Michael did a half-hour
radio interview earlier today in Brisbane, and as
always, his passion for his work came through loud
and clear.
TRANSCRIPT
(I did this one
myself, so all errors are mine, etc etc. As with any
live discussion -- particularly with Michael when he
gets fired up! -- I’ve had to do some judicious
editing of the overlapping conversations and the
hesitational hems and haws in order to make it
intelligible, but I didn’t drop any comment of
import. I’ve also added links for some of the Aussie
terms he uses and specific earlier work of his that I
have on the site. There are also the very occasional
parenthetical clarifications in
italics.)
MADONNA KING: If you've watched news reports about
Iraq over the past eight years, you're probably
familiar with Michael Ware. As a journalist
for Time
magazine and
CNN, he's built a bit of a reputation for going where
some other reporters fear to tread. So how does a boy
from Brisbane end up in a war zone and what toll does
something like that take? Michael Ware, good to talk
to you from across the desk rather than from across a
few oceans, dodging bullets.
MICHAEL WARE: Yes, it's rather a change.
KING: I bet it's rather a change. For those who may
not know your background, how does someone from
Brisbane end up a war reporter in Iraq?
WARE: I'm continually wondering that myself, to be
perfectly honest.
KING: But what was it in you, and at what stage? I
mean, we were young reporters together many, many
years ago.
WARE: Yeah, I remember. I was just telling someone
that this morning, I remember when we were in that
dodgy newsroom at the Courier-Mail.
Not that it's any less dodgy now.
KING: I had pigtails in my hair and you were no more
sophisticated, remember?
WARE: Oh, absolutely not. I had just fallen out of
the law. And yeah, I remember getting that phone call
from the Courier-Mail
way back then
going, "Have you ever thought about being a
journalist?" and I went, "No, not really." We said,
"Let's try it for a year and see how it goes," and
now look at me.
KING: So what was it in that year that made you
think? Was it Iraq, was it reporting from a war zone,
or was it something that you wanted to get away from?
WARE: To be honest, I just knew I didn't want to do
the law, and I was setting off on
the backpacking thing. And there was a rather
far-seeing or insightful Chief of Staff at the
Courier-Mail
-- Dennis
Watt, who now runs the place -- who came and said,
you know, "Would you like to have a go?" And
honestly, it wasn't even in my mind.
KING: And so you said yes, and … have a go, what did
have a go mean? To report from Iraq?
WARE: No, no, no, that was just to become a
journalist. Full stop. And in fact it was quite cool,
he said to me -- once I'd got the job as a third-year
cadet [see
here, item
#10], remember those
days? -- he said, "Would you like to be our war
correspondent?" And I was very keen, I said, "Oh,
fantastic!" And he said, "Wait, wait, I haven't
told you which war yet." It was World War II,
because that was the year of Australia Remembers
[1995],
remember that? The 50th anniversary of the end of
World War II.
And I have to admit, the six months I spent covering
the Australia Remembers program to this day stands me
in good stead. I mean, I went, literally, and
interviewed hundreds of diggers, veterans.
KING: But was it that that made you think, "I'm
unsatisfied, I actually want to get on a plane and go
over there and report from a war zone?"
WARE: Um… my first touch with it, long before I even
thought about journalism -- I mean,
in high school I was hell-bent on becoming a
lawyer -- but I remember the day
in 1985 when the newspapers were full of the news of
the death of this bloke I'd never heard of, an
Australian by the name of Neil Davis. He was a Tazzy bloke
[from
Tasmania], a cameraman, I
think he was working for the ABC at that point.
Anyway, he went to Viet Nam in the mid-60s for a
six-week stint and essentially never came home.
And he died on the streets of Bangkok during one
of those rather pissant coup d'etats that Thailand
has as part of its political process. The great
irony being that he'd survived Viet Nam, he'd
survived Cambodia, and there as bureau chief in
Bangkok--
KING: As a journalist?
WARE: As a journalist, as a cameraman -- dies in a
nothing event on an afternoon in the streets of
Bangkok. And that's -- his story stayed with me.
