Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

War stories: a factual account

By Edward B. Colby, Special to the Times
Published December 9, 2007

- - -  

In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars is as ambitious and unsparing a book as its title suggests - a text distillation of the multimedia reporting Kevin Sites produced from war zones around the world as Yahoo!'s first news correspondent.

A television journalist and veteran war correspondent, Sites left the world of Brokaw and Jennings in 2005 to join "the realm of companies whose names sound more like baby noises than words." Rare instances of humor aside (a "missed moment" with the Dalai Lama among them), this is a sobering experience.

Sites covers Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, but he focuses on the smaller tales that "put a human face on global conflict."

He profiles two young women, one Israeli, one Palestinian, who were physically maimed by that conflict, yet remain hopeful. He recounts the story of Gulsoma, an Afghan child bride who survived barbaric treatment by her father-in-law's family. And he meets a 25-year-old Congolese woman who, in two horrific incidents seven years apart, saw her two children and then her husband killed. She was raped both times.

In the Hot Zone draws attention to some more obscure global conflicts, from the carpet-bombed ruins of Grozny, Chechnya, to Uganda, home of the child-snatching Lord's Resistance Army. But it is really a personal journey, as Sites wrestles with his anguish over not helping a mortally wounded Iraqi man in Fallujah, for example.

The book comes with a DVD, A World of Conflict, a documentary that proves even more stark and affecting. Though Sites juggled news gathering in several media for the Hot Zone project, his primary talent still clearly lies in video reporting.

While in Colombia, Sites reflects on "wading chin-deep into the misfortune of others," writing, "Each profile I do hollows me out with its consistent thread of suffering."

And as Sites worries, that thread - endless stories of war-inflected pain and misery - eventually becomes numbing for readers as well. In the Hot Zone is most effective when read in small chunks.

Edward B. Colby is a journalist in the Boston area.

[Last modified December 7, 2007, 16:54:29]