Sebastian Junger - A World Made of Blood

“That’s right,” Andre says. “Don’t move an inch.”

Andre has his camera up, and Daniel can hear the whir of the motor drive. The fighters are too puzzled to do anything, even kill him. Andre is shooting and opening the car door and shooting some more, on his feet now and moving from angle to angle, talking as he always does to his subjects, though the fighters can’t understand a word. One of them finally glances to either side and then presents his gun self-consciously across his chest in an exaggerated Rambo pose. One by one, the others reposition their guns—across the chest, cocked in the elbow, straight up into the air—until they look like a caricature of the nightmare that they are.

The commander walks over and takes his position out front. Andre runs out of film and keeps talking while his hands unload the roll, pocket it, dig for a new one in his vest, and load it into the camera. The fighters start to jostle one another, trying to get in front. One of them laughs. Another one says something and shoves his friend out of the way. They’re teenagers, Daniel thinks. They’ve probably never had their pictures taken before.

“You’re going to be famous, mates,” Andre says from behind his camera. “You’re all going to be fucking movie stars.”

Daniel hasn’t moved from the back of the truck. The kid, absurdly, is wearing his seatbelt and hangs patiently from it, ignored and irrelevant. The world has already moved on. Daniel pulls a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lights it and sits in the blood and the heat, smoking and watching Andre talk to the fighters. Andre says something funny in Krio, and for a moment the commander’s face opens up like a child’s, laughing, and the next instant he’s a killer again. All of them shift back and forth from men to boys and back to men again before Daniel’s eyes. If we hadn’t come out here, this kid wouldn’t be dead, Daniel thinks. If Andre hadn’t done something, all three of us would be dead.

Daniel tries to picture it. The killers would move on up the road toward the rest of their brutal little lives while the three of them stayed where they were, unrecognizable in their last agony, forever unconcerned with the affairs of men. The shadows would lengthen and it wouldn’t matter and the sun would set and it wouldn’t matter and finally dusk would creep in—the birdcalls, the sudden agitation of the forest—and still it wouldn’t matter. None of it would ever matter again, and it occurs to Daniel, drawing down the last of his cigarette, that no one can really say for sure who actually escaped from whom.

Sebastian Jungeris the author of the bestsellers War, The Perfect Storm, Fire, and A Death in Belmont . With the late Tim Hetherington, he shot and directed Restrepo, which won the 2010 Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for a 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary. He went on to direct a movie about Hetherington, Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? which airs on HBO in 2013. He also started a medical training program for freelance war reporters called Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues ( www.risctraining.org) A contributing editor to Vanity Fair, he has won a National Magazine Award and the SAIS-Novartis Prize.

Read more of Sebastian Junger’s stories at Byliner.com

Photograph by Tim Hetherington

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Copyright © 2012 by Sebastian Junger

All rights reserved

Cover Image © James Cotier/Getty Images

ISBN: 978-1-61452-054-2

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