Which Way is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington Storyville

This programme contains some violent scenes, strong language

and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

What's interesting about war is that there's generalisations.

But in going to these extremities,

you see that even in these terrible times, in these terrible moments,

in these terrible extremities,

people are still human.

I think that that, for me,

is the redeeming factor of the human experience.

No, that sounds too fucking bullshit.

Well, I think it was good. I think you were almost there.

There's a lot of people that make kind of generic...

No, I don't want to say "there's a lot of people".

I think the important thing for me

is to make a work that is connected to people.

I like to...

Oh, shit, sorry, man.

LAUGHS

Blah blah blah blah blah!

CLEARS THROAT

I'm good, I've just got to... Er...

I think the important thing for me is to connect with real people.

To document them in these extreme circumstances.

Where there aren't any neat solutions,

or where you can't put down any neat guidelines -

and say this is what it is about, or this is what it is about.

It's not. Erm...

I hope that my work kind of shows that.

-Yeah, that was strong.

-Yeah?

-Yeah.

CAR RADIO PLAYS

# You're the light in my deepest, darkest hour

# You're my saviour when I fall

# And you may not think we will care for you

# When you know down inside

That I really do

# And it's me you need to show

# How deep is your love?

# You love, how deep is your love

# I really need to learn

# Cos we're living in a world of fools

# Breaking us down

# When they all should let us be

# We belong to you and me #

So, which way... Which way is the front line from here?

That way.

# La la la la la la la

# La la la la la la... #

Jesus, I'm going to stay down! Fuck, look at that.

LAUGHTER

-Look at that...

-INDISTINCT

If we get shot at, just jump on it.

GUNFIRE

HEAVY GUNFIRE

MEN SHOUTING

LOUD EXPLOSIONS

MAN LAUGHS

Good?

Crazy.

Yes, it's crazy.

SHOUTING

FIRES GUN REPEATEDLY

SHOUTING ALL AROUND

I risk my life for a lot of different things.

As a documentary photographer I probe this idea the whole time -

of what I am doing, and why am I doing it.

A single photo isn't necessarily a story,

so you have to ask yourself why you put yourself in that position.

And I do it for lots of different reasons.

I do it, also, for personal reasons.

As much as I do it for the objective truth.

In war, you see so many crazy things happening.

You see all sorts of human emotions crystallise.

Reporting on these things that are very complex and political,

it gives you an insight into human behaviour

that imbues your reporting with a sense of meaning and significance.

It's addictive in that way.

Yeah.

BIRDSONG

As a photographer, you need to develop a way of working that

suits your personality

but also allows you to bring out the subject matter

that you think is important.

At the root of my work is really this whole idea of intimacy.

I become deeply embedded emotionally in all the work I do.

Wow! She's a really bright character, uh?

How old are you?

MAN TRANSLATES

-Nine years old.

-Nine years old!

What's her favourite time at school?

-Tamil.

-You seem very intelligent for nine.

Just keep looking here, and don't move.

It is necessary, I think, in raising consciousness

of serious political or social events

to create something that works on a more imaginative level.

Something that will allow the viewer

to engage creatively with the subject.

Can you see me? Hello!

OK, we're going to swap now.

You are going to come and sit here.

For me, it's all about personalisation.

Often we see scenes of disaster

and it's almost like we forget that the people imaged are individuals,

with individual stories and lives.

You don't? OK, no problem.

Ask him, "Was that painful?"

-Yeah.

-It was painful?!

TIM LAUGHS

That's the sad truth about photography!

I got into photography because I got into travel.

I lived in 12 different places in Britain.

I never had community that I lived with.

And what I do now is a reflection of that.

Because of my work,

we moved around quite a lot.

I don't say that we were... that the family was gypsies,

but Tim certainly was brought up in a family

that was used to living in different parts of the country.

WOMAN: He was always very comfortable and confident with people.

And I think that was one of his great gifts.

That he could communicate at whatever level,

whether it was children or adults,

and in whatever condition.

As an undergraduate at Oxford,

Tim had a very wide and enquiring mind,

and was intensely interested in everything

that took his attention.

He finished his degree and went to India.

After a year, we couldn't get back.

I had three faxes in over two years

from him from odd places.

He was a person who seldom became a tourist.

His mind and the interest led him really to immerse himself.

That commonplace impulse was at the foundation of the rest of his life.

It occurred to me that we were living in an image-based world,

erm, and that that would be an interesting way

to communicate with people.

Eventually, a friend of mine pointed out that

if I wanted to do this properly I should go back to college,

and there was course in Cardiff he pointed out on photojournalism

and he said, "That's telling stories with pictures, right?"

I thought, "Well, that's pretty... That's kind of what I want to do."

As I remember Tim, in '96,

he was a big, rangy fellow.

Tall, thin, very affable.

And he had a nice laugh.

And a relaxed manner about him.

But he was also, obviously, very bright. And he was also warm.

My whole belief about photography

is that it's about engaging with people.

