Generations
I’d rather fight a war tomorrow than think my son might have to do it one day.
This sentence, which I know to be true, does not belong to me. It does not emanate from me. It inhabits me because I am part of this living planet. It originates in the deepest strata of life, in the mechanisms that regulate the way life is handed down from being to being, from generation to generation, across time. It does not make me any more courageous than the moderately frightened – or more heroic than the moderately selfish – man that I am.
- Maidan Shar, Afghanistan. November 2001. The Frontline: Kabul had been liberated and the Taliban had fled. The frontline had shifted some 60 km south of the capital. It was very quiet, apart from sporadic gunfire. In truth, no one knew what lay beyond. No one knew where the Taliban had gone. Time would tell they they were still there.
- Kabul, Afghanistan. November 2001. The Price of a Battle: Two Taliban fighters await their fate in prison, having been captured defending Kabul when their positions were overrun by victorious Northern Alliance soldiers.
- Kabul, Afghanistan. November 2001. Children play in the liberated city.
- Baghdad, Iraq. April 2003. US Marine: When it became clear that to stay in Iraq was going to be much harder than it had been to get there.
- Near Hilla, Iraq. May 2003. A History of Violence: Shortly after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, mass graves from the Saddam era started to surface in various parts of the country. The Mahawil mass grave near the ancient city of Babylon contained the bodies of over 3,000 Shias killed during the 1991 uprising, which followed the first Gulf War. It was the largest one found.
- Eastern Iraq. May 2003. The Search: A US marine searches a local man at an improvised check-point. But what would have been useful to find – the history, the fear, the hatred, the faith, the desire for revenge or victory – none of it could be found in this way. Yet only those things really mattered, only things that cannot be kept in a man’s pocket or hidden in his socks would shape the years to come.
- Baghdad, Iraq. April 2003. Out of place: A US marine guards a tiger that had belonged to the Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday. Two very deadly creatures, the largest predator and a human soldier, both somehow out of place.
I know it is true because I felt it, sharp and clear as a crystal, a few days ago. I was speaking with a very good friend and, as we spoke, we watched our kids playing in the shallow water. She, my friend, is an astronomer. We met when we were little more than children ourselves, at fifteen. And, even if we are in our forties and she lives in Australia, we have never lost touch. We meet briefly every few years, and when we do – a little like teenagers – all we talk about are fundamental questions and cosmic issues.
We were looking at our children. And she said, more or less, “We have lived in times of peace. But them – I am not so sure.”
The sun was still shining. The kids were still playing. It was just a sentence made of words. But I could feel it passing over me like a dark shadow, like a moving wall of black clouds. That possibility, unthinkable just a few years ago. A dark shadow, a quick shiver. I knew then that I’d go to war, if I knew it would prevent it.
- Baghdad, Iraq. April 2003. Invincible. Children.
- Baghdad, Iraq. April 2003. The War in the War: US Marines in the women’s ward of the al-Rashad psychiatric hospital after the conquest of Baghdad. I remember one of those Marines. The smell of the place, the patients pacing up and down, the flies on their bodies, the sudden screams… it seemed to hit him hard. He had tears in his eyes. He had fought his way up to Baghdad from Kuwait, but nothing had prepared him for the despair of these abandoned people who continued to fight their merciless wars with themselves, now surrounded by war as well.
- At Sea, Gaza City. August 2005. I saw them riding the small wooden boat like a horse, the man in the front holding a harness tied to the bow in one hand and a rifle in the other. Their adversaries had bigger guns and bigger boats. The sea they were guarding had been made smaller and smaller by lost wars, much smaller than the typical 12 miles of territorial waters most nations have. A small sea with only small fish. But they still set out to defend what they had, even if it was not much, even if their enemy was stronger. How far would I go to defend what I have?
- At Sea, Gaza City. August 2005.
- Gaza Strip. August 2005. The shadows of young Palestinians are projected on the wall of the house where they gathered to “spy” on the Israeli settlement of Eli Sinai, on the eve of its evacuation under the Disengagement Plan. Borders: Where alien entities, other to each other, sometimes hostile, touch. Nowhere like here have I felt the physical power of borders. It was as if just looking to the other side could hurt or kill. I remember looking only briefly, as if to protect my eyes from the sun. And I remember everybody’s relief when we walked down from the terrace. Out of the shared, open air. Out of sight. But the essence of this story can only be reached by crossing and recrossing the border as many times as possible. The other side is never what is expected. Not being Israeli or Palestinian I could and did cross many times. In so doing, I lost all my certainties. I saw desperate, passionate humanity on both sides. I promised myself that I would do everything possible to cross borders in every conflict situation. To report from both sides within the same assignment. I could not keep the promise. I still think I should keep trying. And, anyway, I did then.
