From Salon.com
I’ve covered wars for years, but nothing prepared me for the conflict on the ground – or in my head
BY OLLY LAMBERT
There’s a private bar in London whose members are nearly all war correspondents. The men and women standing at the bar could easily convince you that war reporting is one of the most exhilarating experiences that life has to offer, a gateway to the outer limits of human experience. This, of course, is absolute nonsense, and they all know it. I can tell you that because I’m frequently one of those people drinking there, and I’ve spun that line on more occasions than I care to remember.
I’ve been making documentaries in war zones on and off for the last 10 years, and I can assure you that working in a conflict zone is absolutely the most horrible, lonely and uncomfortable experience you’re ever likely to have.
But that’s easy to forget. Within days or even hours of getting home, the bitter and complex reality of seeing a conflict close-up quickly melts into a series of increasingly honed anecdotes whose veracity I can’t quite guarantee.
The only true and abiding memory I have of the weeks and months spent in places like Helmand province in Afghanistan or a field hospital in Iraq is a vague and intangible sense of my split personality. One part of me becomes the journalist thief, prowling in search of people and stories to turn into a film. And at the same time I’m something quite different but also connected: a profoundly moved and thin-skinned witness to the awful extremes of human behavior. Both sides need the other, but they pull in very different directions.
For five weeks last fall, I embarked on a new project, living on both sides of a sectarian front line in rural Syria to make a documentary for the PBS series “Frontline,” and for Channel 4 in the U.K. I filmed with Sunni rebels on one side and regime loyalists on the other as they descended into an increasingly hateful feud.
Nothing could have prepared me for the imperial-scale level of violence that I witnessed there. It was totally unprecedented in my experience. And it’s only now, reading journals and looking back at footage, that some of it is even becoming real.