And Tim engaged with people with knobs on.

I think he was willing to put himself in difficult situations.

He did a piece about hospital.

As it turned out he'd been 24 hours at A&E,

which most of us wouldn't dream of doing at the time.

It's a lot of dedication to spend 24 hours in that situation.

FILM SOUNDTRACK

It was a pointer to the way he worked,

and what he did later on.

Tim embraced...

And he was the only student that year who really got into it.

He embraced multi-media.

I think of him as, probably my first genuinely modern student.

He saw, right from the word go,

that the future wasn't going to be just about print.

The future is about learning to work across many different platforms

and many different audiences, in many different ways.

It's about having a subject matter

that you've immersed yourself in completely.

And he had a way of being able to do that, that was remarkable

and not many people have been able to do that.

Photography liberated me from the workplace. It made me free.

It would allow me to express myself.

It channelled me.

It made me free from a, kind of, destructive tendency that

I guess I had inside myself.

So, I could channel my energy somewhere.

It made me free to move and I need to move, that's just how I am.

It's OK? Yeah, you carry on, no problem.

I love working with people.

I think that I can move into diverse situations as a stranger,

fairly easily.

I spent the last many years doing that.

How do you say "very good" in Tamil?

-Alam.

-Alam is good?

-Very good?

-Yeah, alam.

Alam, OK, your English...alam.

I know about five words of about 30 languages.

Alam.

I find that instead of the interaction ruining

the dynamic of the images, it actually break through that

ice straightaway and allows you just to get on and start working.

I mean, it's really obvious I'm there.

I'm a big white guy, I'm in your country and for me

to pretend otherwise is just plain stupid.

It's nice to see, yeah.

How do I say goodbye?

Not goodbye, I'll see you again.

-Foi du arum.

-Foi du arum.

OK, cos I'm going to walk off...OK, so, foi du arum.

Erm, nandri.

THEY LAUGH

The idea of becoming a journalist

and illustrating my own ideas came about in '99.

And that was

when I found out about a group of footballer from Liberia

coming to the UK on a football tour

and they were ex-combatants who fought in the war in Liberia.

Here they were, from one of the poorest countries in the world,

visiting one of the richest and I thought

that was a really interesting

story about worlds colliding.

And they said, "You know what?

"We're looking for somebody to go to Liberia. Will you go for us?"

And that's how it all began.

When I went to Liberia it just blew me away.

I'd never experienced a country like that before in my life.

And it was two years after the end of the civil war,

two years into the reign of Charles Taylor

and I went to photograph football as one of the more positive

things that was going on in Liberia at the time.

Heeling Sport was the first coherent project that

I made as a photographer.

I made it under the idea of Trojan Horses.

The idea was, can we talk about things that people

are reluctant to talk about by disguising them in other vehicles?

And so, basically, Healing Sport was about war

but it was disguised as sport.

After working in Liberia, I went to Sierra Leone in '99.

A rebel army, The Revolutionary United Front,

the RUF had invaded Freetown.

I went with a surgeon into the interior

and we came across people that had been blinded by the rebels.

So, I made a series of portraits of them.

CHILDREN SING

Many of the children lost their appearance.

We have to take care of them.

Are you listening to me?

-CHILDREN:

-Yes.

There was one girl, Safi, who had a rebel beat up her father,

killed him and raped the mother.

And then when she started crying, they melted this plastic

and dropped it into her eyes and that made her to be blind.

Tim's work at the Milton Margai School for the Blind

was really pivotal to what

happened next in his career.

He became really invested in those children's lives.

A lot of photographers, I think, are presenting their work like,

you know, "You have to see this!

The world needs to see this!"

This, you know, moral outrage.

For me, moral outrage motivates me but I don't see it as a useful

tool to get people to engage with the world.

I think that we need to build bridges to people.

He didn't give a Western audience the images that they

expected to see,

of the worst stereotypes of what violence in West Africa means.

What he came back with was a really in-depth, personal profile,

not just of the horror that they'd been through

but of the hope that they had of where they were going.

What Tim saw in the blind school were the effects of war.

He wanted to understand how it would be caused in the first place.

And I think that what he went on to do in West Africa,

when he came to Liberia with me,

when he stepped into the middle of that war was to see very

clearly who was perpetrating these acts of violence and why.

I first met Tim because rang me up out of the blue and said,

"Hi, you don't know me, my name's Tim Hetherington, I'd really

"like to come to Liberia with you and take photographs of the rebels."

Erm, and I was, kind of, taken aback.

The idea of just suddenly taking Tim along and, you know,

throwing that exclusive out of the window.

It's like, "Yeah, sure, come along,

"It's never going to happen, right."

It was one of those meetings where things just clicked.

And, you know, he's the same height as me, we had similar education...

He came along to shoot video for the film that we were making

but part of the deal was that he'd be able to shoot

entirely his own portfolio of photographs.

SOLDIER CHANTS: The official government of Liberia is our enemy!

