In September of 2005 when I set out to report on every major conflict in the world in one year for my Hot Zone project -- I had already spent five years covering war and disaster for many of the major television networks. Despite all of that previous time in war zones -- I felt a genuine understanding of conflict still eluded me.
By committing to going to more than twenty wars consecutively -- I hoped that some kind of irrefutable truth would emerge by the end of the project. Fortunately it did. It was the kind of truth that would have the power to turn my previous thinking on it’s head and motivate me to share this truth with anyone who might listen: war poses as combat -- but is really collateral damage.
We in the media and in society at large tend to define war by its smallest and most fleeting feature, combat, while largely ignoring the long-term legacy of civil destruction that results from that combat.
Collateral damage is never a small portion of war, as politicians and generals would have us believe. It is, I learned, its dominant feature.
When the battle is over, civilians continue to die from disease, starvation, sexual violence and the loss of heads of households killed in the fighting and thus leaving their families without protection or means of support.
Combatants too become part of this attrition, forced to kill a little of their own humanity every time they pull the trigger. This trauma travels with them past their deployments and back into their peacetime lives -- which will never be the same.
The Baghdad Rain Project captures in song the same truth of war I had hoped to capture in my Hot Zone reporting. “A Call To Heal” is a series of hauntingly beautiful songs (including the work of Iraqi musician Rahim AlHaj) that speak not only to war’s tragedy, but also to the healing process that we must all work to be a part of -- if we are ever going to find a sense of true peace in society and in our selves.
Photo by Dar Yasin - Srinagar, Kashmir
Kevin Sites is a veteran war correspondent and author of the Harper Perennial book, “In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars.” His reporting can be found on the web at http://hotzone.yahoo.com/.