Was It Worth It? Wounded Reporter Assesses His Loss

This is the first dispatch from Associated Press correspondent Ian Stewart since he was shot in the head covering the civil war in the African country of Sierra Leone on Jan. 10.

I floated in a gray fog illuminated by the flickering of fluorescent lights. Someone was calling my name over and over, but the voice sounded far away. Blurry faces hovered over me. Shadows, then gone.

Slowly, one of the faces took form. My sister, Karen.

“I always wanted to come to London,” she said, her wide eyes red with tears. “But you didn’t have to do this to get me here.”

Do what? I thought, then I drifted away again.

Puzzling sounds penetrated the haze: the wheeze of my ventilator, the incessant beep of heart and respiration monitors, the scratching sound of the tube used to clear mucus from my throat.

Wavering on that boundary between sleep and awareness, I couldn’t lift my head from the pillow.

Once I drifted back to consciousness to see my mother, dressed in black, sitting beside my bed. The surgeons wanted to perform a tracheotomy to improve the flow of oxygen to my lungs, she explained.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

I thought: A tracheotomy. I know what a tracheotomy is. Why is she asking me that? And why are people speaking in slow, deliberate sentences as if I were an idiot?

“Ian! Can you hear me?” my mother asked. “Squeeze my hand if you understand.”

Something was awfully wrong. Why couldn’t I feel my leg?

Weeks drifted by. The mist that had shrouded my brain began to lift.

One day, still flat on my back in the surgical intensive care unit, I held up my right hand, index finger pinched to thumb, and mimicked the motion of writing. A nurse handed me paper and a blue felt marker.

In shaky script, I wrote: “Ian go home.”

“You can’t go home,” said the nurse. “Do you know what has happened?”

No, not then. Maybe not entirely even now. But I am piecing my story together.

A Need to Bear Witness

Fifteen years ago, I was a Toronto high school student dreaming of becoming a football player. But I was about to get a new path in life.

People were starving in Ethiopia, and the face telling the people of Canada about it was my uncle. Watching him on TV, I thought: What a glamorous way to make a living! Jumping on planes at a moment’s notice to witness history.

Someday I would be that witness.

From the college paper to my first job as a local reporter, I never lost sight of that goal, and by age 27 I reached it as a correspondent for the Associated Press. India. Pakistan. Vietnam. Cambodia. Afghanistan. It was all I had dreamed it would be. Even the danger was thrilling.

I was caught in a mortar attack in Afghanistan, spent hours under small-arms fire in Kashmir. In Cambodia, I ducked as bullets flew over my head and heard a soldier behind me cry out in pain. I wanted to turn and run that time, but I didn’t.

A day later, I was exhilarated that I had overcome my fear. I never felt more alive.

I saw death: villagers caught in artillery fire, civilians slaughtered in bombing runs.

But nothing prepared me for the cruelty of Sierra Leone.

Rated by the United Nations as the worst place in the world to live, this country the size of Indiana has staggered through a series of violent upheavals since it gained independence from Britain in 1961.

The latest band of insurgents was targeting civilians, poking out eyes, hacking off limbs.

When I first visited in February 1998, the rebels were on the run. But by January 1999, they were bursting into the capital city of Freetown. I had to go back to find out what was happening. I needed to bear witness for the world.

I knew the world didn’t care--that few outside of Africa would be interested in a little war in a place most North Americans couldn’t find on a map.

But it was our job to tell it well enough to make them care:

Myles Tierney, 34, a producer based in Kenya for Associated Press Television News. A confident, outspoken Brooklyn native with an infectious laugh, a charming smile and tattooed arms that often shadowboxed in the air.

David Guttenfelder, 29, a veteran AP combat photographer based in the Ivory Coast. A Waukee, Iowa, native who looked more like a California surfer and took on the world with an “I’ll-prove-it-to-you” attitude.

And me, then 32, AP’s new West Africa bureau chief, based in the Ivory Coast capital of Abidjan for just 11 months.

Freetown, a colonial-era city of swaying palm trees and decaying clapboard buildings, was crumbling under the assault. Jet fighters screamed overhead. Explosions shook the downtown district. Homes set ablaze by rebels filled the sky with smoke. Civilians wandered the streets past rotting bodies.

On Saturday, Jan. 9, we tried to get a look at the heart of Freetown but were turned aside at military checkpoints.

Sunday was a different story.

By midmorning our station wagon was rolling down a deserted road toward a checkpoint where six pro-government soldiers crouched behind sandbags with their hand-held rockets and assault rifles.

“Stop!” they barked. “Hands up!”