- Former Israeli settlement of Sanur, West Bank, now Palestinian Authority. August 2005. A child-settler, wearing a gas mask, looks down from the besieged fortress as Israeli policemen prepare for the final assault to evict him and his hundred and some fellow settlers.
- Spielfeld, Austria. September 2015. Slovenian-Austrian border: War gives rise to mass movement. People leave behind all that they know and try to rebuild their lives in somebody else’s land. A mother and her two children – from Syria – are seen through a train window as the local express from the tiny border station of Spielfeld finally departs towards Graz, deeper into Austria. They had walked the few hundred metres from Sentilj in Slovenia to Spielfeld in Austria. After a lapse of uncertainty they were let on the train, for which they had bought the ticket. They looked surprised when the train suddenly started moving to disappear quickly due north. They had just managed another step on their epic journey.
I have seen war, more than once. It is because of my job. I am a news agency cameraman. I saw it in Kosovo, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Banda Aceh, in Israel, in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Tunisia… It is where I collected the photo-notes that make up this article. But I always saw it briefly, always as an outsider. And it was never my war. War never saw me.
I was born in Sicily in 1972, and I have never fought in a war. Neither has my father, Ettore, who was born in 1945.
His father, Antonino, who was born in Sicily in 1896, did. He fought three wars. He was 18 when he went to fight the Austrians in the Italian north-east. It was the Great War. He gained several medals there and I remember reading, as a child, the handwritten accolades signed on behalf of the king describing with magniloquent words how this young man did not hesitate to dive into no man’s land under enemy fire, to retrieve a wounded comrade. This grandfather, whom I never met, eventually became a professional soldier and went on to fight in Italy’s colonial war in Libya for ten years. By the time the Second World War came round he was a major and by the time he died, when my father was sixteen, he was a general. War had been his life’s trade.
My other grandfather, Angelo, had a very, very different story though he too fought a war. He was born in Sicily in 1910. He was not interested at all in martial activities and became a doctor. An unlucky coincidence had him start his two-year compulsory military service in 1937. By the time he was about to finish and go back to his life the Second World War had started and he was drafted to fight on the eastern front, against Yugoslavia. Which he did. By 1945, this man who had no interest in fighting, had been a soldier for seven years.
Angelo was a very, very important presence in my life. He died in 2007 at the age of 97. After the war he started where he had left off, became a very well respected psychiatrist, had five children and many grandchildren. In the very last months of his long and full life, as he began drifting away from the daily life of the house of which he was the centre, strangely and suddenly, he started talking more and more of his days as a soldier, of his days at war.
He died on a luminous winter day. Just before entering the short agony that ended his long life he insisted on shaving with his electric razor. He sat down in front of the window and shaved carefully, way I had seen him do it so many times in my childhood, before going to school. I am sure he shaved like that, slowly and carefully, even in the midst of war, in the midst of storm and thunder.
Just before his coffin was sealed, his four daughters exited the house and went into the vast garden-forest that surrounds it. They picked roses – his favourite flower – in every colour, and they raced back to put their petals and buds in the coffin. I was looking for the last time at this man I loved deeply, covered in roses, surrounded by his beautiful daughters shedding tears. And I thought, what more? What an epitaph. What a testimony to a life truly lived.
- At Sea. May 2015.
- Lampedusa, Italy. February 2015. A Somali teenager. Just landed. In limbo. In others’ land.
- Persano, Italy. April 2014. Libyan soldiers being trained in Italy.
- Persano, Italy. April 2014. Libyan soldiers being trained in Italy.
- Persano, Italy. April 2014. Libyan soldiers being trained in Italy.
- Tunis, Tunisia. January 2011. The beginning of the Arab Spring.
