CNN's Michael Ware on Iraq: "I am not the same f#&@ing person. I don’t know how to come home."
By SilentPatriot Friday Dec 12, 2008 4:00pm
CNN's Michael Ware is easily one of the bravest (and best) journalists in America, so when he tells "Men's Journal" about how radically covering the Iraq War has changed him as a person, we should all take note.
“I am not the same f#&@ing person,” he tells me. “I am not the same person. I don’t know how to come home.”
It’s October, six months after our first meeting, and Michael Ware, 39, is at his girlfriend’s apartment in New York, trying to tell me why after six years he absolutely must start spending less time in Iraq. He’s crying on the other end of the telephone.
“Will I get any better?” he continues. “I honestly don’t know. I can’t see the — right now, I know no other way to live.”
Make sure to read the whole thing. It's truly fascinating.
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He is unquestionably the bravest Western journalist in Iraq, but there are plenty of brave journalists in Iraq. Doing that work in Iraq is risking your life everyday, and Ware was captured by A.Q. in Iraq but handed over to the Sunni's who he had gone to interview. The Sunni's demanded the return of this reporter. Ware escaped with his head intact. At least physically attached. Hopefully he finds peace after all he has witnessed. Same for anyone exposed to all that violence.
Bastard warmongers have destroyed countless people's humanity in their quest to remake the people of the world as inhuman as them.
they succeeded. More recruits for the groups that want to blow America into oblivion. More neocons for the other side.
Talk about Mission Accomplished.
Respect and honor to a rare breed...a real journalist instead of a man sitting behind a desk framing question.
When it comes time for Dick Cheney and George Bush to leave this life, I pray that their deaths will be long and agonizing. I hope that as they lay dying they will see the face of every soldier and every civilian that they are responsible for killing.
Amen
Click your ruby red slippers together three times.
He saw the result of our "WOT" first hand.
Limbaugh, Hannity, NPR, MSNBC, CNN... saw what they believe.
Ideology rules when you are not being bombed.
I did not have a dry eye. It hit really close to home for me. I can only thank Mr. Ware for doing what he has done. I hope in the future that he can find some peace.
It's a miracle that Ware is still alive after living in Iraq for so many years and witnessing such unimaginable horrors. He's a brave man who is unafraid to speak the truth. How unfortunate that nobody in the administration listened to him.
Michael Ware has my total respect and admiration. May he find some comfort and solace in his life.
Time to get him out. NOW!! He needs to decompress.
You know what? I and many of the people here are going through the same thing but on a much much much smaller scale after this past election. We put our heart and souls out there and lived the whole thing every day. Michael has been doing the same thing but on a level that we cannot even come close to comprehending. Multiply your fatigue by 10,000 times and you may get an idea of what he has put himself through. Get him out now. Put him on the auto bailout, the economy, the Blogo scandal. Anything but this. I'll give him a vacation place to stay for a while. Seriously! We need him and his kind for many more years and we don't want a basket case.
Is it possible that he's been there longer than a redeployed soldier? just asking. the article is very moving and powerful.
But seriously, he must take a hiatus from the trauma. Because he can.
A good read (for a start) is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychiatrist and survivor of the worst the holocaust offered up. It might offer insights that only Michael Ware and people who experience war firsthand could discern and appreciate.
I agree with Captain Kangaroo that it's time to get this man out now. He needs serious, intense, long-term therapy for PTSD or else we'll all be shaking our heads over his suicide in the not-too-distant future.
Whom can we write to to advocate this idea?
Michael Ware, the only honest man in Iraq.
I've seen and read his reports. They are devastating truths that exposed the monstrous neo-con lies.
Be safe, Michael. Become the Ernie Pyle, or Joe Galloway of this generation’s war and tell their story.
Should pay for this man to have a long overdue vacation and some serious help. It's their fault he's gone through this. CNN owes him this much.
Is one of the co-founders of the very large right-wing Vets PAC Vets for Freedom, FYI.
There is a book out on the NY times 10 best books of the year called "the forgotten war" it is an amazing book written by a NYtimes reporter. Absolutely horrifying when you read it. I'm sure some of it relates to ware
...how our soldiers must feel when they come home not just from Iraq but from all previous wars & conflicts? And this goes for the opposing side. I mean, really, if you look at the Iraqis and the Iranians, they still hold past wars on their faces. Who the hell are we to call them 'barbarians' or whatever it is the right wingers of America have labeled them? Jees. If Michael Ware is having a hard time dealing with 'normalcy', then we can understand how others who are actually living in war must feel.
Ware is a good man and has done an extraordinary job over the years to get the truth out.
Not here, over there. None of the things Michael Ware said in that article are things we haven't heard from countless soldiers for hundreds of years. The way it eats you up. The way you can't forget it. The way it pulls you in, and keeps you there.
I don't have any personal experiences with warzones. But I've read tons of memoirs and scraps of history, those that my father collected to try and sort out and understand HIS father. He fought in WWII, and came back with 2 purple hearts and a Silver Star. Got a job at Xerox, and killed himself when my father was 12. Reading those gave me the distaste for warfare that I have now. It is a horrible, horrible thing.
