‘Buoyed by their resilience’: Reporting on life during wartime

Episode transcript

Clay Collins: Many news stories have conflict as a component. Some of those conflicts get “hot.” Wars of whatever size and duration are important to cover, with special attention to clarity, to fairness, and to correspondent safety. The Monitor’s Scott Peterson has reported – with stories and images – from many active theaters, from the Balkans to Baghdad, Afghanistan to Somalia, and more. He has, of course, been covering Ukraine.

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I’m Clay Collins, and this is “Why We Wrote This.” Scott joins us today from London to talk about covering conflict in ways that are a fit with the Monitor’s clear, calm, and constructive approach. Welcome, my friend!

Scott Peterson: Thank you.

Collins: So about 23 years ago in the preface to “Me Against My Brother,” your book about Somalia, Sudan, and the Rwandan genocide of the mid-90s, you wrote, “I don’t consider myself to be a war junkie, flitting from front line to front line.” Now, I’ve known you a long time, and I know that your work indeed has much more range and deeper motivations than that. But when you do end up near the fighting, what job are you hoping to do for Monitor readers?

Peterson: I always go back to what is the object of The Christian Science Monitor, which is “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” There couldn’t be a more noble aspiration for a journalist. And that’s something that’s really informed all of my reporting. I think if you start from that motivation you’re giving people a reason to share their voice with you. I think it also allows you to look at a conflict not just as a case study of human misery and despair, but also one where people are finding ways to persevere, where they are being resilient. And, this is really the real reason that I go into these places. Because you find people at the extreme edges of experience. And what they are producing in response is something that is unbelievable sometimes. And I think, as a journalist, you really need to be there to witness that.

Collins: We spoke via WhatsApp early last March, right after you arrived in Odesa, Ukraine, after having crossed into the country on foot, carrying, I think you said, 60 kilos of gear. You were reporting on civilian resilience and resistance – defiance, really, of the Russian incursions. And those human stories – and our foreign editor Peter Ford remarked on this in an earlier episode of this podcast – really are so central. Where do you begin to look for those, and how sensitive is that part of the work?

Peterson: In the Ukraine example, just everywhere you go, there are incredibly powerful human stories and stories about how people are resisting this Russian invasion. And ultimately, we work with translators. We work with what we call fixers. These are people who, you know, you share your story ideas with. You say, “Listen, I’m hoping to find an example of resistance in Odesa.” You know, to give one case, my translator knew of one man who was in a heavy metal band who also happened to be a welder. And he had just decided that he was going to donate his time to weld some of these tank traps. 

And usually, you know, we’re always putting out feelers and trying to find connections among different people. But ultimately, you know, your most important asset is going to be the translator or the fixer who’s with you, who themselves are key to interpreting certain aspects of their own culture. So I applaud every single one that I’ve ever worked with. 

Collins: You’re one of the Monitor writers, obviously, cycling through Ukraine as we hit the one-year mark there [in] the war. It’s a conflict in which most people, certainly in the West, see pretty clear good and bad actors. How do you find the nuance in a story like that? And do you have any expectations going back in?

Peterson: You know, I think Ukraine is one of those examples that is particularly black and white. I mean, I’ve been in I’ve been in a lot of other conflicts, certainly in the Balkans and, in the Middle East, where there’s an awful lot more gray in the spectrum. But certainly Ukrainian views are very clear in terms of what they’re trying to achieve. The fact that Ukrainians have been able to resist what was an initial Russian invasion, the fact that now they’re receiving so much military help from Western allies and that sort of thing, it really has changed people’s expectations and the picture of what the Ukraine war looks like. But as a journalist trying to cover that, it is important that we look for the nuance, even on the Ukrainian side. Of course, there are issues of corruption that should be written about, and those have recently emerged as big talking points. And there are a lot of factors that are involved there that we should be reporting on, irrespective of the fact that this is a conflict in which you clearly have one country that has invaded another.

Collins: I did want to pivot and ask you about a very different perspective than that of noncombatants. In 2004, you were embedded with U.S. Marines in Fallujah, Iraq, at a critical moment in that conflict, [when there was] house-to-house fighting. How different is it reporting from inside that kind of “band of brothers” setting? How hard is it to maintain some distance?

