When a war correspondent comes home his colleagues will welcome him back to the pub and ask him what it was like, but the truth is that they don’t want to know. A sound bite will usually suffice. Up to your neck in mud and bullets, deprived of sleep for a fortnight at a time, constantly under fire, that’s about as much as they can take. Maybe a quick, very quick, story of some squaddie’s heroism, or some subaltern’s stupidity. And, no, I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing there, either.
But, wait, you haven’t heard about the really hilarious thing your secretary said to the editor while you were away. Yes, you need to catch up on all the office gossip.
So you don’t tell them about how quickly you learnt to keep your correspondent’s credentials visible on your chest at all times, because the first time you reached inside your jacket for them a dozen soldiers clicked back the bolts on their small arms. Or that when you slithered backwards on your belly in retreat from an ambush, everybody covering for the next man in line, you were expected to take your turn with the weapon; or that, if embedded with the US Marines and approached by anybody under six feet tall you were supposed to shoot the bugger.
They are far more interested in how much you made on your expenses during your trip. And you, scanning the file copies after a few weeks away, are too busy wondering why most of the wonderful, and colourful, news-packed copy you filed never made the newspaper anyway.
It takes a death – like the tragic killing of Sunday Mirror defence correspondent Rupert Hamer, and the gruesome injuries inflicted on his colleague, photographer Phil Coburn, in Afghanistan – to bring it all home.
How close to home it actually comes, though, is a different matter. Hamer and Coburn were both victims, along with a US marine, of a roadside IED. So let’s ask everybody who pretends to be following the news from Afghanistan exactly what an IED is. My money says they haven’t got the foggiest idea. That’s how much they care. While you’re at it, show them a map of the world and ask them to point to Afghanistan (without reading the small print). See what I mean?
So why do we – or did we – do it? It’s bloody crazy. It was only a wish to be covering the things that seemed to matter when the alternative – in the days of which I write – was worrying about Joan Collins buying a new frock, then Princess Diana having a new haircut, and then Posh Spice doing whatever it was she did to make her famous. What defence correspondents did – and do – was important, but there were no celebrities involved so it wasn’t deemed particularly interesting. And it didn’t sell a single extra copy of the paper.
I remember one editor, faced with copy from one of the most astonishing events from the war in Viet Nam, consigning it to the spike with the comment that it was all “half a world away”. Never mind that his reporter had looked death in the eye to get the story, and would never get a better one.
Rupert Hamer was the third Mirror staffer to die covering a war during the papers’ 106 year history. Bernard Gray hitched a lift on a submarine in Malta to tell the story of the island’s heroic battle for survival during World War Two but the submarine never reached port; Ian Fyfe volunteered to fly in a glider attack on D-Day against a heavy battery on the coast of France and was never heard of again.
At the height of the troubles in Ulster, the Mirror had the bright idea of sending all reporters over for a couple of weeks to understand what it was about, and to learn what the guys on the ground were living with. It was a big story that the world was watching but it was astonishing to discover how many reporters didn’t want to know about a war being fought on British streets, and found excuses to be somewhere else when their turn came round.
A few who went were threatened, beaten up, shot at, and some even briefly kidnapped. None of them was killed, but a few came close. Wives rang the office to threaten nervous breakdowns if their husbands were sent across the water.
Was it worth it for the story? Rupert Hamer thought it was and he knew the risks. This was his fifth tour of duty in Afghanistan. Though his widow and his children may have a different view.
Revel Barker