What should I do with the yellow reporter’s notebook clutched in my left hand? Maybe, I thought, they’ll mistake it for a weapon of some kind.

“Pressmen!” we shouted. “We’re reporters.”

Satisfied that we posed no threat, the young troops began clowning for the cameras.

Their antics halted when a burst of gunfire popped like a row of Chinese firecrackers. David, Myles and I darted for the cover of a drainage ditch. Sewage oozed around my left boot.

A colonel waved his handgun at us and ordered: “Go back the way you came.”

Fine with me, I mumbled.

A few minutes later we encountered a convoy carrying Julius Spencer, Sierra Leone’s minister of communications.

“This thing will be over in three, four days tops,” he declared. “The rebels have been defeated. We are now just mopping up.”

I scribbled his words into my notebook. They would have been in my next dispatch.

Eager to show evidence of the government’s victory, Spencer invited us to join his convoy of two Jeeps and two trucks, one carrying soldiers and the other volunteer undertakers to collect the dead. We set off with our station wagon in the middle of the convoy.

At the crest of a hill, the convoy stopped. I didn’t know why until I heard the whistle of a bullet. Then several more. The troops in the lead truck fanned out along the ditches on both sides of the road.

David and Myles went into action with their cameras. I crawled from the station wagon and joined them at the roadside, flinching at every incoming bullet.

After a few minutes, the shooting stopped and our convoy continued toward the downtown, rolling past vultures foraging among the dead. Jammed in the back of the station wagon between Myles and David, I could see the rifles of the soldiers assigned to protect us bobbing in the front seat.

“This is too dangerous,” I said to myself in what had become an almost constant inner dialogue. “No, this is fine. We’re with a military escort; they’ll protect us.”

My attention shifted to my physical discomfort. Stuck between Myles and David on this stifling day, I sweltered. It felt as if someone were standing on my chest.

My legs were pinned between theirs, and a twinge of terror gripped me at the idea of being trapped in the car.

“How will I run if I need to?”

I spread my elbows and shifted my knees to claim more space.

“I have to get out of here!” I thought.

“Shut up!” Tierney said, even though my complaints had all been in my head. “You’re in the safest seat in the car. If anyone starts shooting, you’ve got my fat body to protect you.”

Those were the last words I remember hearing in Africa.

*

Destruction and death haunted my hospital dreams. Silhouettes of palm trees swayed against a cobalt sky streaked red and yellow by tracer bullets. Waking hours were no better. Lying on rubber sheets, I struggled to stop the walls as they spun by.

One afternoon I lay facing away from my mother, who stood at the foot of the bed. Out of nowhere, I asked for the first time:

“What happened to Myles?”

“Honey,” my mother replied in a controlled voice, “Myles is dead.”

Dead. Just weeks ago, he was bringing cold beers to my hotel room in Freetown. How could he have left me like this?

Adding to the torment, I have never been able to remember what happened when we were shot. With no recollection of the most cataclysmic moment of my life, each day is a battle against the incomprehensible.

Of course, I have been told how it happened.

Our station wagon turned a corner and came upon five armed men in American-style jeans and flip-flops. Oddly, one was wearing a bowler hat. He raised his automatic rifle and fired a burst. Our escort returned fire, killing the shooter and another rebel. It was over in seconds.

David had been cut by flying glass. I had been shot in the head. Myles had been killed instantly, the 24th AP journalist to die in the line of duty in the organization’s 151 years.

Our driver rushed us to a military base where about all they could do for me was wrap a turban-like field dressing over the leaking entry wound near my hairline, dead-center on my forehead.

“Hang on, man,” David said. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

But the base’s Russian helicopter --the only way to Sierra Leone’s airport--was down with engine problems. The sun slowly sank into the Atlantic. In minutes, the airport would close for the night.

Darkness meant my death.

A 20% to 40% Chance of Survival

Suddenly word came. The helicopter was fixed. In minutes we were airborne.

Over the next several hours, David and AP Abidjan correspondent Tim Sullivan (now bureau chief) saved my life, pleading and cajoling my way onto a succession of airplanes that would hop across Africa and on to England and modern medical care.

It was late Monday night by the time I was carried into London’s Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. With the dirty field dressing still around my head, I was wheeled past a shocked couple who had just rushed in from Toronto.

My parents.

More than 36 hours had passed since the shooting. My surgeon, James Palmer, gave me a 20% to 40% chance of survival.

Piecing Life Back Together

Palmer made an incision from ear to ear across my forehead. Carving at the skull, he enlarged the bullet hole in my head. Then he inserted a wire-thin suction tube to clear out clotting blood and debris.

