Review: Where War Lives
| Date | 01 June 2008 |
| Published date | 01 June 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300226 |
| Author | Lara J. Nettelfield |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| International Journal | Spring 2008 | 513 |
| Reviews |
WHERE WAR LIVES
Paul Watson
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007. 367pp, $34.99 cloth (ISBN
0771088221)
“If you do this, I will own you forever.” Those were the words journalist Paul
Watson heard in his head as he took a picture of the desecrated body of Staff
Sgt. William David Cleveland, Jr. Cleveland was one of the casualties of oper-
ation
Gothic Serpent
, the ill-fated 1993 mission in Somalia to capture warlord
Muhamed Farah Aideed that claimed the lives of 19 American soldiers. The
loss prompted a hasty US retreat.Watson’s image, which featured Cleveland’s
body surrounded by jeering Somalis after the downing of his Black Hawk hel-
icopter, exemplified the dangers of interventionism in the post-Cold War era.
It also shaped the Canadian journalist who snapped the shutter that fall
day. Watson chronicles his involvement in almost of all the significant con-
flicts of his era in an honest and gripping new memoir,
Where War Lives.
The book is framed as an attempt to “restore some the honour that [he] stole
in that second when [he] pressed a button” (xiii). Watson’s physical and emo-
tional journeys around the globe are deftly woven together in an attempt to
find meaning in the string of assignments that led him to his current post as
the bureau chief of the
Los Angeles Times
in Jakarta.
Watson got his journalistic start at the
Toronto Star,
where he was first as-
signed to scan the police radio waves for breaking stories.Using his vacation
time from the paper, he traveled to Eritrea, and later Angola during its civil
war, to do his first war reporting. These early experiences whet his appetite
for more field assignments. A print journalist by training, Watson earned a
master’s degree from Columbia University’s school of international and pub-
lic affairs.
After his time in Somalia, Watson became bureau chief in South Africa
and covered the Rwandan genocide. In Kigali, upon meeting Roméo Dallaire,
commander of UN forces, he realized how the Cleveland photo affected pol-
icymakers reluctant to deploy troops into the unfolding genocide there. “I’m
sure he [Dallaire] had no idea that I’d helped make certain that he, and
Rwanda, would be abandoned by the world” (113).
Even if the moral imperative for action was obvious in Rwanda, for much
of the book, Watson breaks down the image of the world at war as a conflict
between the forces of good versus evil.He also shows how the journalist’s de-
sire to make the right choice isn’t always clear. The decision not to document
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