KING: And was it his story that got you on a plane or
what got you on that plane out of Australia to Iraq?
WARE: Well, it all starts with Timor, to be honest. The
guts of the Timor story had passed me by --
remember in 1999 with all that horrible violence
and so forth, and the Aussies led the international
task force. It was almost as an
afterthought that, working back then for
the Courier
and then
News Limited Group in Australia,
I was sent in as sort of a last-minute
relief person to cover the Christmas of December '99.
I ended up staying five months in Timor. And I came
home after INTERFET came home. And I went
-- that was my first taste of a foreign story and
secondly, it was my first brush with the
international news community. And I went, "Oh,
this is a bit of allright. They do this for a
living?" And so I came home and told the
then-editor of the Courier
I wanted
to keep doing that and he said, "Well, you know we
have no place for that," and I said, "I know,
that's why I'm telling you that I'm looking for
something else," and I was lucky enough to be
picked up by Time magazine, of all people.
KING: So you got to Iraq. Tell me--
WARE: Iraq itself -- by the time I got to Iraq --
well, this story begins, as so many tragic others do,
with 9/11. I mean, as with so many others, my life
has never been the same since 9/11. Since 9/11 I have
lived war. And until recently, I didn't visit and I
didn't do rotations and I didn't come and go. I lived
-- and I will argue the toss with the Australian Tax
Office, but I am still a resident of the Republic of
Iraq.
KING: Why? Why?
WARE: Um… why…
KING: Is it the people? Is it that you think you--
WARE: No, it's the -- I mean, God bless my Iraqi
brothers, or Allah, as the case may be. It's
the--it's the fascination. I mean, it is just
intellectually the most gripping thing that I have
ever seen or imagined. Because after 9/11 I lived for
a year in Afghanistan, and again, I went on a
three-week relief stint and I stayed thirteen months,
most of which was spent living in Kandahar -- the
heartland of the Taliban, where they were born --
much of that period as the only Westerner still in
the city because they had bombed the Red Cross and
done this and done that, and I lived as an Afghan. So
by the time the Iraq war came along, rather than just
being a sub on the bench, at Time
magazine I
was the first cab off the rank and I was going to
Iraq with bells on. And the Middle East had never
been an area of particular concern of mine, I mean, I
was absolutely focused on Indonesia and Southeast
Asia. But it is incredible. It's worked out well on
several levels. First and foremost, I've been given
the privilege of having a front row ticket to
history, watching firsthand as it unfolds before me.
KING: So tell us about that front row ticket. What do
you see, what do you feel? Tell us about the Iraqis.
Obviously your affinity with the Iraqi people is
huge, it's enormous.
WARE: Yeah, it is, it is. And with the Afghans, too.
And there've been a few wars sprinkled in-between, so
sort of, you lose track. But I mean, in one sense --
there's two levels, I guess. In one sense, in war you
see humanity stripped bare. I mean, that's kind of
trite to say, but until you've seen it you have
absolutely no idea. The sense of seeing a community
in upheaval really gives you a sense of-- it sharpens
your own awareness of what's important and what's
not, let alone the near-death-experience kind of
business. But seeing that-- and, I mean, to see how
societies cope, to see how humans cope. I mean,
seeing little kids still smiling and laughing and
kicking a beat-up old can like a football in a
refugee camp when they've lost everything and dad's
missing, that never ceases to amaze me. To see good
men do evil and to see evil men do good… I mean, it's
life stripped bare.
And certainly once you're in that moment in combat
when the lead's thick in the air, I mean, there's no
room… there's no room whatsoever for--for-- I
normally call it something else -- but for those
little lies that we tell ourself each and every day.
We all get up every morning and go through our day
fudging a couple little things here and there,
telling ourselves, "Oh, I'll do this" or "I can't do
that." In those moments, you cannot hide from
yourself. So it tells you about yourself, as well.
KING: When you say you learn things about yourself,
what have you learned about yourself that you didn't
know beforehand?
