Q&A: Sebastian Junger Worries War Journalism Is Less Safe and Viable Than Ever

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In April of 2011, the photojournalist Tim Hetherington was on assignment in the Libyan city of Misrata when he was struck in the groin by shrapnel. Hetherington and another photojournalist, Chris Hondros, who was also badly wounded in the attack, were quickly transported to a nearby hospital, as colleagues and rebel fighters desperately worked to save their lives. They both died. (Two other colleagues who were wounded in the attack survived.)

A few weeks later, friends and colleagues of Hetherington’s gathered in London for his memorial service. Among them was Sebastian Junger, a journalist and filmmaker whose documentary Restrepo, about a US Army outpost in Afghanistan’s deadliest valley, was codirected with Hetherington. Junger had assumed that Hetherington’s main injury, a femoral-artery bleed, would have been unsurvivable under any circumstances, but while at the service, he spoke with a retired British field medic who told him that with the right training and certain tools, it might have been possible for someone to save Hetherington’s life. “That was very painful to hear,” Junger said.

Back home in New York, Junger began work on what would soon become a new component of his life’s work, Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC). The nonprofit, started with money donated by some of Hetherington’s former employers, like ABC and National Geographic, as well as twenty thousand dollars of Junger’s own money, would provide free, combat-grade medical training to freelance war reporters. The first class was held in 2012, at the Bronx Documentary Center—an art, education, and community space founded by the photojournalist Mike Kamber. Classes typically spanned several days, with instruction overseen by experienced combat medics, including at least one full day of drills meant to simulate the chaotic environment of warfare—smoke bombs, piped-in audio, fake blood, chicken carcasses, 185-pound dummies, and role-players running interference. 

RISC became a symbol of a new era of safety-conscious war journalism—something that only became more important as more journalists died in the spiraling conflicts emerging from the Arab Spring. There were trainings on mental health and PTSD. After one alumnus of the program, the freelance magazine writer Matthew Power, died from heatstroke while on assignment in Uganda, the course added a new module on heat and hydration. The effort drew praise from NPR, the BBC, and The New Yorker, and RISC soon expanded overseas, to conflict zones in Kosovo, Brazil, Ukraine, and East Africa, where half the slots were typically reserved for local reporters. (Three additional RISC alumni would lose their lives in the field: the American reporter James Foley, the American documentarian Brent Renaud, and the Dutch photojournalist Jeroen Oerlemans.)

But over the past several years, financing dwindled, and the rate of classes was forced to slow down. During COVID, the program took a hiatus, and last year, Junger told alumni and supporters that RISC expected to close. Last month, they made the final decision to pull the plug, disabling the program’s website and social media pages. “If we can’t offer the best, we don’t want to do it,” said deputy director Chrissy Heckart. The below conversation with Junger, which took place over multiple phone calls, has been edited for length and clarity.

CL: Your mission at RISC was very specific: teach experienced freelance war reporters high-level medical intervention in three or four days. Why did you make that choice?

SJ: Typically, in a five-day journalism safety course, you have all the medical stuff crushed into a day or half a day. We didn’t have to do that, because we’re assuming you all know the operational stuff probably better than we do. So we’re not gonna waste your time on that.

This was four days of learning how to be a pretty competent first responder in any circumstance, including frontline combat with massive trauma and blood loss. And it isn’t that you need four days of learning. It’s that you need one day of learning and three days of repetition in a fairly realistic scene designed to raise cortisol levels, stress levels—and to see how well you can focus while someone’s screaming in your ear. This is to make sure it’s ingrained in your reflexes, into your muscle memory, so when you’re in a crisis, the behavior will come out. 

COVID put the program on hiatus in 2020. What made you realize it was finally time to shut down?

The America that emerged on the other side of COVID wasn’t one where there was a lot of money floating around. Journalism was not on people’s list of priorities, and we just couldn’t fund it. My idea was RISC could be like a desert flower, and could survive long periods of drought. Then, with a light sprinkle of rain, we would spring to life and have a session somewhere, and then we’d go dormant again and wait for the next thunderstorm. But even that didn’t work.

That must have been a very hard decision for you.

Yeah. We trained almost four hundred people, and they went on to help other people in medical distress, and themselves, and also became a resource for each other. We were considered the best, because we were the most thorough, the most effective, and the cheapest, because the cost to people was zero. 

