Translator: Elisabeth Buffard Reviewer: Ms Buffard's students
Hello.
On April 8 in 2003,
I was in Baghdad to cover the war in Iraq.
It was when the Americans entered Baghdad with their tanks.
We were just a few journalists in the Palestine Hotel,
and the war was approaching downstairs, outside our windows.
Baghdad was covered in black smoke and oil,
it stank, you couldn't see a thing, but we knew what was happening.
I was supposed to write an article, of course.
It's always when it happens that you have to write the article.
So I was in my room on the 16th floor,
writing, and occasionally looking out of the window to see what's happening.
And then suddenly, there was a loud explosion.
For the past 3 weeks, we were being bombed
by missiles and half-a-ton bombs
but then that shock, I felt it inside me.
So I thought, it's so close! Very, very close!
So I went down to see what was happening,
I came down on the 15th floor, to see,
and I saw people screaming in the corridors, journalists
and I walked into a room
and I understood that this room had been hit by a projectile.
Someone was hurt,
then near the window, there was a man
who was a cameraman, called Taras Protsuyk,
and he was lying face-down.
I'd worked in a hospital once, so I wanted to help.
So I turned him over. And when I did,
he was open from sternum to pubis, but I saw nothing, nothing at all.
I saw a white, pearly, shiny spot, that blinded me
and I did not understand.
And the spot faded and saw the wound, which was very serious,
some buddies and I put him put in a sheet,
we brought him down in an elevator which stopped at each floor, 15 floors,
We put in a car that took him to the hospital.
He died on the way to the hospital, and the Spanish cameraman José Couso,
who was on the 14th floor and was also hit
- because the shell had hit between floors -
died on the operating table. When I came back,
once the car left, I had an article to write,
I had to write it. And so I came...
I returned to the hotel lobby, my arms were covered in blood
And there, there was some Iraqi henchman who stoppped me
asking to pay him ten days overdue taxes
so I sent him packing. And I thought:
"Above all, put that aside. Put that aside!
If you want to write, you must put that aside. "
That's what I did, I went up, I wrote my article, I sent it.
But afterwards, beside affect, beside having lost colleagues,
something was bothering me:
I kept seeing this spot, shiny, pearly,
and I did not understand what it meant.
And then war was over.
Later, I told myself, it is not possible.
I can't not know what happened.
Because it was not the first time, it is not just me,
I had seen things like that in others
in 20 or 35 years of reporting .
I've seen things that had affected me too, but for example,
in The Lebanon, I knew a man, a veteran, he was 25,
5 years of war, so he was a veteran, we followed him everywhere!
He would crawl at night, confidently,
he was a great soldier, a real soldier,
so we followed him because we knew we were safe with him.
And one day, I was told, and I saw him again since,
he was playing cards in the barracks
and someone came in, they discharged their weapon,
as the gun went off and the blast, the simple shot,
had him duck under the table, like a child!
He was shaking, panicking! And since then he's never been able
to get up and fight. And he ended, I found him,
as a croupier in Beirout casino because he could not sleep,
so it was quite a suitable job.
So I thought:
"What is that thing
that can kill you without leaving any visible injuries?
How does that happen?
What is this unknown thing?
It was too common to be a coincidence.
So I started to investigate -- that's all I know to do.
I started to investigate
look through books,
and reach out to psychiatrists, museums, libraries, etc.
And finally I discovered that some people knew --
often military psychiatrists --
and that what we were dealing with was something called a trauma.
Americans call it PTDS, or trauma, traumatic neurosis.
It was something
that existed,
which we never spoke about.
So, what is this trauma?
Well, it is an encounter with death.
I don't know if you've ever had an experience with death --
I'm not talking about dead bodies,
or someone's grandfather laying in a hospital bed,
or someone who got hit by a car.
I'm talking about facing the void of death.
And that is something no one is supposed to see.
People used to say:
"Neither the sun, nor death can be looked at with a steady eye."
A human being should not have to face the void of death.
But when that happens,
it can remain invisible for a while --
days, weeks, months, sometimes years.
And then, at some point
it explodes,
because it's something that has entered the brain,
a sort of window between an image and the brain,
which has penerated the brain and will remains there,
taking up all the space in the brain.
And there are people -- men, women,
who suddenly no longer sleep,
and experience horrible anxiety attacks --
panic attacks --
not just minor fears.
Who suddenly don't want to sleep
because when they sleep, they have the same nightmare every night,
they see the same image every night.
What type of image?
For example, a soldier who enters a building
and comes face to face with another soldier aiming at him.
He looks at the gun -- straight down the barrel.
And this barrel suddenly becomes enormous, deformed,
it becomes fluffy, swallowing everything.
And he says --
later he will say: "I saw death,
I saw myself dead, threrfore I'm dead."
And from then on, he knows he is dead.
It is not a perception, he is convinced he is dead.
Though in reality, someone pushed that gun away,
and he didn't actually get shot --
but all he knows is that he died in that moment.
It can also be the smell of a mass grave --
I have seen many in Rwanda.
