Dispatches From The Hot Zone: My Interview With Kevin Sites

Kevin Sites has worked for ABC, NBC and CNN, and became the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. From September 2005 to Summer 2006 he traveled into twenty war zones reporting with a video camera, digital still camera, laptop, satellite modem and a determination to put a human face on global conflict. I recently spoke with Sites about his experiences, his new book -- In The Hot Zone -- and how the experience changed him.

For an entire year you were a war correspondent, but not in the traditional sense. What exactly were you doing?
The project itself was very traditional in the sense that the idea was to do traditional journalism. The idea was we were going to cover these different conflict zones, but the technology was going to be different, using smaller digital cameras as well as smaller transmitting tools (satellite modems). But the concept was very much the same: tell these stories and a traditional narrative.

What was different about it, in addition to the technology, was that these stories were not being told. They were going to be about people on the front line and individuals that were on the ground level of these wars, not necessarily seeking out these newsmakers, people on the top -- presidents and people in government -- but people who were really experiencing these conflicts first hand (the combatants, the victims of war). It was really about not chasing headlines.

You set out on October 1, 2005. What was your mission? What did you want to accomplish?
For me, specifically, the mission changed. The stated goal was always the same: to cover every major conflict in the world within one year and not to chase the headlines but do the smaller stories in front and behind the conflicts; not the big headline stories. But even as a seasoned war correspondent, someone who has been covering conflict for a long time, my belief in what conflict was, was fairly traditional. I believed that a big part of it was the conflict, the fighting. Even though in all of my experience, combat had been a small part of any war I covered. However, I still framed conflict in a traditional viewpoint of clashing armies or clashing formal fighting forces with gorilla forces. That changed, I think, really dramatically. War is really about collateral damage. It was about civilian and civil destruction, rather than this traditional conflict concept. We had always heard there would be collateral damage in any war. But to me, the truth was there is always collateral damage and that it is the most important thing that happens in any conflict.

How did you go about finding these stories?
It happens the same way that any traditional journalist operates in a foreign country where you do not speak that language. You hire people who are your fixers, your drivers, your translators and so on. You are asking them -- the people who actually live in these places. They are your best source. In almost every situation, with very few exceptions, I did not know what I was going to cover when I would get to the country. I had a general idea of what the conflict was about, I would do my research, but for the most part we really found the stories when we got on the ground. I also did work with international aid organizations a lot and people who were already on the ground and assisting people. They knew very well who the victims were and what was going on in a specific area.

How did the people receive you?
It depended where I was, but in so many cases it is almost as if you are an astronaut. I mean, here I am, coming into a place in the south of Sudan or in the middle of the Congo and I have a backpack on, cables dangling from my head, cameras around my shoulders and all this equipment that is characteristic of the 21st century mobile order, but to a lot of people it is something that they don't encounter every day. They didn't, in a lot of cases, encounter a single western reporter with a notebook, so imagine me coming in. It took a little bit of adjustment for them. People would look at me and it would be somewhat uncomfortable that they would have to adjust to the fact of what I was doing. And then, once that happened, almost everyone was pleased that I was there because no one asked them about their stories. Very few people had come through these regions to speak to them about what was happening in their lives. In Somalia I was the first western journalist there in probably four or five months.

What were your living conditions?
Depending on where I was at, places like South Sudan, the only way that I could move around and do the work that I needed to do was to imbed with NGOs. I could not just go out there and set up camp in a village. So they had compounds and I would be sleeping in a grass hut with my sleeping bag. That was common in Africa. In places in the Middle East, I would embed with the US Army or Marines. In places like Lebanon and Beirut I would stay at nice hotels. In most of the cases, you cannot necessarily do the work that I was doing and provide for all of your survival needs at the same time. You can't go off into the wilderness and eat bugs. You find a way to do the job that you are there to do -- which is journalism -- and find a way to live as close to the people you are covering.

Did you ever have a close call with your life and maybe wanted to come home after?
You think about that, but as a journalist it is the easiest reporting you will ever do because it is so inherently dramatic. It was not those moments of danger. I have had plenty of those in my career, before, such as being captured in Tikrit by Saddam's Fedayeen. All of that has happened in the past. I think the most difficult for me was loneliness. There were places and times where the only person who I could speak with in my native tongue would be my fixer. You would be very isolated by simply your own language abilities. That would be hard. And the fact that you are doing this day in and day out. I had a team back in Santa Monica that I would feed this material back to -- a couple of producers and a researcher -- because it really took a four person team to pull this all together. Someone has to set up visas for you, do research and when I gather the material, someone has to post it on the other end. I am feeding this stuff into a forest. There was just a really grindy loneliness and sometimes the difficulties of the entire process wore on you. You would be tired, you would be gathering stories all day from 6 or 7:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night and then staying up to write them and then staying up even past then to transmit them.