THEY SHOUT

THEY SING AND CHANT IN NATIVE LANGUAGE

In a way I felt guilty, you know.

I mean, Tim had never been in combat,

he'd never been on a front line in war like this before.

I mean, he was totally unfazed!

But then he didn't really know what was about to happen next.

You can see, yeah?

So, you think he's a good driver or rubbish?

No, he's a good driver.

The rebels from the North, the LURD, who Tim was travelling with were

largely ethnic Mandinka and they felt really cast aside by Taylor's regime.

So, to join up with the rebels

would be to throw your lot in with

a bunch of young men, teenagers at best

and you're going to walk through some of the most traitorous jungle

conditions that you can find anywhere,

towards a regime that's one of the most feared regimes in West Africa.

Charles Taylor's regime was considered

the source of instability for Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.

THEY CHANT AND SING

The nature of the fighting in Liberia, it wasn't

just two armies facing each other off.

It was two groups of young men absolutely enamoured with

the theatrics of war.

They used the drama to instil fear

but they also used it to give themselves courage.

And the effect that that has on you...is terrifying!

HE SPEAKS IN NATIVE LANGUAGE

It's, kind of, strange doing a job where you're going out

and you're looking for fighting.

I remember in Liberia going down a road

and there was fucking heavy fighting up there.

There was shelling, bombing and I'm like, we're walking that way?

It's like two corners and we're walking there,

are we fucking insane!?

GUNSHOTS

Down, down, down, down, down...

GUNSHOTS

Oh, fuck!

GUNSHOTS

You really think,

"Man, you wanted this and now it's just gone too far.

"You're really fucked in there, you're going to end up dead.

"You've let everybody down and just for what?

"For a picture, you know?"

And that's very frightening, that's the ultimate loss of control.

HEAVY GUNSHOTS

Tim was just in it!

There comes a point where that just is your reality that stops

becoming weird and different.

It's just what you're living and breathing at that moment.

GUNSHOTS

Oh, fuck, I'm fucking tired.

You really don't know how you're going to react in a combat zone

and I reacted OK, when it first happened to me

and I can, kind of, keep my head together.

I think I just have the ability to go,

"OK, I've got to do this fucking shit, I hate this shit, OK,

"Click that side of the brain off." I can just do that.

And I looked at Tim and I thought, you know, "He's cool."

I'd spent so long working there alone, and suddenly

I was there with someone who really had his shit together,

who really knew what he was doing,

who was filming great stuff, taking amazing pictures, and to get...

..both video and stills,

but really good, that's hard.

That's hard.

Not being so much interested in action

or traditional war photography, what I've tried to do in the work

was bring a quieter kind of reflection to images of conflict

and I've done that by using a medium-format Rolleiflex.

It's a square-based format which is suited to portraiture.

The great thing about using those kinds of cameras in war,

apart from the fact that no-one else was,

the fact that you had to slow down and look for the moment,

it's almost like he saw a different layer, visually, to the conflict.

It changes the dynamic of my relationship to people.

I look down into the camera at them. I'm very tall.

If I put a camera to my face, it's like an object in a war zone,

I stand out, I'm very threatening, so I changed the way that I worked.

It also means that I can talk to people whilst I photograph them.

So you hear some photographers who all say they never talk to people,

that it's this objectivity thing.

No, no, no, no. Stay, stay.

You know what? I've got to talk to people.

Tim's work was not about war.

Tim's work was about human nature.

There's this picture of a fighter about to head off to the battle

and you recognise it immediately exactly for what it is,

this moment of saying goodbye.

It's this moment that speaks such a greater truth

about what war does to people than seeing the action.

I was documenting different things at different times

but one consistent thing that I saw

as I travelled around the country during the war,

it was this war graffiti that had been painted by armed factions

in houses that they'd taken over.

And I started to document this.

The names of people became very important,

being able to trace where certain fighters were.

Taylor perfected a system of inversion in Liberia,

where kids became killers, where women were carrying ammunition

and so the graffiti, it sort of, for me, has all of that loaded into it.

It was like these psychic scars of the war.

I think they have far more power,

for me, than some of the more gory images

that were taken by press photographers.

Well, we've just come in from, we walked yesterday about...

-How far?

-About 35 miles.

About 35 miles. Nothing to eat,

we slept at Po River Bridge, about ten of us in a fucking sentry post,

and then we just endured...

fucking I don't know, 5, 10km of firefights

to make it here to the beer factory and I'm pretty fucked.

-Did you just have a refreshing drink?

-I did!

The beer factory's over there!

-And how good was that refreshing drink?

-It was fucking awesome

but I can't wait for my first beer in the Mamba Point Hotel.

We got to the beer factory,

which the rebels had turned into their sort of headquarters,

and they'd also converted the interior into a makeshift clinic.

And after about an hour or so, Iron Jacket, deputy chief of staff,

he decided that this doctor,

paramedic, from Monrovia was a government spy.

THEY SHOUT

I turned around, I could see this happening,

and I'd already filmed several executions in Liberia

and I thought, "It's going to be another execution,"

so I turned around and got it in a wide shot.

