Australian journalist Michael Ware first left for Iraq in 2003 for a three-week reporting stint for Time magazine and CNN. After three weeks, his compulsion to report on the war led him to stay in Iraq for seven years. For his HBO documentary, Only the Dead See the End of War, Ware has culled footage from those seven years that he captured on his handheld camera. The result is often gruesome imagery of death and destruction, narrated by Ware. We witness footage of beheadings, car bombings, a man slowly dying as soldiers look on with striking apathy, and, ultimately, the birth and evolution of ISIS. All of this, Ware explains, is to bring outsiders closer to the experience and feelings of war. A feeling, he insists, outsiders will never truly understand but should confront.
We spoke with Ware about his own near-beheading, his relationship with death, and the current state of ISIS.
When you first arrived in Iraq, did you go in with a fear of death? And how long did it take for that fear to dissipate?
The minute you go to war you limit the fear of dying. Death is with you everywhere. Death sits with you constantly. The question is, how do you grapple with that? My problem is that I didn’t just go for one or two weeks, so I didn’t just fly in and fly out. I stayed and stayed and stayed for seven, continuous, endless years. So I got to the point where I was already dead. So it didn’t matter to me what happened. And in the end that became a strength in my reporting. I got to a point where I just didn’t care about dying because I was already dead inside.
When you’re spending time with the other journalists and soldiers in Iraq, did they share that same feeling? Or did you meet anyone that felt differently, that still carried some fear?
It was a very personal experience. The soldiers are in a kill-or-be-killed situation. You reduce yourself existentially as a fighter to a place where you are ready to die. Journalists, perhaps less so — particularly those TV journalists who flew in for a week and want to get their byline and “Oh, I’ve been to Baghdad,” then flew out — are very different from the soldiers and marines and those of us in the Baghdad press corps who actually lived in Baghdad. So there are many experiences of war and of your closeness to death.
You were close to being executed and at the same time filming it with your own video camera. So, by that point, what compels you to stay? How do you continue and continue to record and maintain that, I suppose, disconnect?
Well, that’s a good question, I suppose. After I was grabbed by what we now call the Islamic State and after I was readied for my own videotaped beheading, the great question that people ask is, “Well, why didn’t you leave?” There’s lot of reasons for that. The story had yet to be told. For whatever reason, to some sick perversion of history, I was the only Westerner able to access the other side, the enemy. No one else was able to carry their voice back to our people. And so I felt compelled to stay. I also felt compelled to stay because Iraqis around me, my staff, they weren’t my employees, they were my family. And I just couldn’t abandon them.
But, honestly, the more truthful answer to your question is that by that point in the war, war had become my norm. It was harder for me to be in New York or back in Australia then it was to be in Baghdad by that point. After my near beheading I was home in Baghdad in the midst of war. I couldn’t imagine leaving. I could have left at any given moment. I could have put my hand up and my editors would have extracted me immediately. But the reality is I fought against my own editors, first at Time magazine and then at CNN, to stay. I fought to stay, even against my own interest, even beyond the point that it was healthy. Beyond the point that I needed to be there. But that was the place I knew I needed to be.
There’s a scene at the end of you documentary where an Iraqi man is dying and the American soldiers around him are showing this indifference to his death. Filming that, you are capturing their indifference while being indifferent yourself.
Totally, I made a conscious decision to continue filming. Journalistically I was on solid ground. We tried to capture a moment to amplify a much greater story and a much greater point. But at the same time we, as journalists, are still human beings and we still have to live with our own morality. And I made the decision, in that courtyard, not to intervene and to keep filming. It was at that moment that I realized that I was as indifferent to this man’s suffering as the soldiers around me whose indifference I was intending to capture.
When you look back on it and watch the footage, do you almost feel like you weren’t there?
No, I was there and every time I see that footage I’m right back in that courtyard. A part of me will never leave that courtyard but I don’t have a single regret. I didn’t stay one day too long, I didn’t leave one day too early, and there is not one thing that I did or didn’t do that I regret. Now, that said, it’s basic physics. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, there’s a price for everything in life. At war, that could never be more true. To the day I die I’ll be paying for some of the decisions I made and indeed,’til I die, I’ll be walking with ghosts.
And you know what? That’s a privilege. I see the world now and appreciate the world now in a way that none of you could ever imagine. And that makes us part of a very small, very rooted club. We have a take on life you can only begin to imagine. Now the whole point of our film is to close that distance between those of us who were there and all of you who were not. Because we believe that we made a war film that you don’t just watch but that you actually experience. This isn’t Hollywood blood made of corn syrup. This isn’t a documentary that you’re watching from a distance. War is not something you watch, war is something that you feel. We believe we’ve made a film that is experiential — where you, the viewer, will actually feel war.
When you’re selecting what footage to show people in the documentary, and when you were selecting footage for CNN to broadcast, how explicit does it have to be. And to what extent do you feel people should see the more graphic images of war?
Look, I see the role that I performed, personally, as a contradiction. I have a family, I have kids who grow up and live in this privileged bubble that is the West. And I want them to continue to enjoy being a part of that. Now, at the same time, my whole reason for existing, my job, was to constantly pierce that bubble.
But how much is too much?
That’s always a matter of taste, for the network or the publication that you work for. Mainly, for the dignity of the person whose story you’re telling, be they alive, be they dead, or be they dying. At the end of the day the point is to parlay and translate the experience and the moment without denigrating anyone, either the viewer or the sufferer. But at the same time people with dignity and death and suffering need to be preserved. Yet, at the end of the day, my greatest calling was carrying the voice of these voiceless. Now that can be the American men and women who served in uniform in our wars on terror. That could be the millions of Iraqis or myself and the journalists around me. It’s a fine line. Life is not black and white. Life is grey and there’s no greater testament to that than war. It’s always a matter of taste but I’ve always seen that my role is to constantly be pushing your comfort levels.
Have you found that news sources are more lenient when it comes to showing gruesome imagery from foreign countries, and that they are more inclined to censor images when it comes to acts of terror from their own country?
I think that’s the greatest challenge of a storyteller, certainly of a journalist. We’re the ones trying to sift through all the noise to find the tiny little gems of truth. Part of that is confronting — life is meant to be cruel, brutish, and short. And it’s easy to forget that back here in the West. If occasionally, on the nightly news, we make you feel uncomfortable then frankly, yeah, the world is a very hard and difficult place. For most people it’s an ugly place. Existence is clawed out inch by inch and sometimes, here, we can forget that. So I’m sorry if we upset you over your Wheaties occasionally. It’s something you must constantly be reminded of.
Having seen the birth of ISIS and their control evolve, does their level of power come to no surprise to you?
I witnessed the birth of ISIS. I witnessed the birth of the Islamic State. I saw it all in the summer of 2003. It’s had several name changes. It’s had a succession of leaders from its founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to its current leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, but it’s the same organization. From the moment I personally witnessed its genesis, I knew it was something we were all going to have to live with for generations to come in one form or another. But was I surprised? No. I was shocked but not surprised. Inadvertently, unwittingly, with our invasion of Iraq we unleashed the Islamic State upon the world. I was there to see its beginning. So the fact that we still have it today in no way surprises me. Its breadth and its size does surprise me, or does shock me. And I knew that we unleashed a dark force that we’d never be able to put back.
Only the Dead See the End of War premieres on HBO tonight.
