Toronto Star foreign desk editor Peter Martyn reviews Where War Lives, the new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Watson, who has literally been to hell and back.
In the Toronto Star newsroom, it was a night of quiet pride, even jubilation. Our colleague Paul Watson had become the first Canadian newsman to collect a Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious U.S. journalism award.
Speeches were made. Stories were written.
We were all aware of the cost in lives of that medal – the photo for which Watson was honoured showed the body of an American helicopter crewman being dragged by a blood-crazed mob through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993.
But even those of us who knew Watson had little idea of its cost to him. We do now.
He writes:
"(J)ust as I was about to press the shutter on my camera, the world went quiet, everything around me melted into a slow-motion blur, and I heard the voice:
"If you do this, I will own you forever.
"`I'm sorry,' I thought. I wanted him to understand. To forgive."
That instant, that voice – not a whisper (he describes it later as "a sound so clear and strong that it seemed to come from outside and inside, from all directions") – haunts Watson to this day.
The story he tells in this autobiographical reflection will have readers squirming in their armchairs in places.
Woven into the timeline of futile modern wars from Afghanistan to Yugoslavia is a soul-baring tale of one man's descent, rescue and redemption from a personal hell.
No one who opens this book will put it down with any sense of complacency.