Next moment, Tim comes in.

He grabs the, um...

..the gun hands of Iron Jacket,

and starts negotiating for the guy's life,

and just says, "Look, you know, this is the only doctor you've got,"

and really just put himself directly in the path of this.

They led the guy off. They didn't shoot him. And very shortly,

he was back treating wounded at the hospital again.

Tim had this ability to...

..just do very surprising things.

You know, he didn't see a division between being a photographer

or a videographer or a journalist

or a humanitarian or a participant.

He was just Tim. And that...

It's very hard to find that.

Tim was almost immeasurably affected by what he had seen.

The horrors that had been perpetrated.

It was something that sort of

sat on his shoulder a bit, really,

and it reinforced his attitude to...to the world.

I remember him one saying to me, you know, "You're very rich."

And I said, "Well, with what definition?"

He said, "You are very rich because

"you are able to control and determine your own life

"and avoid the absolute devastation that I have seen overwhelm people."

He was very forceful about it.

He said, "No, no, no, you must understand.

"We are all very privileged."

You know, working at war,

myself, Tim, other journalists

develop mechanisms to cope.

A lot of the time, I think Tim looks for refuge in his work.

GUNSHOTS

Striving, always to be the best and to get it right and to be different.

GUNSHOTS

I think that brought him a lot of comfort

and it helped him to assimilate what he saw at war.

MUSIC

There were lots of atrocities committed during the war in Liberia.

I witnesses all sorts of different things.

But more importantly,

what I witnesses were the power relationships that happened

between the guys on the ground and the people directing it.

I was interested in young men in power,

young men and violence.

I think the war is part of the hard-wiring of young men.

And they are really ultimately used as tools for political process

because of genetics and chemistry.

MUSIC

The interesting thing that I've recently come to understand

is that the role of witnessing carries a strong responsibility.

This is the only photograph that exists of the mortaring of Monrovia

that killed over a thousand people.

The leader of these rebels denied that his men had mortared the city

and everybody said,

"No, we have seen the picture. We've seen the picture."

Suddenly, you realise you are part and parcel of this

important historic process of coming to terms with what happened.

MUSIC

I decided, at the end of the war, to stay on in Liberia.

It seemed that although the war had finished,

my job was not finished.

I felt that what Liberia needed

was for people to really take part in the society.

And I was, I lived and worked in West Africa for eight years,

three or four of those in Liberia.

It shows Tim's commitment. He went in and he stayed in.

And he works as a film maker and as a photographer,

as a teacher, as a mentor,

as an investigator

and as a humanitarian.

HE LAUGHS

OK.

That's you.

And me.

'I have no desire to be a kind of war firefighter,

'flying from war zone to war zone.

'I have no, really, I don't really care about photography.

'I have no interest in photography per se.

'I'm interested in reaching people with ideas

'and engaging them with views of the world.'

Me, Tim. You?

-Jama.

-Jama?

-Yes.

So, Tim...

EXPLOSION

All right.

-Jesus Christ.

-What just happened?

Oh, we were fucking walking down the hill...

I think we were their targets.

It was just right, very close over our head, incoming.

I heard a kind of sniper or something. It was like...

We heard five rounds or so.

MUSIC

HELICOPTER

I had this idea of following a platoon for an entire deployment

in Afghanistan.

And I realised I needed to work with a photographer

who was really comfortable shooting video as well.

I needed someone who was in shape, who could carry a lot of gear,

and who had been in a lot of combat.

Basically, I needed someone like Tim

and then I met Tim.

In my work as a photographer and film maker,

I always look to be as close to the subject as possible.

You're always looking for those moments

when the machine breaks down,

where there's cracks in it.

And I think what happened to us,

in terms of being given access into this remote valley in Afghanistan,

was that people kind of forgot about us.

And I think it was that persistence of going back and back

that gave us such unique access.

Hey, guys.

How you doing?

INAUDIBLE SPEECH

Ah, you know!

LAUGHTER

Perfect day for a stroll.

When Tim and I got into the valley,

the things that soldiers evaluate are "Are you going to cause a problem?

"Are you going to freak out during combat and need to be taken care of?"

And finally, "Are you going to be, sort of,

"nasty and political about all this?"

And Tim and I were clearly not doing that.

Listen up.

Today we're going to conduct a move in and contact

in the village.

I've got 11 US personnel.

Five A and A, one terp and Sebastian and Tim.

Does anyone have any questions?

INAUDIBLE SPEECH

I think what was interesting was working with one platoon of soldiers

in this valley in Afghanistan.

In some ways, I could have been anywhere.

You know, it could have been any war.

I was looking at the experience of the American soldiers,

I wasn't necessarily trying to say anything about a truth

of Afghanistan or the truth of the political realities on the ground.

WHISTLE

In here.

It was a very different kind of project for Tim to take on,

for Tim to spend all of this time with American soldiers,

because Tim's instincts would have been much more

to just spend time with Afghan civilians.