Two days later, using computer imaging, Palmer and his team found the bullet. Palmer drilled a hole in the back of my skull at the precise spot, and the pressure from the swelling pushed the slug out the hole.

Later that day, Palmer decided to rouse me from what had now been a four-day-long, drug-induced coma. Standing at the foot of my bed were my parents, my sister and my boss, AP International Editor Tom Kent (now a deputy managing editor).

They watched and wondered: Would Ian still be Ian?

I can’t say when I began to realize the gravity of my wound. Because of the very nature of a brain injury, patients often find it hard to understand and almost impossible to accept.

Brain injuries come in many forms and degrees. Cognitive skills --everything from reading to tying shoelaces--can be lost. Long-term memory, and hence the victim’s sense of self, can be erased.

The consequences of my injury were almost entirely physical. My left arm and hand were paralyzed, my left leg impaired.

Pain Far Beyond the Physical

But there were other complications. For days I struggled just to understand where I was.

“London, England,” I was told repeatedly by doctors, nurses and relatives.

“London, England,” I responded obediently. But where was London, England?

My brain was a crystal goblet shattered into a million slivers of fading dreams and dashed hopes.

I have been piecing it back together, one sliver at a time.

Leslie, the hospital physiotherapist, was working on my paralyzed leg even before I was truly awake. Days of stretching and acupressure slowly brought life back to dormant nerve channels that connect my brain to the muscles on my left side.

Slowly they begin to click back on: a toe wiggled, a thumb twitched, simple joys that brought tears to my eyes.

But weeks passed, and nothing happened in my dead left arm.

Several weeks after my operations, Leslie began helping me learn how to stand. I would heave my shoulders forward and bend my waist, and my rear would lift a few inches before plopping back into the wheelchair.

But Leslie was persistent, and by Monday, Jan. 25, I was standing.

Who would think standing could be not just difficult but frightening? I teetered like building blocks stacked too high.

Eventually I was transferred to London’s Devonshire Hospital, which specializes in rehabilitation of brain injuries. There I began keeping a diary.

One entry: 3 a.m. Once again I lay awake with excruciating pain shooting through my left shoulder and the left side of my neck. Medicine and ice packs do little to calm the agony.

All this because of one ill-timed second on a dusty street corner in West Africa.

One more night was over, but how many more would there be in an alien world where the physical hurting is only one part of the pain?

In the silence after dark, a slamming door sounds like a mortar round.

*

Ten weeks after the shooting, I returned to my parents’ home on Toronto’s Lake Ontario waterfront.

For months I have struggled to adjust to life with a disability. I don’t ever want to forget even the smallest detail of this experience.

Hunched in my wheelchair, I bump along Toronto’s busy streets, a broken man whose knees bounce with spasms. Averting their eyes, people stroll by, oblivious to the brain power their movements require.

Two months after returning to Toronto, I have improved enough to walk with a cane. On June 3, a Thursday, I walk into a medical supply center to return my wheelchair.

Once I was an athlete, a football player. Now I shuffle a few yards, stop to catch my breath, sit for a spell. As a wire service reporter, I used to whip out several stories a day. Now I spend months on this one, pecking at the keys with my one good hand.

My therapist says that, in time, my left arm will regain some function. How much is impossible to say.

Friendships Founder in the Aftermath

I spend a great deal of time pondering my future. Will I ever run again? Will movement in my hand return?

My relationship with my girlfriend has ended. Without knowing why, I have pushed away things and people I loved before the shooting. Perhaps I don’t want to go through the rest of my life being compared with the old Ian.

Even my friendship with David has suffered. He saved my life and is probably the only person who can understand all we’ve gone through, but we just don’t talk anymore. Perhaps the memories are just too painful for both of us.

Home with my parents for the first time since I was 18, I feel like the oldest teenager in Canada.

I worry most about my parents. Imagine what they’ve been through since picking up the phone early one morning to learn their son had been shot in West Africa.

Every morning I wake and prepare myself for another day. I wonder where the strength comes from. I wonder if it will still be there tomorrow.

I no longer wonder if it has all been worth it.

For war correspondents there is an age-old question: “Is this story worth risking your life for?” There are always some who say yes, lured by both the story and the danger.

If some stories are worth the risk, Freetown wasn’t one of them.

Myles, David and I were naive to hope our reporting could make people care about a little war in Africa. In fact, Freetown might never have made your daily newspaper had it not been for the death of one Western journalist and the wounding of another.

Will I continue to work as a journalist when I am well enough to work?

Yes, and most likely I’ll go back overseas.

Will I risk my life for a story again?

No. Not even if the world cares next time.