumulative effect that after some years -- maybe even after some decades -- kind of erupts and it affects you in a very, very profound way. That's absolutely what happened to me.
RENÉE LOTH: You're segueing nicely into one of the questions from the audience here, which is: “After being in war zones, how do you readjust to being in society when you come home?” This is from a woman on Cape Cod.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Humans are really adaptive. We're really malleable, we're really adaptive. I don't know how many of you all have been to prison -- probably not many in this room. I never have. But if you were sent to prison for something, within a month or so, you wouldn't like it but you would have adapted to prison.
You go to a war zone, you adapt to being in a war zone. It doesn't happen overnight, but after a couple weeks it becomes sort of the new normal. Then when you come home, the same thing happens. That doesn't mean that there aren't emotional consequences for adapting. There are. Huge ones. But you absolutely can adapt. I had a sort of middling to fair case of PTSD, I would say, after the Korengal Valley. It eventually went away, but it was a little weird for a year or so, for sure.
RENÉE LOTH: Somebody else asks: “In the film, I did not see the press wearing something that would identify them. Is this typical? And do you think it would help if they did?” I guess it didn't help the TV reporter.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: No, it doesn't. I mean, you have to understand how warfare works, how modern warfare works. People are fighting often at a distance of 50, 100, 200 meters, 300, 400 meters at times. They're shooting at movement and muzzle flashes in a tree line, in a blownup building, in the rubble of a street. They're not really stopping to see if that flicker of movement in that building we're taking fire from, do they have TV taped to their chests? They're just not doing it, and it's not how warfare works.
You have automatic weapons that shoot hundreds of rounds a minute, and you shoot at where you think the enemy might be. That's how it works, and that's how people get killed. There are snipers in Syria who are targeting the press, but they're targeting rebel fighters or soldiers just as much. So I don't think it would affect anything, actually.
RENÉE LOTH: This is so obvious to say this but were it not for brave reporters, journalists like Tim and yourself, this movie would not have been made, we would not know what we need to know. And this is a democracy, we need to know about what our government is doing, regardless of where you stand on the issue. So I think what you're doing to help these reporters is incredibly patriotic.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Thank you.
RENÉE LOTH: I think everybody here owes you a debt of thanks and maybe a couple of $800 donations. [applause]
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Thank you.
RENÉE LOTH: Thank you. Okay, that's it! I think maybe we'll be around to talk a little bit informally.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Thank you for coming today, everybody. I really appreciate it, thank you. [applause]
THE END