But what comes through is that war is difficult for everybody.

MAN SPEAKS IN AFGHAN LANGUAGE

If there was anything, you know, suspicious going on,

would he be willing to tell us? Come up at any time to let us know?

The world was very much focused on Iraq.

And I thought that we would be walking around the mountains,

we would be drinking cups of tea with elders.

We'd occasionally get shot at and it would be pretty uneventful.

But it was completely the opposite.

GUNSHOTS

SHOUTING

Right over the fucking ridge, man.

GUNSHOTS

I was completely surprised by the amount of fighting going on.

These guys were in a lot of combat.

People really hadn't raised their heads up to what was happening.

Oh, shit!

-You good?

-I'm good, I'm good.

SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY GUNSHOTS

He's still in there!

GUNSHOTS

Shit, man.

GUNSHOTS

During that time, what was interesting was that,

not to belittle the fighting, but I got kind of tired of it.

For me, whilst there is a certain amount of adrenaline

to do with combat and filming that, I mean,

for me the really important stories are being close to these men.

That's what it's about. That's what, really, I'm there for.

-HE GROANS

-OK.

-Welcome to the beauty parlour(!)

-Yep.

Good morning. So... here we are in the, er...

It's the equivalent to the barber shop.

-This is the compere for the day.

-What's about to happen, Tim?

Er, I'm going to let this lunatic at me with a pair of clippers.

I don't know why!

Take one look at him - would you trust this man?

What's the name of this particular haircut?

It's called the High And Tight.

For English purposes, it will be called the High And Mighty!

-Oh, this is what they do to you when you first join the military?

-Oh, no!

-You want to see what they do?

-Yeah!

-Here he is, ladies and gentlemen.

-How does it look? Pretty sexy, eh?

My grandpa - he'll sit there and tell stories about World War II

and shit like that. He doesn't tell stories about the war -

he tells stories about the whorehouses in the different countries.

THEY CHUCKLE

"When I was in Calcutta, India, Jesus Christ!

"Craziest fucking broads there you ever fucking met.

"They do things that just blow your mind!"

So, while you're in Amsterdam, Tim,

are you going to go see the red-light district?

It depends if my girlfriend comes with me or not!

THEY CHUCKLE

Oh, yeah, fuck!

'The lure of a place like Restrepo inhabits a much more profound place

'in young men than just, "Oh, I need some adrenaline." '

Tim called it the Man Eden.

'It was just, sort of, for the young male psyche, this easy place to be.'

-What are we doing?

-Well, we've found a new hole to dig in.

You'd think after so many months of being here,

we'd be fucking done with this shit but we're not, so...

Filling sandbags on the side of a mountain,

waiting to get shot at, while making fun of each other

and eating bad food and telling bad jokes.

It was a great place to be if you're a man!

There was no social norms.

I think that doesn't happen a lot in our society.

Out there, it didn't matter how you were dressed

and it didn't matter how you looked, how much money you made.

It didn't matter how hot your girlfriend was.

If you weren't filling sandbags, you were fucking wrong.

One of the pictures I really like

is what I call my Man Eden picture.

It really isn't, like,

a kind of war photograph.

It's a very pastoral scene to it.

It kind of brings up ideas of medieval paintings

and kind of indicated that the work was going in another direction.

As I stayed on, then I was starting to make these more nuanced pictures

about men and war and these kind of relationships, the boredom...

MEN LAUGH

Stop!

He's like a wild animal, guys!

Fuck, dude! Ow!

'They're just family.

They're the best guys ever...

That you could ever be with.

You know, even the guys you don't like, you love 'em.

Even the guys you fight with, you argue with,

you'd still die for 'em so how much can you hate 'em?

Talking about dudes that, you know, work together

and you think, 13 months - you start to fall apart.

But the truth is, it's only brought us closer.

Come on, Tim!

Hey, Sebastian, grab these two cans and bring them down.

'Tim had been in a lot of combat in Liberia

'and I think one of the things he was'

looking for after that experience...

..wasn't the truth about combat as a form of conflict,

but the truth about combat as a form of bonding.

And what he saw with his camera,

in this environment of killing and fear and hardness,

was connection.

My grandfather was a professional soldier.

He fought right through the Burma campaign.

He lost all of his friends.

And I said to him,

"Do you regret any of this? Would you change any of it?"

And he explained it to me like this.

He said, "War is the only opportunity that men have in society

"to love each other unconditionally."

And it's understanding the depth of emotion at war

that Tim was fascinated with.

HE MUTTERS

MUSIC: "Buffalo Soldier" by Bob Marley

# Buffalo soldier... #

What's going on?

We were down at the cemetery and a round hit me right in the head.

Knocked the shit out of me. Knocked me out for a minute.

I heard somebody say,

"We got a WIA. Steiner's been shot in the head."

Then I heard somebody say, "He's fucked up."

That's when I came to and told them I wasn't.

Just flashing blue spots in your eyes.