WARE: Well, I'm not sure I really want to inform the
state on that, to be honest. But I mean, for example,
in a unit you'll see -- it's almost like a caricature
from every World War II movie. There's always the
great big burly bloke carrying the M60 or the SAW, as
they're called. He's the bravest and, you know,
[American
accent] "Come on, get some, get
some!" Under heavy fire he might be the one who's
curled up crying. But then the next day he's the one
who charges the al Qaeda bunker, you know what I
mean? There's no room -- I'm gonna say it -- there's
no room for bullshit. I mean, all that stuff that
pads our lives just is stripped bare and you find out
exactly who you are: how brave, how not; how true,
how not And what's important when you're sitting
there waiting -- I mean, one time when
I was
grabbed by the bad boys, by al Qaeda, you
know, I was making my peace. They were my last
moments. No one can explain why I'm still here
after that one. But I mean, when you've been
there--
KING: When you were making your peace, what went
through your head? You say you were making your
peace.
WARE: Well, I really don't want to inform the people
of Queensland what's going on inside--
KING: But everything's stripped bare, you think
you're going to die. Does it matter that you're in a
war zone, do you regret being there in the first
place?
WARE: No, no…
KING: Or are you just living that couple of minutes?
WARE: Yeah, you haven't got time--
KING: This is when you were kidnapped, no doubt…
WARE: Yeah, one of the times.
KING: And
your fixers have been kidnapped,
too.
WARE: Yeah.
KING: How do you hold yourself together in a
situation like that, or don't you?
WARE: Umm, as I'm now learning, you sort of-- you
process things as you go, but you kind of don't. I
mean, in relation to that one particular kidnap when
al Qaeda grabbed me, I am very fortunate. I am the
only Westerner to have been kidnapped by al Qaeda in
Iraq who lived to tell the tale. And I say that --
that just rolls off my tongue, that phrase. And I've
never stopped to think about what it actually -- I am
the only Westerner to…
Before I left the States in December,
I had to do a job for CNN where I went to Memphis
to interview this fellow, an American contractor
who'd been kidnapped in Iraq. I was there when he was
kidnapped. And he was one of the few who actually got
rescued. Now, he wasn't kidnapped by al Qaeda, he was
kidnapped by criminals. But he was entombed in the
ground for eleven months. They used to concrete over
his thing [the underground
cell], every three days
they'd chip away at it, put food in, take something
out [the bucket of
waste], and concrete over it
again. He survived eleven months like that. Anyway,
he was then rescued.
We're sitting down, we're doing an interview, and the
idea was from CNN, you know, kidnap victim interviews
a kidnap victim. It was only afterwards when I read
the transcript of our interview that I looked at the
questions that I was asking, and I was saying, "Well,
when they grabbed me on the street that day…" It was
as if it was happening to another person.
KING: Yes.
WARE: And he went, "Near death--" I mean, "Out of
body experience!" And I went, "Yeah, was it like that
for you?" I had no idea it felt like that to me. And
what that told me was that whilst I dealt with it at
the time -- I mean, when I got home that morning, I
went to my bedroom and I didn't leave it for three
days. And then there was an attempt on my life at
that point, so eventually I went and put America's
1st Infantry Division between me and the killers
trying to get me. And it was through the
Battle of
Fallujah that I actually got
over this. Every time I got in the car I had a
sinking feeling that I wanted to throw up. So I
dealt with it at the time and moved forward. But
it's like I put the emotions away in a box,
gaffer-taped them up and put them in the attic.
And now I'm finding that the attic is absolutely
choc-a-bloc full of gaffer-taped boxes.
KING: You hinted at the toll this takes on someone
who's been in your situation.
WARE: It's not just in my situation, there are some
kids going up in this stuff. I remember during the
Iraqi civil war when they were butchering each other
on the streets. Like the kids here in Toowong
[a
Brisbane suburb]: wake up in the
morning, and they meet their mate on the street to
kick a footy, and there's the next door neighbor's
headless body. I mean, for goodness sakes. You know,
and obviously it's silly to say that you're not the
same person.
