Fergal Keane

I did this. Then I did that. I went here. After that I went there. And there too. I saw this and that, and then more and more. But does it mean anything at this stage of the story? By now have you not had proof enough of the state of my reckless, addicted mind? Christ, I am weary writing this, thinking about what it says of who I was in those days. But that is the point: clarity only emerges for me as I set this down. Not every place told an easily defined story of psychological show more disintegration, but they would accumulate and set my face towards a reckoning.
—Fergal Keane

Moral wounds have this peculiarity – they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.
—Alexander Dumas

I first encountered Fergal Keane in a 2004 PBS Frontline documentary, Ghosts of Rwanda. He was Africa correspondent for the BBC and travelled into the central African country in July 1994 during the genocide. The Frontline episode includes footage of him and his crew making their way along a narrow, densely overgrown road to a church where Tutsis who sought sanctuary were massacred by Hutus. After watching the film, I read Keane’s Season of Blood about his time in Rwanda. It is a harrowing book about an experience that changed him profoundly.

I’ve thought a lot about those who lived through the genocide, including General Romeo Dallaire and the UN peacekeepers sent to Rwanda on a mission that was doomed to fail, given the lack of troops, resources, and the apathy of the West. I had never deeply considered the impact of this atrocity on the journalists who were there and those who report from one war zone after another. According to Keane, “the idea that the mental disturbances of war might extend to journalists is comparatively recent.” The first major study of war reporters and PTSD appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2002. 25% of the group of journalists studied experienced PTSD, a lifetime prevalence rate similar to that of combat veterans.

I recently came upon a 2013 NPR interview in which Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning American journalist/war correspondent and self-described “adrenaline junkie,” commented on the psychology of those who report from conflict zones:

Foreign . . . war photographers, war correspondents are a small fraternity, and they tend to leap from conflict to conflict to conflict . . . And the longer you do that, the less able you are to fit in at home or even in a society not at war. I think that, you know, soldiers call it a combat high. That’s very real. Those adrenaline rushes become something you need. They pervert, deform you. And I think it is much— I've not used drugs, but—I think it is much like an addiction, a drug addiction. And you go back to an environment where you can get those kinds of rushes, but as importantly where you're surrounded by people who have the same kind of pathology.

The Madness, an informative and often wrenching memoir, confirms Hedges’ remarks and then some. Keane opens up about his experiences in many conflict zones, including South Africa, Rwanda, Kosovo, the DRC, Sudan, and Ukraine. Some of these stories concern the tragic loss of colleagues. His main focus in the book, however, is his own mental health: his alcoholism, breakdowns, and diagnosis of PTSD.

Keane appears to have been genetically vulnerable to alcoholism. Éamonn, his father, was addicted. He desperately wanted to give up drink, could not, and died in his mid-sixties after years of alcohol abuse and multiple hospitalizations. As a child of eight, Fergal secretively drank some cider and experienced “an otherworldly sense of relief.” Respectful of family members’ privacy, he provides scant detail about his early home life but makes clear that his childhood, like that of many who grow up with an alcoholic parent, was chaotic and dysfunctional. He writes that he’s been afraid all his life and that, as a boy, he lived in fear that his family would fall apart and he’d be put in an Irish industrial school. Perpetually anxious and hyper-vigilant, he was bullied by classmates for his facial tics and ultimately became deeply invested in the idea of one day proving he could be brave.

Keane drank intermittently as a teenager, but when he was 21, a girlfriend, concerned about his heavy drinking and the sadness that seemed to be fuelling it, referred him to a physician in Cork. The doctor told Keane he could never drink again or it would eventually kill him. Keane was prescribed antidepressants, took them, and abstained from alcohol for several years, but he returned to drinking with a glass of champagne in celebration of a new job. His subsequent career path did him no favours. War correspondents are generally a hard-drinking lot. Self-medication and temporary emotional-anesthetization with alcohol are common.

Keane is interested in the question of intergenerational trauma, an emerging scientific field based in epigenetics—the study of the ways in which environmental factors, including traumatic experiences, can turn genes on and off. There is some evidence that genes altered by trauma can be passed on to offspring. Keane was advised by an expert that given the newness of this field, it might be more fruitful for him to focus instead on cultural factors that can create greater vulnerability to psychological trauma. Hence, the early chapters of his book explore some of the turbulent history of Ireland, particularly of County Kerry where his people are from. He speculates that the Famine of the 1800s (which his grandmother’s elders survived and talked about), the Easter Rising, Civil War, and the protracted sectarian violence of the twentieth century have all contributed to the shaping of his character. Born in 1961, Keane grew up with “a consuming curiosity about the world,” a love of history, an “instinctive loathing of bullies,” and “an irresistible compulsion to be where the night was darkest.” It’s clear he was an emotionally wounded person with a compensatory need to demonstrate bravery and fearlessness. Given all these factors, his career choice—reporting from dangerous conflict zones—should perhaps not surprise.

The author’s mental health issues were in evidence from the beginning of his foreign-correspondent work. In 1990 when he was 29, he had his first breakdown at Heathrow Airport while waiting to board a plane to South Africa. Experiencing intense mental anguish, he phoned home crying and barely able to speak, and left his ticket and money belt at a kiosk. When these were stolen, the BBC came through with assistance. He flew to South Africa, but required hospitalization in Johannesburg and then at home. Institutional memory is short, however. He got on with assignments after this first nervous collapse, but he’d suffer periodic breakdowns for the next 25 years. He’d come to learn that confusion, memory lapses, and an overall inability to keep pace with the world were the prodrome of such episodes. Keane believes in retrospect that he had PTSD from childhood. By the time he was actually diagnosed in 2010, his case was a complex one. It had arisen “from exposure to multiple instances of trauma, experienced over a long period” and was consequently significantly harder to treat than a case resulting from a single traumatic episode. I suspect that the addictive rush that Chris Hedges mentions, the alienation from normal work and family life, as well as deeply ingrained behaviour patterns that involved pushing on regardless of distress further complicated matters.