-It's pretty good to be alive. Good day.

-Come here, man!

Yeah, that's... That ain't very nice to look at right there!

That almost went through, you know?

I'd be floating around with a halo and some wings.

Just drinking beers with the Almighty!

THEY LAUGH

You're going to hell. We're all going to hell!

We commit premeditated murder on a daily basis. I mean, come on!

Come on! It's not murder. It's war. There is a difference.

'War is very confusing to soldiers.

'It's so terrible when it's happening'

and then you miss it so terribly when it's over.

The experience of being part of a group like that

is not reproducible in society.

Restrepo is a distillation of what Sebastian and I

have really come to understand about young men and war.

The war machine isn't just technology and bombs,

missiles and systems and this kind of CNN TV-mediated world.

The war machine is,

put a group of men together in extreme circumstances

and get them to bond together

and they will kill and be killed for each other.

At the end of the day, you realise they were all young men

just put together on this mountain. All they were trying to do

is survive and look after each other, so they all got back alive.

That was it, really. Nothing to do with war.

Nothing to do with the politics.

One day, it was this incredibly hot, boring day

and everyone's asleep except the guys on guard duty.

I mean, this is the ultimate situation

where nothing's going on - you can just switch your brain off

because there's no work to do as a journalist.

And I see Tim scuttling around with his camera

and he's photographing the soldiers who are asleep.

I said, "Tim, man, what are you doing?"

He said, "Don't you get it?" Of course, I didn't.

I never did, often, with Tim.

"Don't you get it?"

And he said, "This is what the American public never gets to see

"because any nation is self-selecting in the images it presents."

We want to see our soldiers as strong.

We don't want to know that they're also these vulnerable boys.

There is something about those sleeping soldiers' pictures.

The sense of, these are just kids, you know?

And to see them stripped down and asleep in wartime...

..conveys this sense of sending off young men to die.

RAISED VOICES

SUSTAINED GUNFIRE

I returned to the Korengal Valley

to go on an offensive combat operation and, during this time,

we saw some

very close fighting, where the American lines were overrun.

251. The enemy's pushed up on the high ground.

I was with a machine-gun crew that managed to hold off one area.

Fuck!

'And then we ran up to a point where we thought the Scouts

'were under attack.'

SOLDIER WEEPS

Goddamn it, man!

-Sergeant, what happened?

-Our guys just got overrun....

..we lost one. Got two wounded right now.

We're about to try and get them med-evaced out of here.

I don't know what else to say.

'What, for me, was the real tragedy

'was seeing a young man who sees his best friend get killed.

'Seeing that young man go through that was really upsetting.'

I knew it was going to happen, because I had been in a war before,

I know what it's like to see somebody die in front of you.

But for them to see that, that's something you know that they will

for ever live with.

We're going to take those two wounded out. I want you to get back

-to Eagles. You know where that's at?

-Roger.

-The drop over there.

'At one point, during the ambush,'

I was filming and a colleague of the sergeant who'd been killed

came up to me and started swearing at me and told me to stop filming.

-Go that way.

-What's up?

-It's over that way.

They got his weapon and the fuckin' 240.

-The bad guys?

-Got a good picture?

I'm going to fuckin' smash the camera off his fuckin' face.

-Get the fuck out of here.

-All right. Hey, let's fucking go!

'Later on, he came up to me and said, "I'm really sorry

'"for shouting. I understand you have a job to do."'

But it was really strange to film people who I got close to,

in such a, kind of, moment of trauma.

'I remember, at one point, the Afghan Army tried to drag away

'Larry's body and one of his friends started shouting at them -

'"You can't drag off his body. I'm not seeing you drag his body off

'"like that."'

'You know, those were very traumatic events for me and, you know...

'..you try to, kind of, digest them,

'but it takes time to work over them.'

It is not that traumatic almost getting killed, being in danger,

it really isn't. Makes you jumpy for a while.

But I wouldn't call it deep trauma.

Deep trauma comes from the pain of others...

..in the sense of being part of the thing that's hurting people.

As a journalist, you ARE part of the machine that's hurting people.

You are in a war, shooting images of people who are dead or dying

or wounded or grieving. You are part of it.

And it leaves you, in some ways, quite ashamed.

RAPID GUNFIRE

I just finished a 20-minute short called Diary.

It's the first time where I have located myself in my work.

It's an artistic rendering of what it feels like to do my job.

It's, kind of, very disconcerting sometimes to feel you have lost

the needle of what is..what is graphic, what is, you know,

what is too far.

RADIO TIMECHECK BLEEPS

RADIO: 'You're listening to the BBC World Service for Africa.'

'This is London.'

'The film is a stream of consciousness,

'where you flip between my personal life and my work life

'and so you understand that this'

multiplicity..these different realities that I flip between.

LIVELY CHATTER

We'll find a place where it's playing at a reasonable time.

He has all of these scenes back in his home life,

where he is talking to people,

talking to his girlfriend,

walking around in a field.

But you can see that his mind is actually in another place.