I remember when I was in South Sudan it was such a hardship, just the fact of living there every night. One little comfort we had was at 7:30 every night they would turn on the generator on for half an hour, which would power our computers and sometimes power TV and VCR to watch a movie. But, every time we would turn those things on, swarms of insects would just come alive and cover the light and the screen and you would just get eaten up by these things. I remember having bites all over my body and just being really uncomfortably hot and really tired. Those were the days where you just wanted to hop on a plane and come home.

So what motivated you to stay there was to tell those stories?
That was exactly what it was. In fact, the deeper that I got into it the more I realized what a necessity this project was. Like any job, there are selfish motivations -- you want to do something new, you want to tell important stories -- but as you begin to do this process, I really realized how important these stories were. But those stories were not being told (like the stories in the book about rape victims in the Congo). No one was hearing about them. I felt entrusted with these really important tales. There was a little bit of anger as well. First of all, you feel a loyalty to a people you are covering and you want to get their stories out.

Then you are driven by small sense of anger and sometimes contempt for the ignorance that is out there. Sometimes stories are being reported but people are just not paying attention to them. In a lot of cases we had the perfect opportunity because if stories were being told in the mainstream media, a lot of times they were being told in the larger, geopolitical sense. They were 'issue' stories and I wanted to tell 'people' stories. There is weakness and strength in that. The weakness is that sometimes the people stories sometimes lack the full context of that conflict, telling the chronology and explaining how we got there. But, there is strength in them in the sense that they end up connecting people more strongly to the issue overall. I wanted to get people to hear about these issues and I did that through a human face by finding someone that would illustrate that conflict. And, perhaps stringing together over the course of a week, within a conflict, you might get a better idea of what is going on. The goal was, additionally, that since it was Internet you could also link to other sources. So, if you wanted to learn more, you had the ability to do that right on our page if you were interested and wanted to learn more. I did not expect to be the last word. I wanted to be, in some cases, the first word in a conflict for someone, to get them interested.

Finally, what did you learn about yourself throughout this experience?
That is a really good question. For me, the journey was incredibly difficult in so many ways. I thought about if, given the similar circumstances, would I do it again. Initially, when I came back I said I wouldn't, but now I say I might do it again. You are just so humbled by what you see. You realize, me specifically as a person, what a weak individual I was. I realized I had the easiest job compared to the people I was covering. The things that they were experiencing on a daily basis, they had to go on experiencing, where as I would come into an area, report on it for a while, leave and get a chance to take a shower and go to a nice hotel. But I learned, specifically, that I and many people in my circumstances, have so much and because of it we become very weak individuals. I would not have the strength to experience the kind of things a lot of my sources have experienced with the same kind of dignity that they experienced it with. That was amazing to me and very humbling.

The other aspect of it was just the enormity of my ignorance of what was going on in the world. I was covering these things, and that was important, but I knew so little about so much of the world. That fueled my desires to tell the stories more. Finally, I became somewhat contemptuous about what I had learned. Not self righteous, just contemptuous in the sense that because I personally knew so little that other people who were not paying attention to these things knew less than I did. We have to make real efforts to what is going on in the world, especially as American citizens and the last remaining superpower involved in almost every place that I went in some way, shape or form, either as consumers, or military advisors, or political players. Every country I went to, there was some form of American involvement and, yet, the citizens of my country probably could not point out these places on a map. We need to get in there and we need to get involved and we need to learn about these things. Ultimately for me, the web site was important, but having a book where people could see all of these conflicts in one place consecutively - one right after the other - will be an important tool in that education. That is what I want to see happen: people read this book and become involved or at least follow what is going on in these places. I will not be unsatisfied if people who read the book do not necessarily take a specific action. I think, in some cases, knowledge is its own reward. Being an informed citizen after reading something like this is as important as taking action. That is what I hope.

To find out more visit: http://hotzone.yahoo.com

Comments

[Dionita]

Thank you Eric for this wonderful interview with one of the most amazing journalists-not to mention Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill-of our age. Without their courageous efforts and sacrifice, we would be subjected to the lackadaisical reporting from the MSM day in and day out. Kudos to you Mr. Sites. Stay safe.

[rabun666]

Until WW2 collateral damage was the exception to the rule. The start of WW2 is the Japanese invasion of China. Since WW2 collateral damage is the rule accounting for 90% of casualties, by current estimates, with combat deaths being the exception. Governments and militarists still discount civilian causalities, todays collateral damage, as the exception when it is the rule.The fascist media just sing their tune, repeating it and discounting it. The USA has been living with the same conditions that were enacted to fight WW2 with one crisis after another most of which are contrived and created by the American government to continue this state of perpetual war. Orwell's "1984" took place in the 1940's for all practical purposes and has just been refined using the technological advances since then.