Dispatches

I used to lie in my bed as a boy and read the poems of Wilfred Owen along with those of Sassoon, Brook, and Graves. On the black and white television in our sitting room, I would watch the American war in Vietnam with my parents. It was from there that my journey into journalism began.

I was raised on heroic and exaggerated histories of adventure, conquest, and warfare, as were many boys in England at that time. I learned in my school books that Britain was a great civilising force for good, and the greatest empire in history on which the sun never set. I understood from the newspapers and TV broadcasts that since the collapse of the British empire in the dust of World War Two, America had become the great civilising force, exporting freedom and democracy and protecting us from evil.

I found my first war stories on the staircase leading to my grandparent's attic, in books that my father had read at the end of World War Two. From there I migrated to the poems of the First World War where my romantic ideas about conflict were challenged for the first time. Every stanza bled with layer upon layer of horror, indignity, and inhumanity. I learned from those who lived it, that war was anything other than romantic, noble, or heroic.

In my teenage years, my parents’ marriage disintegrated, and with it any influence they had over the course of my life. I was lost, damaged, and angry. Photojournalism found me when the librarian in the small Elizabethan village library introduced me to the work of Robert Capa and David Douglas Duncan. From there I found Don McCullin, Larry Burrows, Philip Jones Griffiths, and Tim Page who had all photographed the war in Vietnam. I sought out Tim Page who became a close friend and mentor, and on his advice, I went to Thailand to find my own war.

I found more than I could imagine. More love and more hatred than any book, newspaper or TV broadcast could hope to convey. It took less than a few weeks to understand that the narratives I fed on as a child were a betrayal, and that the country of my birth, and the America that has since become my home were anything but a great civilising force for good.

GK