Venter - Barrel of a Gun: Misspent Moments in Combat: a War Correspondents View From the Frontlines

The Dubious Life of a War Correspondent

It wasnt all guts and derring-do, but it was certainly fun while it lasted. As John Miller, one of the better-known Fleet Street foreign correspondents, was heard to comment from his almost permanent seat at the bar of the Royal Cape Golf Club, this is actually a hell of a lot better than working

D ANGER IS A MARVELOUS TONIC once you accept your limitations; the trick, I imagine, is to know how far you can push the envelope. Unfortunately, the lady doesnt always smile and Ive lost a few friends over the years, some of them professional news gatherers who were simply doing their job.

In my case, Im only alive because Im the original coward. When the shooting starts I get my head down. Damon Runyan had it about right when he said something about life being a case of six-to-five against

Not so with some of my colleagues. The tally of those who went to what British journalist Jim Penrith likes to call that great scriptorium in the sky includes Mohammed Amin who died brutally in an Ethiopian Airlines passenger jet that had been hijacked by zealots and came down in the sea alongside a tourist beach in the Indian Ocean Comoros Archipelago; Ken Oosterbroek, accidentally shot by soldiers of the old apartheid regime in South Africa; George DeAth, with whom I covered Israel, South Lebanon and Beirut and whose death also raised questions; and the incomparably romantic Nicholas Della Casa, who was killed in the aftermath of the First Gulf War by his Kurdish guide.

Let us not forget Danny Pearl and Michael Kelly, both more associates than friends, with whom I exchanged notes. The film A Mighty Heart about Dannys murder in Karachi by Islamic fanatics was a good rendition of what took place. It also serves to underscore some of the issues that correspondents face in these countries: different mindsets, different norms as well as seemingly irreconcilable cultures. More often than not these disparities come along with diverse homegrown values. Kipling reminded us of these alienable differences a long time ago when he wrote: East is east and west is west

Before Oosterbroek and Pearl there was Priya Ramrakha, another East African colleague with whom I shared a few events in West Africas Biafra, and, a while before that, George Clay, who was shot in the head while accompanying one of Mad Mike Hoares mercenary columns in the approaches to Stanleyville in the Congo known today as Kisangani. George and former British Army colonel, Hoare, that indomitable unconventional tactician who headed up 5 Commando in the Congo, became quite good friends. That happened despite the fact that this military maverick who not long afterwards went on to launch an aborted attempt to unseat the legal government of the Seychelles had a strong aversion to members of the Fourth Estate.

Years later, Miguel Gilmoreno arrived on the scene, in this case, Sierra Leone. He gave up everything as a Barcelona-trained lawyer to follow the action and worked as a cameraman for Associated Television News. He died in the same West African ambush as Kurt Schork, a former Rhodes Scholar who was at Oxford with Bill Clinton.

I am aware that the kind of work that journalists do today is often dangerous. It sometimes feels like death follows in your footsteps, or perhaps it could be said that we are following in the wake of the Reaper! Either way, you sometimes see things that you would afterwards not like to recall.

I know that Ive been instrumental in the deaths of two young men, one of whom, a young Lebanese combatant by the name of Christian, has his tragic story detailed later in this book. Indirectly, the tally is three, if you count former British television personality Nicholas Della Casa, who would probably still be alive if I hadnt hired him early in his career as an apprentice sound man.

Tall, good-looking and insouciant, this young Englishman, who had served in the British Army, was the definitive man about town. As the saying goes, he could charm any bird out of a tree. One of the women who moved about in our circle, and with whom Nicholas briefly shared a relationship, made the comment that his eyes were set in the kind of face that drew attention when entering a room for the first time. They were alternately fierce and vacant, depending on what took his fancy.

Nick was a most intriguing character. After hed gone, the circumstances surrounding his death acquired the kind of cult status that centres more on legends than on facts, not all of them substantiated. In an alluring way, Nick was also a bit of shit who, like Denys Finch Hatton of Out of Africa , allowed his derring-do reputation to make his fecklessness into something of an art form. One of his friends ended up in a Botswana prison because of a reckless action that might ultimately have had far more serious consequences. There has even been a book written about him.