KING: You're not the same person.
WARE: Of course not, I mean, obviously. The depth to
which you change and the fundamental nature of that
change is breathtaking.
KING: Is there a level of regret that you put
yourself through this?
WARE: Oh, hell no. Hell no. I regret that I put my
family through it. The ones who really pay for this
are those who love us, the poor fools.
KING: Because they don't know what's happening, they
don't know if you're dead or alive.
WARE: Can you imagine? Nine years of just quietly
wondering.
KING: Do they have rules, that you've got to call in
or email every so often?
WARE: If they did I wouldn't follow them anyway. I
mean, the war dictates that, not you. Certainly not
anyone back here. So I mean… certainly from our
perspective, from the Australian perspective, it's
the journalists who go, and the diggers. You're never
the same again. And certainly in my experience,
you'll never come home. I mean, not home-home.
KING: Not to where you were before?
WARE: Nothing is ever the same. I mean, one of the
hardest things is -- for me, for example, and I know
from other soldiers' experiences -- is finding
traction again back here.
KING: I was wondering, because we were just listening
to the news together --
WARE: Nothing seems real.
KING: No, and we were listening to the news together
and yet you weren't interested at all.
WARE: Oh, I'm totally oblivious, I mean --
KING: Because news isn't really news --
WARE: Well, I heard you talking about electricity
bills, and all I could think about was, well, go and
buy a goddamned generator, people. I mean, in Baghdad
you get one hour of electricity a day. And you think
Brisbane's hot? God damn, you have no idea. $240
bucks a year? Oh, grow up, people, come on. At least
you've got electricity. That's the sort of way -- and
I know that's wrong and it ignores a lot of just
day-to-day realities. I mean, please. But I'm
thinking about people who have got, say… preemie
babies. And there's no hospital to take care of them.
You should see the preemie ward in Baghdad Hospital.
Please. And it's stinking hot, it gets to 52 degrees
[152 degrees
Fahrenheit]. And there's not a lick
of electricity and there hasn't been for three days
and you're living in a slum and everyone keeps
showing up dead. I mean, come on…
So it's hard to get beyond that and it's no great
shock, and it's a matter of public note now that I
have Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
KING: You do have that, it's been diagnosed?
WARE: Oh, yeah. Disorder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah. And it's actually been made very, very public
of late.
KING: And what does that mean? What did they explain
to you it means?
WARE: They didn't need to explain it, I can tell you
now. I mean, there's a whole series of things that
people who go through traumatic events, you know,
they can experience.
KING: Is it impossible to go through what you have
gone through and not experience it?
WARE: Well, I don't know if it's impossible, but you
certainly-- you don't walk away untouched. I mean,
physically I've been very, very lucky, my wounds have
been minor, just scrapes. But no one comes home
untouched. There's the wounds you can see and the
wounds that you can't see.
KING: Do the people in Iraq get Post Traumatic
Stress, too?
WARE: Yeah, it's called being Iraqi. Of course they
do, but they have to push on. They don't get to come
home. And don't get me started -- I mean, I guess the
PTSD kicks in in the lack of perspective here, but I
mean, talk about Australia and refugees and
immigration, it just offends me. Talking about the
things that we trouble ourselves with and tie
ourselves up in knots with when really, in the grand
scheme, you know, it's not that important.
KING: But are there things you worried about, too?
WARE: No, no…
KING: You can't go a few minutes without worrying
about, but twenty years ago you would have.
WARE: Of course. I had nothing else to worry about
and I didn't know what the real world was like.
'Cause this is not the real world. This is a bubble
floating on the sea of humanity.
KING: But how do we learn? How do we each day get out
of our bubble and understand the world?
WARE: Oh, God knows. I have no idea. I'm trying to
get back in the bubble. That, I can't do. And, like,
for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder there can be an
involuntary re-living of a near-death experience. I
don't have that; I have entirely too many of them.
