Grenades, Mortars, and Libya’s Sand — Al Jazeera’s Evan Hill Describes the Chaos that Killed Photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros

© 2011 Peter Free

 

22 April 2011

 

 

Mixing unprofessional militaries with sand, concrete, and chaos

 

(Background on Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros and their deaths is here.  Bryan Denton’s beautiful photograph of one of the memorial services is here.)

 

Journalist Evan Hill eloquently wrote:

 

Sand will accept a bomb into its soft embrace, deaden its impact, and save your life. Harsh pavement will throw up a hail of deadly shrapnel, obliterating everything in the vicinity of the blast. When shells start falling, you move into the sand.

 

On one side, unprofessional civilian volunteers fire off rockets and AK-47s into the air with abandon, on the other, comparatively under-trained government troops indiscriminately shell civilian positions, and suspected regime infiltrators wait for their chance to sow chaos.

 

Communication may have improved since then, but rebels still rely on runners, moving up and down the line in 4x4s, to communicate.

 

And regime troops – at least those not driving tanks or other armoured vehicles – rely almost exclusively on civilian cars, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between them and rebels.

 

No matter how good you are, death can come in such a place.

 

Two photojournalists, Briton Tim Hetherington and American Chris Hondros, met their ends there on Wednesday, hit by shrapnel from the blast of a rocket-propelled grenade. Hetherington appeared to have bled to death from a leg injury; Hondros suffered a devastating wound to his head and never came out of a coma.

 

© 2011, Evan Hill, No safe haven for reporters in Libya, Al Jazeera English (22 April 2011) (paragraph split)

 

 

Consider

 

It is a pity that the men and women, who risk and lose their lives for truth, so often have the moral core of their messages ignored by the leaders who start, or aggravate, the conflicts they cover.

 

It is not just that political leaders’ hearts are hard — but that their heads and souls are near empty.

 

We, as a people, cannot get it right each time, but our leaders’ average could be much higher — had they the guts and insights of these fallen.

 

It is mostly the best who perish, and the worst who reap the spoils.