Closing—I was sad about it, and sad for the industry. This was a really good thing. Freelancers are doing heroes’ work for pennies on the dollar, and an awful lot of the world’s war coverage is provided by freelancers. They’re a cheap date for the industry, and there’s no responsibility. “Oh, you got your leg shot off? Too bad.” But one of the things they had was RISC. “Here ya go. Well done. Here’s something to keep you safe.” So I feel good about it, but bad for them, and for the industry. 

There are still some great programs out there that do journalism safety. But on the whole, do you think the world is less safe for journalists?

Journalists will always avoid things that will kill them. That’s pretty hardwired. There’s obviously new risks today around drone warfare, which sounds terrifying, but the risks of being around gunfire and artillery never change. Battlefield risks are sort of random. There’s no data. People who are extremely cautious can get wounded and real daredevils can escape unscathed, so it’s mostly a function of experience.

As the industry collapses financially, there are fewer opportunities for freelancers, and almost no opportunities to get paid decently. So for the industry itself, they’re losing all these eyes and ears on the ground. It’s a sign of where the world’s gone to.

The veteran war photojournalist Don McCullin recently made some headlines when he said that he felt like he’d been “stealing other people’s suffering with my camera,” and that the work he did was “a waste of time” because it did little to prevent conflict. What did you make of that?

Well, I’m not going to argue with someone’s feelings about themselves. But I can’t imagine any kind of decent world that doesn’t have a mechanism for documenting and dispersing the worst tragedies. A world where that all happens in darkness? And no one ever knows? It’s just unspeakable. So it falls to the press. And maybe a couple UN agencies, but basically it falls to the press. 

It would be horrific if people stopped reporting the news. Unthinkable. That would be like doctors saying, “You know what? No more doctors! We’re all gonna die anyway, and I don’t wanna take advantage of people’s suffering, so I’m gonna do landscaping for a while.” That’s an unimaginable world, right? If people are suffering, you need professionals who know how to help, how to document, how to alert others so they can help. That seems really obvious to me. 

A lot of journalists did seem to connect with McCullin’s sentiment—it went viral.

It’s not to say that there aren’t really intense emotional repercussions from making your living by documenting other people’s troubles, other people’s pain, other people’s agony and death. I myself have navigated a real sense of shame, that some part of me is like, “When’s the next war?” Sorry. I’m a human being. War’s intense. It brought out, I think, some of my better qualities, but it can also make you feel kind of ashamed. 

But I think it has to be done. Otherwise we would live in a much worse world. But the people who actually do it—the ER trauma surgeons in Detroit, the war photographers, et cetera—those doing this work that has to be done, it’s not to say there aren’t enormous emotional consequences.

We live in a time when smartphones and social media mean that just about anyone can be a journalist—the bystander who filmed George Floyd’s murder received a special citation from the Pulitzer Board. Yet unsourced media goes online constantly, which helps spread misinformation. Do you think there is less of a need for a professional corps of journalists? 

There’s citizen journalism, and citizen witnesses. I have a flip phone, but most people do have smartphones now, so a citizen witness can take a photograph that changes history. But this isn’t new. The [1992] riots in Los Angeles were triggered by a cameraman shooting video from his window of the cops beating Rodney King. So it’s not new, it’s just more pervasive. And it’s ubiquitous. Every time there’s an argument on the street, people think it’s TikTok-worthy. 

But the focused and dedicated mission of a journalist is to understand what’s going on. You might get a photo out of Gaza that shows something horrible, and you know something horrible happened, but there’s no context that you can trust. How do you know the person that posted this isn’t a member of Hamas and trying to spin a story? 

One of the functions of journalists is that they are trustworthy. That the editor says, “Okay, I know this reporter. They’re not working for Hamas.” I don’t think you can replace that with people who happen to be on the street corner when a thing happens. A photo is a photo, as long as it wasn’t manipulated, but the context—you need someone who you trust, who you have a working relationship with. Because without context, a photo means absolutely nothing. 

You came up in journalism in a time and place—glossy magazines of the 1990s—that only exists in reporting and memoirs. Do you feel that journalism careers like the one you had are still viable today?

Miraculously, I caught the heyday of something, but I no longer do assignments like that, or make documentaries, because I can’t afford to.

Now I don’t think I would go into the business. And I don’t know how the economics work. Because as the news industry contracted, they probably relied on freelancers more, because they couldn’t sustain a salaried staff, and so they had freelancers all over the world. But they weren’t paying the freelancers. Like, one now-defunct agency paid something like twenty dollars for a combat photo. That’s insulting. Reporters can’t live on that. But the numbers are the numbers, so what do you do? How are people going to get their news?

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