There's disassociation, sleeplessness, you have the
nightmares, the mood swings, the this and that, you
know. The hyper-vigilance -- right now I can tell you
how safe this building is for a bombing and how prime
it is, how well a carbomb would go off in your
carpark underneath, it would be an absolute corker.
They're the things I see. I still sit with my back to
a wall in a restaurant. Actually, I don't go to
restaurants, I don't go out.
KING: So did you realize you were having this problem
or did someone else tap you on the shoulder and say,
"Michael…"
WARE: No, I'm not a fool. When I went to my first
conflict, even in Timor, I was aware of PTSD. I saw
the vets come home from Viet Nam, for goodness sake,
and the crappy way we treated them -- which is not
happening today.
So I was waiting, you know, I was alert and I read.
But no, it took me kicking and screaming to bring it
to people's attention. That and the fact that I could
no longer ignore it once I was going off the deep
end.
KING: And so what happens from here?
WARE: Well, allegedly I'm writing a book. That's what
I'm home for.
KING: Is that therapeutic or is that a silly move?
WARE: Well, insha'allah, hopefully it will be. That
was Arabic, by the way.
KING: What were you telling me?
WARE: That means God willing.
KING: Okay.
WARE: We hope so. It's been six months, I haven't
written a word. Every notebook I touch, every piece
of paper, every video I watch, every memento I pull
out of a box is laden with memory.
KING: But yet you want to write a book and you want
to go back to Iraq?
WARE: Oh, yeah. I don't want to live in Iraq any
more. That's the thing -- there's a difference
between living war and visiting war. That's what most
people do, is visit war. And there's a difference
between doing a one-year tour as a grunt or a digger,
and living there nonstop for, like, seven. I think
that was a bit excessive, looking back.
KING: And people probably tried to tell you that
along the way, family included.
WARE: Yeah, I suppose. But that's the other thing. I
mean, front row ticket to history, also… it's so
engaging. It's like chess. It's like this
intellectual chess but with violence and armies. And
the other thing is the truth! The truth. I mean, you
know, Tony Abbott actually admitted that
they all tell us porkies [lies].
In war, everyone lies. Our government, their
government, the so-called good guys, the so-called
bad guys, even the civilians. Tim O'Brien wrote this book after
Viet Nam and he said, "There's no such thing as a
true war story." And that is true. And so, to get
behind it and to see it is just -- it is a gift.
Now, that gift comes with a price.
KING: And you're paying the price, is what you're
saying.
WARE: Well, so do the diggers, and that's what annoys
me so much about successive Australian
administrations, federal governments. Their media
policy on the soldiers, on the diggers -- I mean, it
is unbelievable. Our diggers are sweating and
bleeding in a vacuum. And they're kept in that
vacuum, where it's over there, out of the way, and
it's not in the Australian public consciousness,
because it's politically convenient. Now, the less
the Australian public thinks anything about our
diggers being involved in anything over there--
KING: So what are they involved in? Today, in Iraq.
WARE: In Iraq, we did very little. It was a little
bit of a joke, I thought. It was unkind to the
diggers. I mean, they were stuck -- our battalion
group was stuck in the most remote part of the
desert, the most peaceful part of Iraq, so there
wouldn't be any body bags, essentially. In
Afghanistan, however, our boys are putting in in a
big way. I know there was a thing on
MediaWatch
last year
[possibly this,
from 2007?] and I've since
caught up on the debates about the nature of the
media coverage and Australian Defence Force
policies … all I can tell you is this: I've worked
with just about -- I've certainly worked with
every modern Western military fighting in the
so-called War on Terror. I've also been to the
wars in Georgia, I've covered the Mexican cartel
wars over there, I've been to the wars in Lebanon.
The Australian Department of
Defence and the Defence Force
itself, their media policies are embarrassing. The
Americans -- even the Brits, who still remain
tight-lipped and still uncomfortable with the
media -- have a much better, much more successful
media policy than we do. We are stuck in the Dark
Ages when it comes to the Australian government
and the Defence Force leadership handling our men
in conflict, our men in combat.