HE CONVERSES WITH CHILD

After a while, war becomes normality...

..and the hard part is not about going to war,

it is about coming back home.

This is England. Early autumn. Look at it.

'I think, in the end, he drove himself into a welter of indecision.'

I remember he once said

to Judith and me... He was bemoaning the fact that he

wasn't married and really couldn't understand why not.

'When we said, "Well, when you are not here, you are in Liberia

"or you are in the Korengal Valley or somewhere equally dangerous

"and you come home and you are, by degrees, damaged or undamaged

"and then, you are here for a month, at most, and then somewhere else

"for another three months. Why are you surprised you're not married?"

One of his deepest fears, I think, was that he didn't want to be alone.

Nobody wants to be alone. He wanted to have a family.

He was trying to establish some kind of finality with violence,

with combat, so that he could then move on to the complicated

challenge of a really deep, committed relationship with a woman.

-Hi.

-It's the Queen of Somalia.

-The President.

-The President of Somalia.

-It depends how I'm feeling.

-Is this an official state visit?

-Yes.

Yeah? How do you find America?

It is nice!

'I knew from the first day'

that I met Tim that I was in love with him.

I couldn't recognise it right away, but I knew it and he did, as well.

Walking around with him

was almost like walking around with a set of, you know, ten eyes.

He was always so inspired, you know.

We could go to McDonalds

and he'd probably find some kind of creative inspiration there.

It was never-ending, and when I met Tim, he told me he was done with war.

Erm, I don't know, at the time, if I believed him,

knowing, slowly knowing his body of work, but he was so clear,

you know, "I'm done with war."

He was ready to almost start a new chapter in New York.

But whether he was done or not, I supported him.

I don't know if I want to stay covering conflict any more.

It's a very destructive thing to carry on beyond a certain age,

not least because if you look at the ages by which conflict

photographers get hurt it's usually as they get older

because you're inured to the risks more.

You know, I know when a story's good,

and I know where a story's good,

and where that is is usually in the most dangerous area,

and I won't do any of the other stuff, I'll just go straight

to where I think it should be. I don't know.

-You got me at a low point.

-HE LAUGHS

I'll have a drink later, cheer up!

I think Tim came out of Afghanistan

and out of our close calls out there very much with

the sense that it was time to stop the combat reporting,

and he couldn't quite get himself to do it.

He was on a cycle that, you know, eventually,

I mean, weirdly, ironically...

..landed us at the Oscars.

This is our first time doing all this, we're first time film-makers,

it's all a surprise for us, we're absolutely delighted and honoured.

The most important thing for us is that the film is played wide

across America, the people responded to it...

'Our Oscar experience was quite surreal.'

Erm, I think most of the time we were there

we couldn't believe that we were there.

I'm not wearing my body armour today but I think I should be,

judging by the crowds and the amount of press here.

I think it was very intoxicating to him and kind of alarming.

'And, you know, we're working journalists, right?

'So while this is going on the Arab world's in flames.'

SHOUTING AND CHANTING

By the time Libya came, Tim felt the need to get close to the stories,

you know, get close to the current events.

You know, the world was changing and we were on a red carpet,

so far removed from reality.

All of his colleagues were there, you know, and he was in a tuxedo

in Los Angeles, it just, it just didn't feel right.

He wanted a project,

but I also think he wanted to understand something,

the sort of self-referential idea about war,

where soldiers in war

see themselves in ways that are informed

by images of other soldiers in war,

and there's a conscious cycle of imitation going on.

He just started to realise there was a feedback loop.

The theatre of war in Liberia and the theatre of war in Libya,

at opposite ends of Tim's career, were fundamentally connected by one

really important question that Tim was trying to answer, which is,

"How do young men see themselves at war - and why?"

When he told me that he was going to Libya, I was incredibly apprehensive,

and I said to him, "I have a very bad feeling about it.

"I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing.

"It's a dangerous sort of situation

"and a dangerous part of the world at a dangerous time."

And he said, "Well, you know, I've been in danger before."

And I said, "Yes, I know, but you're going to be on your own in Misrata."

'It was difficult to read the news about Libya,

'and all the while knowing that Tim was there.'

However, we were in such constant contact

and we'd created this vision and narrative for the direction

we were going into that, erm,

death was not a part of, you know, the picture, despite the work.

GUNFIRE, EXPLOSIONS AND SHOUTING

We had a very explicit conversation about how dangerous Libya was,

where I said, "Come on, Tim, you can do this work

"without getting up to the front lines, you know.

"Don't take the risk, this is not your story right now."

But somehow, there is the other journalists going and there's,

you know, three other people going

and you sort of forget what your immediate mission is

and you want to go closer and closer to where the action is.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

MEN SHOUT

In a war you lose a lot of things.

One of the things that you lose can be the original connection

that took you there.

I felt that they were not, you know, paying the proper attention

and the proper respect to everything that was happening around.

They were actually trying to get in front of the rebels.

I think, me, I didn't realise

what the danger was where we were, you know.