It can be the voice of a friend calling
who's being slaughtered, for whom you can't do anything.
You hear that voice.
Every night for weeks, months, you wake up.
In trance, panicked, terrified like a child.
I have seen men cry, but like a child,
seeing the same image.
So in his brain, that image of horror,
that of the nothingness of death,
which is called an analogue,
meaning an image hiding something, will occupy everything.
He can't do anything. Anything at all.
He can no longer work, it can no longer love.
He goes home, he does not recognize anyone. He does not recognize himself.
He hides, he stays home, he locks himself in!
I know people who put small tins outside
with coins in case anyone passed by, came.
All of a sudden, he wants to die, he wants to kill,
he wants to hide, he wants to run,
he wants to be loved, he hates men
and something comes over him all day long,
and he suffers tremendously.
And the others don't understand!
They say: "But there's nothing wrong with you!
You're fine, you have no injuries,
you went to war, you came back, you're fine. "
And these people suffer tremendously and some commit suicide:
after all, suicide, it's to put my agenda to date,
since I'm already dead,
if I kill myself, fine. And in addition, there is no more pain.
Some commit suicide,
others end up under the bridge, start drinking...
You all remember of the story of that grandfather, of that uncle,
that neighbour who drank, who said nothing,
who was cantankerous, who beat his wife
and ended either sinking into alcoholism, or dying.
And they don't talk about it, why? We don't talk about it, why?
Because it is taboo! You cannot say -
man does not have the words to say the nothingness of death.
But the others can't hear it! When I'd come back from an assignment,
for the first time, I was told: "Ah! He's back from his assignment! "
There was a dinner, a beautiful white tablecloth, candles, guests,
"Here, tell us about it! " I told about it.
20 minutes later, people would give me dirty looks,
the hostess had her nose in the ashtray,
well, it was horrible,
and I realized I had screwed up the evening.
So now, I don't tell anymore, but we are not ready to listen to that,
We say "Oh, stop!"
Is it just a few cases? No. This is extremely common!
One third of the dead soldiers in Iraq - dead, sorry for the slip.
One third of US soldiers in Iraq suffer from PTSD.
In 1939, there were still, in English psychiatric hospitals,
200,000 soldiers of the First World War.
In Vietnam, there were 54,000 deaths. Americans.
By 87, the US government had found 102,000 - twice as many -
102,000 completed suicides of veterans.
Twice as many deaths in combat as in Vietnam.
So you understand that this is something that covers everything!
Not just modern warfare, ancient wars too,
they are found in ancient texts! It is told, it is said,
why do we not talk about it?
Why do we not talk about it? Because the problem
is that if this man does not speak, he's heading for disaster.
But the only way to heal,
because the good news that thing is that it is treatable:
Munch's The Scream, Goya, etc. yes, it is treatable!
The only way to heal this trauma,
this encounter with death, which stuns you, petrifies you, kills you,
is to manage to talk about it.
Someone said, the anceints used to say:
"Language is the only thing holding us men together."
If there is no language, we're nothing.
We are only humans because of it.
Faced with this image of horror
which has no words,
because it's only an image of nothingness obsessing us,
the only way to work this out,
is to put human words on it.
Because these people feel excluded of humanity:
no one wants to see them anymore and they don't want to see anyone.
They feel dirty, defiled, ashamed.
Someone said: "Doctor,
I do not go in the subway anymore
because I'm afraid people will see the horror I have in me in my eyes."
Another said
he had a terrible skin disease, he spent six months in dermatology,
he would be sent from one ward to the next, and then one day,
they sent him to the psychiatrist.
And he told the psychiatrist at the second meeting
- he had a terrible skin disease, from here to foot -
he said: "But why are you in that state?"
And the man said, "But because I'm dead, so I'm rotting away."
So you see this is something that affects men at their deepest.
To heal, we must talk. We need to put the horror into words,
human words, manage to tame, to talk about it.
You have to look death in the face.
And if we can do that, if we talk about these things,
then gradually, working with a speech
we can recover our human side.
And this is important! Silence is killing us!
What does that mean? That means that if afterwards,
ah, of course, we lost our unbearable lightness of being,
we lost our sense of eternity which makes that you are here,
if you are here, it's that you feel you are eternal! You're not!
Otherwise you would not be here, you'd say "why bother?"
And they lost that feeling of eternity.
They lost their lightness. But they found something else!
It means that if we manage to look death in the face,
and face it rather than keep quiet and hide,
well have men or women I know, - Michael from Rwanda,
Carole from Iraq, Philippe from the Congo all those people I have known,
Sorj Chalendon, who is now a great writer
and who gave up report assignments after a trauma.
4 or 5 friends of mine committed suicide,
they're the ones who did not survive after a trauma.
Well if we can look death in the face
if we mortal humans, human mortals,
we know where we are humans and mortals, mortals and humans,
if we can confront it and to put this thing back on it
which is the most unknown land of unknown lands,
since no one has seen it.
If we can put things on it,
yes, we can die, survive and revive,
but stronger, stronger than before. Much stronger.
Thank you.
(Applause)