And what Michael Ware says is yet another reiteration of the voice of those who have gone into battle. The dehumanization that we all understand happens and that is always tragic is here yet again, until it takes us 50 years to see what it was. We all have a story, I think, of a Grandparent or Parent coming into contact with someone who they could've fought against, my mother's father once said of the uncle of someone one of his sons was marrying, and who he shared drinks and laughs with, "I coulda KILLED that guy!"
We all know this is what happens. It's a necessity. What bothers me is the comments over at that site, rolling their eyes and pinning him to journalism in the 60s. I worry a lot about this, these are not radical new things he's talking about. We've always known that once you go to war, you never come back.
And make no mistake, Micheal Ware has been to war as much as any soldier. It is easy to think of him only as a journalist and not somebody who experienced war in the same sense as an army man/woman.
I don't watch CNN very much, but the few times I've seen Ware, he's had a haunted look about him, especially of late.
another Viet Nam paralell to me.
Michael Ware was the first Iraq War correspondent to go off reservation. And it happened in fits and starts. He started out extremely gung ho on the basis of the war and the Bush doctrine.
Or maybe the war I watched was different from the war you all watched.
Dunno.
I'm not sure what he expected would happen but, yeah, war should change people. It's how we keep from having more of them.
Having said that, Ware has shown extraordinary bravery both on the battlefield and in bucking the military's propaganda machine/MSM conventional wisdom. Kudos to him for speaking up.
I wish him peace.
-AF
Andrew Sullivan Is A Fraud
Amongst all the bullshit hype about media bias, everyone loses sight of the fact that journalists are just as traumatised by what they cover as anyone else in the situation.
The ABC journalist Peter Lloyd is currently in a Singapore prison for possession of the drug Ice. He fell into the habit after finding it was the only thing that helped him sleep and forget about the horrific things he has had to cover over the last few years.
When I saw Lara Logan on the Daily Show, it was clear that she was pretty messed up from her experiences, but because she's attractive and female, all people want to talk about is her sex life.
I don't like to equate journalists with soldiers, but these people are as brave as any soldier and deserve everyone's respect and thanks - even if the story they tell is not what you want to hear. In fact, especially if it isn't what you want to hear.
Let's see....the war in Iraq. No, don't seem to remember that one.
That could be because the neocons and Bush/Cheney have successfully kept all of the horrors of the invasion of Iraq off of our TV screens. None of the networks have presented reports on the thousands of returning soldiers who have taken their own lives or about the tens of thousands of military families ruined because of long deployments.
And not that anyone cares, but it might turn a few war supporters heads should they see videos of the two million displaced Iraqis and hear about the one million Iraqis who have died in order for Bush and the neocons could "Free" them.
I agree with Mr.Ware when he says. what our military was asked to do by these warmongers in power was a war crime!
...is there any War that is not a crime against humanity??!!
We like to think we've evolved as a species...I guess we have. Now we can kill hundres or thousands - maybe millions - with just the turn of a key, push of a button. Ah, progress.
I think absolutely the saddest thing to me is that this is not the only American going through the hell of trying to come back to "the world" after being in Iraq.
Thousands of our vets are facing the same issues every day - some realize it, some don't. And except for an occasional passing news story, it seems to be as completely ignored as it was when our soldiers returned from Viet Nam haunted by their experiences.
For Ware's sake, I hope CNN offers medical insurance with better options than our troops will get from the VA.
... but thought I'd point out that Ware's an Australian (not that you wouldn't notice his Ozzie accent!), not an American... and yes, the saddest thing is that a lot of Americans are going to go through hell coming back to the world after being in Iraq.
I go to the States a lot, I've seen recruiting officers in the shopping malls, walking around looking for victims, promising them a good life with money or whatever the hell they promise.
Two years or so ago, while in Phoenix, I saw a man who looked extremely fit and handsome, walking with his partner down the street. He was walking very well for someone with no feet - he had stainless steel ball things at the end of sticks that replaced the bottom part of his legs. Both feet gone, ankles, half way up the shin. It was a shock and then one remembers that this guy is probably lucky - his whole body didn't get blasted away and he wasn't dead. Lucky, ooh yes, lucky - what hideousness war is.
Well you can thank this administration from keeping any media from really showing what is going on over there. It's been a clean war, unlike VN when they showed daily bombing and people getting killed in the street. God forbid if any civilians in our country see what really is going on. They don't want riots in the streets. The republicans think this is a just war.
About as fascinating as the appointment I was five minutes late for in the mid-seventies so I drove past the dead guy on the freeway the crazy Vietnam vet sniper picked off from the overpass five minutes earlier.
The war Michael is facing now is no-win. He's a good journalist because he cares about the subject and that is one of the many reasons his PTSD will only get worse if he stays there. As for CNN...I personally know an employee they FIRED after the employee sought treatment for PTSD. PTSD that he got on the job!!! Don't bother writing CNN to get him help...this is the company that leaves him there with no counseling or support. Write Michael, keep posting...maybe he'll see your words as reason enough to leave.
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