Peterson: It was as you describe. I mean, it was literally window-to-window fighting. I mean, I still have shrapnel in my arm from an exploding RPG that was part of a battle that was fought between the Marines and some Al Qaeda fighters who were literally on the street across from us. 

You know, there was no access for Western journalists like me on the other side. So finding a balance is more of a fluid term, frankly, than an actual, concrete way of operating. In this case, of course, I was dependent on the Marines for everything. Actually I was No. 3 on one of their four-man teams that would go into these houses. And the Marines themselves were actually kind of shocked that I wasn’t armed. And I told them, “Well, I think you guys have got enough weapons, you know, for everybody. And with my job, there’s no way I could actually carry a gun while also photographing what you’re doing and everything else.” But of course, we as journalists, we never go anywhere, ourselves, armed. We sometimes work with armed guards, as I did recently in Somalia. But in Fallujah, it was a different game. 

In terms of working with the Marines and kind of keeping your distance, of course, when you get to know these people and they themselves are busy, you know, in quite excruciating circumstances in which they are fighting this conflict eyeball-to-eyeball, it is difficult. I wasn’t presented, myself, with any circumstances in which the unit that I was with kind of misbehaved. I know there were other journalists in Fallujah who actually witnessed Marines killing someone that they had detained inside a mosque. But my unit had a different experience. They were also completely professional. It was a remarkable story.

Collins: You’re a career journalist who’s also a spouse and a parent. And you mentioned shrapnel just now in Fallujah. I’m also thinking of you being on the ground in Mogadishu back during the 1993 U.S. military action, the one that’s memorably recounted in “Black Hawk Down.” In those situations, how do you balance a responsibility to do your work with all of the necessary risk-management?

Peterson: This will probably be a surprise to you and to a lot of our listeners. But, you know, I really am actually quite a cautious person. I’m making certain decisions based on having a much broader context of what the threats are. Recently during my trip just to Somalia, not only to Mogadishu, but also to Baidoa, which is kind of the epicenter of the current famine, the threat from Al Shabab, this kind of Al Qaeda-linked group of militants, they have a taste for suicide car bombs, suicide truck bombs, targeted assassinations, and kidnapping. And so I had to travel inside an armored vehicle with other vehicles that were loaded with armed guards. And when visiting a place – for example, to visit a feeding center or a camp for the displaced – for you can’t be on the ground for any more than 30 or 35 minutes at a time in any single location, because then that gives the people who do want to do you harm time to put together some kind of response. 

I have to say that the Ukraine war has presented a new kind of threat experience. In this case, we’re dealing with just full on artillery assaults and airstrikes and things that can really come from nowhere, from a very large distance, and with no warning. And that is the kind of conflict we haven’t had to deal with for a long time. But we’re careful, we’re cautious. I mean, I’m not saying I’m a homebody. But I certainly do take great care and make sure that no one gets hurt.

Collins: Scott, you work for a news organization whose brand is credible hope. I guess I’d like to know where is the needle on your, you know, your personal hope meter after having seen so much human anger and human ego … is it all just so much history repeating?

Peterson: Well, I do find reasons for hope. And one of the stories that has really shown hope to me has been a series that I’ve written about a family in Baghdad. This was a widow with eight children and no money. And the first time I met them, we were sitting on the floor because they had sold a couch to pay for school fees for one of the daughters. I would visit them at times when it was incredibly dangerous to be anywhere near the neighborhood that they were in. Every single time that I left their apartment, after hearing their stories, hearing how they were coping, listening and laughing, you know, with their black humor about how they were just managing every single day, I was just always buoyed by the level of resilience that they demonstrated on a daily basis. 

That daughter, later on, thanks to our stories, actually, ended up going to the [American University of Iraq, Sulaimani] in northern Iraq. She’d just finished her master’s degree in Ohio and is now back in Baghdad, doing quite a good job with the work that she’s [doing]. That is an example of where there is hope, truly, even in some of the darkest places.

Collins: That’s remarkable. Well, thank you, Scott, for your time today and for all of your important work.

Peterson: Thank you.

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Collins: Thank you for listening. For more, including our show notes with links to some of Scott’s stories and to more audio features, go to csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins. Co-producers were Jingnan Peng and Morgan Anderson. Our engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton. Original Music by Noel Flatt. Copyright: The Christian Science Monitor, 2023.