KING: So our men in in combat, in Afghanistan, what
are they doing?
WARE: You wouldn't have a clue what they're doing,
would you? You've got to ask me! That's unbelievable.
KING: That's why you're here. Tell me.
WARE: The Aussie government doesn't want you to know
the truth, I suppose, because like I said, it's
politically inconvenient.
KING: But you can tell us the truth, so tell us.
WARE: Well, I haven't -- hey, very few people have
spent real time with diggers in the real shit, you
know? The truth, in war, lies where the meat meets
the metal. That's on the front line. Now, I see the
Australian Defence Force has done these "trial
embeds," taking a handful of selected journalists
over and then wrapping them up in cotton wool balls
-- against those journalists' objections -- as a
so-called insight for the Australian people into what
our soldiers are doing. Well, that was just a farce.
And our soldiers… in Afghanistan, we have an infantry
group that's there under Dutch command supporting a
reconstruction effort in a province in Afghanistan I
know like the back of my hand. In Afghanistan, let me
just preface it by saying I am Afghani.
[speaks in
Pashto] I'm Pashtu. I come from
the Taliban tribe. I really went native. So I know
the area where the Aussies are operating like the
back of my hand. I know the men they are fighting and
killing. So I know I've pretty much -- I've been in
Iraq, only just paying small attention to
Afghanistan, but I do know what our lads are up to
and what they're up against. So you have the infantry
there, under Danish command, and those boys are out
there doing patrols, and on patrol you can patrol a
thousand times and nothing happens till that one
that…
KING: Does happen.
WARE: …you come back without that leg. Then you have
an entire regiment of our Special Air Service over
there. Now, they're SAS, super-secret, media-shy, and
there's good reasons for that. There's good reason
why soldiers don't like journalists. However,
journalists are a tool in any war, and our boys over
there are really getting into it, trust me. They're
taking out the Taliban's mid-ranking leadership. Our
boys are spilling blood, and in a very effective way
and they're doing glorious things in silence, and I'm
sorry, that offends me. And to say that we can't talk
about these things for operational security, meaning
if we talk about these things afterwards, this will
affect the security of our soldiers still in the
field, what a load of codswallop. I challenge the
Minister of Defence to bring that on. Oh my God.
KING: Okay, so can I go back to you, because that is
where this started--
WARE: Oh, who cares about me? I mean, let's think
about the soldiers who are doing this and their
families, what the families go through!
KING: But you're home for a break--
WARE: Oh, sorry, I forgot.
KING: --because you're suffering Post-Traumatic
Stress.
WARE: You wouldn't know it, would you?
KING: Will you go back?
WARE: Oh, if--if--if--if the situation arises, yeah.
KING: If doctors allow you or you feel up to it?
WARE: Oh, bugger the doctors. Who gives a shit about
the doctors?
KING: If you feel as though you're up to it? Under
what conditions would you go back?
WARE: Yeah, I'd go back. If there was a good story.
If there's a story that had to be told. And this is
the other thing. I mean, there's stories that just
don't get told!
KING: Allright, but The Michael Ware Story, when do
you--
WARE: Oh God, that's the most boring story of all.
KING: Yes, well, I want to hear about it. So just
briefly in summing up, how long are you back in
Brisbane for?
WARE: Um, turns out for another year.
KING: For another year?
WARE: Yes, yes.
KING: So can we have you back for another chat in a
little while?
WARE: Oh, you are a glutton for punishment, darling,
aren't you?
KING: I am a glutton for punishment, you've always
known that.
WARE: I came home on book leave, and then there was a
bit of a thing with my current employer, sort of some
confusion, and now I'm home for a year. It turns out
it's a good thing to be home. It's nice to actually
be back.
KING: Well, I certainly think your family think that,
too.
WARE: I'm sure they do.
KING: Michael Ware, thank you very much and we look
forward to talking with you again soon.
WARE: Thanks, sweetheart. It was my pleasure,
anyhow.