Blah Blah Flowers

Just watched Jeremy Bowen on the Front Line where the former BBC war reporter talks about his trade while revisiting the places he reported from and talks about the experiences. Grisly and gripping, it's the story about how his enthusiasm to be doing the work (Martin Bell says that when he met Bowen in Sarajevo at the start of the nineties he thought he was insane) gradually disappeared as the mental strain of the devastation he saw built up, culminating in the accidental killing of his friend and driver by an Israeli tank in the Lebanon. It's of a similar tenor to the film by John Simpson last year on his reporting of the second Gulf War. To hear Bowen describe it, the drive to be in these deadly places seems akin to manic depression, the bad times get balanced by the nature of the great times, though he seems unable to clearly articulate this beyond being able to live 'without rules' and certainly I'm left wondering, after numerous times seeing Bowen duck sniper fire, what on earth could counterbalance that. It seems to be one of those great indescribables, as he talks to fellow war journalists, mostly 'former' ones, and they describe heroin addiction, drink abuse, mental disorders and death, as reasons to get out of the business. In the end the only thing you can think is: they must be nuts!