Keane had to be hospitalized and have extended time off work for both of his mental health issues. He was treated for his addiction in 1999 and has been sober for over twenty years. However, it took him much longer to recognize he was “in the grip of a compulsion” more powerful than alcoholism. He could not stop himself from returning to the wars and placing himself in the most dangerous situations. Based on what I know about post-traumatic stress disorder, this really surprised me. Sufferers are typically highly avoidant of situations that bear any resemblance to the traumatic event(s) that precipitated their condition. While Keane did, at a certain point, make clear to the BBC that he would neither cover nor return to Rwanda, until fairly recently he continued to go to other violent and volatile places.

Keane tells many stories about the hot spots he’s reported from. He also considers the nature of evil and provides cynical but illuminating commentary on the entire journalistic enterprise. As might be expected, a significant part of the book is dedicated to describing how he attempted to run from, then wrestle with, his demons, including his hospitalizations, his interactions with his Alcoholics Anonymous advisor and his psychotherapist, a specialist in the treatment of PTSD.

Some of the most moving parts of this rich, intense, and thought-provoking memoir concern his efforts to transform his personal narrative about Rwanda by thinking about the goodness, kindness, and deep humanity of people living in the direst and most distressing conditions. He writes warmly and lovingly of Anatoly and Svetlana Kosse, a Ukrainian couple in their sixties living in the bombed-out village of Piski in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine (whom he met after war began in the eastern part of the country in 2014). He also describes visiting novelist, poet, and Rwandan genocide survivor Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse. Her counsel to him came in the form of a poem by French Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo, whose husband was executed in the camp:

Learn to walk and to laugh
Because it would be too senseless
After all
For so many to have died
While you live
Doing nothing with your life. show less

Road of Bones is a masterpiece of military history, using an single battle to illuminate an entire conflict. Burma is the forgotten front of the Second World War. Relative to most military history buffs, I'm an expert in the theater, because I've read General Slim's memoir Defeat Into Victory, but that doesn't mean that there's plenty more to learn. Kohima was the turning point of the Burma campaign, which Feane uses as a lens to examine the British Empire at it's height, and the Japanese show more Empire at it's greatest extent.

The larger campaign of which Kohima was the final battle was one of those grand throws of the dice which had served Japan so well at Pearl Harbor and Singapore, and which would turn against them later in the war. The basic plan was to march an army through hundreds of miles of trackless jungle, across rivers and ravines, to conquer India, the diamond in the diadem of Empire. In the optimistic Japanese plans, Indian sepoy soldiers would turn against their white officers, and the difficulties of moving supplies would be obviated by capturing British stockpiles. This bold attack, carried out with stealth and surprise, would catch the British in their soft underbelly and lead to a wave of retreats and surrenders which would see IJA troops in Bombay in short order.

In execution, this attack required conquering the border post of Kohima first, with the 15,000 Japanese soldiers of the 31st Division facing off against roughly 2500 British and Indian defenders. The Allied forces in Kohima were line-of-communication troops, bolstered by the veteran King's Own Royal West Kent Regiment and the Assam Rifles. For two weeks, the Allies faced assaults characterized by the fanatic light infantry tactics that the Japanese army relied on. Then a relief column made it through, Japanese food supplies failed entirely, and they began the long, harrowing retreat.

This is more than a military history. Keane captures the entire feeling of the edge of empire in the twilight days of the Raj. I was particularly taken with Ursula Graham Bower, a British woman who was an anthropologist among the local Naga tribes, and who became a guerrilla commander against the Japanese. For reasons of language and literacy, this account is biased towards the British, who had the majority of survivors and surviving documents, but Keane does justice to the Japanese and the Indians who left records. The acrimony between Japanese commanders is astounding, and Keane's book serves as belated vindication of General Sato of the 31st, who did his best to achieve an impossible mission.

Simply an astounding book. show less

Just finished this detailed and well paced account. What is particularly remarkable about this work is that the author weaves research, the people, the story and anecdotes seemingly effortlessly together. The result is an informative and highly readable account, an almost from the bunker level view of the terribly hard fought siege, the build up , the aftermath and everything. Keane has conducted several in-depth interviews of some of the participants on both sides, and so results in a show more balanced account. My only bug bear is that the maps could have been a bit more detailed and legible, but its an insignificant quibble. The author follows the fates of many of the participants and as a result they and the book really come to life. After reading so closely of their trials and tribulations, in many cases their poignant fates, one feels one almost knows some of the fellows, it is a very much over the shoulder feeling, quite uncanny!

Harrowing and moving. A triumph of war literature and bound to be a favourite for many years. It is also a fitting tribute to the men that died there in the epic struggle for survival and victory that was Kohima.

This book should be read alongside other accounts for the fuller historical picture of the battle and the Burma campaign but certainly holds its head up high as a sterling effort.

Highly recommended, one of the best WW2 books I have read. show less

Very good narrative account of crucial battle of Kohima in 1944 to forestall Japanese invasion of Northern India. Good use of Japanese sources and attempt made to present unbiased account of the battle. The differences between the British commanders at Kohima , Laverty and Richards are revealed and the author places great emphasis on the help given to the British forces by the Naga hill tribes. The Japanese underestimated the British / Indian resistance ,which occurred at the battle and due show more to their lack of supplies and the defenders bravery suffered a catastrophic defeat. show less