Tim, I think, realised, because he was, like,

looking at everything, like, with a face, like, you could tell he was

aware of what was going on, really.

MEN SHOUT

The rebels that were with us, suddenly one of them fell

and he was, like, he was shot in the head, you know.

And we took him out.

GUNFIRE AND SHOUTING

And then, at that point, we looked at each other, all of us,

like, I mean, I felt real danger to be there.

And I think all of us, because we all decided to leave that place.

And there was a side street, and we all kind of stopped at it,

and it was this really eerie scene of this open truck, erm,

filled with Kaddafi soldier uniforms,

and they were all over the ground and there was a helmet,

a green helmet with a bullet hole right through the top of it.

Tim took a photo of it.

And I liked that spot too because it was behind a corner,

and I didn't like being on Tripoli street.

And then there was just this huge blast.

EXPLOSION AND SHOUTING

There was a lot of dust.

I saw seven, ten bodies lying at the same place,

and I thought at that moment, "Oh, my God, they were there."

GUNFIRE AND SHOUTING

I thought Tim was OK. He was holding his leg but he was shouting,

so... But Chris wasn't moving, wasn't speaking.

I saw a pick-up car with two guys,

and said, "Please, please, come, come."

And they helped me to put their bodies into the back of the pick-up.

Chris and Tim.

Tim was still conscious, but getting dizzy, getting...

losing consciousness, so I took his hand,

just to make him awake, and to say, "Tim, come on. Don't fall asleep.

"We are getting to the hospital."

Whenever I talked to him, he was like that, like that.

Like when you wake up someone who is sleeping, and...

then falling asleep again.

But each time he was more, like, going away.

And at one point, he wouldn't wake up again.

INDISTINCT VOICES

Give them space. Give them space.

Something very unusual happened to me on that day.

There were some beautiful flowers outside the shop, and I...

Chose some red roses,

got back to the car, and...

..I lifted the boot to put the red roses in, and I just...

..I don't know, I just felt something incredibly...

I just felt I didn't want to take the red roses home. I just...

And I...

And it's something I've never, ever done in my life before -

I took the red roses back and I went and chose 12 white roses,

and took them home and...

When I got home, um...

They were in my arms when I found out that...

Through the Home Office, that Tim had died,

and I just dropped them on the floor.

The deaths of two outstanding photojournalists, Tim Hetherington

and Chris Hondros, have caused enormous sadness, not only among

friends and family but also within the entire community of journalists.

Hetherington, aged 40,

was a consummate professional who took the job of war reporting

as seriously as anyone in the history of this business.

No, I never thought that...

Tim was going to be killed.

It sounds naive to say that now.

This is my mum and dad, with my book.

What are you looking at, Mum?

'People don't assume that, you know,

'family members or people close to them are going to be killed,

'even though they do have a very dangerous occupation.'

-Oh, you! Stop crying.

-No, it's good.

-It's nice.

-Yeah.

-It's really emotional.

-Yeah, good.

-It's meant to be emotional.

-Mm.

'It was...'

Yeah, it was...

completely devastating.

I went to Sebastian's house,

and that's where I got the news, and I didn't believe it at first.

I didn't believe it.

It was so worth it, because...

We didn't compromise in our relationship.

So why would we compromise our passion and our work?

And aspects of our lives that...

..made us feel fully alive and fully realised human beings?

I wouldn't have compromised,

so I don't think he should.

'I get an e-mail from a Vietnam vet that we had both met in Texas,'

and he said, "I'm so sorry about your friend Tim."

He said, "You guys, you know, with your...

' "With your movie and your books, like, you really...

' "You really came close to understanding a war." '

We're going to war. We're going to war.

'He said, "I'm worried this is going to sound callous, but...

' "You didn't get all the way. '

"The core reality of war isn't that you might get killed out there.

"That's obvious.

"The core truth about war is that you're guaranteed

"to lose your brothers.

"And now you've lost a brother

"and you know everything you need to know about it."

And it wasn't callous, what he said, it was...

I mean, the truth can't be callous. It's the truth.

And finally, I got it.

HE CHUCKLES

MUSIC: "Danny Boy" by Frederic Weatherly, performed by The Pogues

# Oh, Danny boy, the pipes

# The pipes are calling

# From glen to glen

# And down the mountain side

# The summer's gone

# And all the roses falling

# 'Tis you

# 'Tis you must go and I must bide

# But come ye back

# When summer's in the meadow

# Or when the valley's hushed

# And white with snow

# 'Tis I'll be there

# In sunshine or in shadow

# Oh, Danny boy

# Oh, Danny boy

# I love you so

# But if you come

# And all the flowers are dying

# If I am dead

# As dead I well may be

# Ye'll come and find

# The place where I am lying

# And kneel and say

# An Ave there for me

# And I shall hear

# Though soft you tread above me

# And all my grave shall warmer, sweeter be

# If you will bend and tell me that you love me

# Then I will sleep in peace until you come to me. #