- Tunis, Tunisia. January 2011. I saw them at dusk, carrying the wounded man on their shoulders towards the frontline as if he was a battle standard. In the streets of Tunis I saw things I had very rarely seen before, even in apparently similar situations. This –people going back to the streets every day despite being tear-gassed, beaten, shot at – was one of them. The wounded man was proud and there was no fear visible in his eyes. The crowd was right to hold the man like an ensign, I thought. His tenacity, and that of people like him who came back to the front after a beating, made repression powerless. It brought things closer to what seemed closer to a revolution – not something ordered from above – than anything else I’d seen.
I was in that same forest-garden a few days ago. I live in Rome but I try to go back to the house where I grew up, in Sicily, when I can. It was late and the vast garden was enveloped in the darkness of the night. We were having dinner and our children, mine and my sisters’ and cousins’, were playing by the house, in the well-lit terrace.
Suddenly the older kid invited the others to follow him into the darkness of the garden to play hide-and-seek. My son, who is three years old, started shouting that he did not want to go, that he wanted to play hide-and-seek inside the house. He was about to start crying. I got up and walked up to him to ask what was wrong. So he looked up at me and as he did I saw – clear in his eyes – the intense, painful struggle between the desire to go and play with the others and the deep fear of the dark and unknown garden. That fear, which prevented him from going and nailed him to the light. That terror, where every shadow hides a deadly danger, which I had come to know so well, in that very place, decades earlier. And that, later, I had forgotten. I saw in his face the desperation of someone who knows that fear will prevail, that terror will be stronger.
He was looking towards the dark garden, where he could hear the others running and laughing. My heart shrank. I would have taken his fear and put it into me if I could have. But I couldn’t, just as my father couldn’t take on my fear, nor his father – the warrior – his.
I told him that I’d go with him and smoke a cigarette in the garden. He hesitated briefly, then took my hand as we walked down the stairs that led into the darkness, where the others were playing. As we approached them, he left me and ran towards the shadows where the hide-and-seek action was taking place. I stood back and lit my cigarette.
I looked at them briefly, before going back to my dinner. He was running, laughing and moving fast among the dark bushes and trees. His terror was gone, swept away by a moment of confidence and courage, by the warm hand of a father. Suddenly, in the long shadows of the trees where he had seen only deadly danger and peril he could see adventure, fun and life. The miracle of courage.
For how much longer will I be able to walk with him into the dark gardens that await? Not long. For how much longer will my hand still manage to give him courage? I don’t know. But not long. It is the nature of life that one must walk towards the shadows alone.
I will not be able to fight any of the many wars that he will have to face. No. Like all fathers, all I can do is try and help him to learn what little magic can make us see adventure where danger lurked when we walk into a dark forest.
- Tunis, Tunisia. January 2011. The day policemen joined the demonstrations. One of them, carried on protesters’ shoulders, leads the siege of Government House.
- Tunis, Tunisia. January 2011. Demonstrators hug and kiss a policeman on the momentous day the police joined the protest.
- Tunis, Tunisia. January 2011. The Pride of Revolt: The young man bared his chest and proudly showed a small wound. It looked like a gunshot wound, it was probably the mark of a rubber bullet. I thought of French writer Albert Camus. A man in revolt is a man who says “No”, “This, no more” (I quote from my memory of youthful reading passions). But, while saying no, a man in revolt is a man who says “Yes”. He says yes to the part of himself that he wants to survive. He declares his loyalty to the part of himself that he wants to live on in dignity and, possibly, to thrive.
- Mitrovica, Kosovo. October 1999. The bridge across the Drina river during clashes between Serbian and Albanian inhabitants of the divided city.
- Mitrovica, Kosovo. October 1999. I saw the little boy on the opposite side of the street. His gestures were perfect. He shot every passing vehicle with a stick. After every shot he recharged and aimed again. The faint writing on the wall behind him seemed to speak of the impossibility of having a normal life.
- Mitrovica, Kosovo. October 1999. I saw the little boy on the opposite side of the street. His gestures were perfect. He shot every passing vehicle with a stick. After every shot he recharged and aimed again. The faint writing on the wall behind him seemed to speak of the impossibility of having a normal life.
- Oswiecim Poland. July 2016. The Memory of War and How Wars Change the World: Pope Francis walks towards the gate of the former Nazi death camp of Aushwitz. The Pope walked alone through the gates of the death camp. A rare view. He said nothing throughout the visit.