Former Reuters journalist Dean Yates’ career has taken him around the world and up-close-and-personal with some of the century’s worst tragedies and atrocities. From the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, to the frontlines of war in Lebanon and Iraq—Yates’ experiences have taken a deeply personal toll. The killing of two Iraqi journalist colleagues by a US Apache gunship finally pushed him over the edge. After years of dealing with PTSD, substance abuse, and psychiatric hospitalization, Yates has written a new memoir about his journey, Line in the Sand. Dean Yates joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his new book, his career, and his healing journey.
Studio: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
(Singing).
Chris Hedges:
Dean Yates was a reporter for Reuters who led teams that covered the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia. He served as Deputy Bureau Chief for Israel and Palestine in 2006 during the Lebanon war, and was the Reuters Bureau chief in Iraq, overseeing a staff of 100 people from 2007 to 2008. It was during his time in Iraq that a US Apache gunship gunned down two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. On July 12th, 2007. WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange published footage of the attack in 2010 known as the Collateral Murder Video. Yates struggled in the aftermath with severe PTSD, was consumed by guilt over the killing of his two Iraqi colleagues. His trauma turned out to be a time bomb, leading to substance abuse, rage, numbness, and pushing him up to the edge of suicide. He was hospitalized three times in a psychiatric ward.
He, like many former war correspondence, felt abandoned by his news organization. He was unable to recapture the camaraderie and sense of purpose, even meaning that comes with war reporting. The toxicity of his trauma, which took a heavy toll on his wife and children, became the new war he had to fight. Yates has written a brutally honest memoir about his battle, Line in the Sand, a Journalist Memoir of War, Trauma and Healing. He joins me to discuss the trauma of war reporting, its crippling consequences and the struggle to heal and find peace. So as you know, I’m a huge admirer of this book for its unflinching honesty.
I want to ask having … and I think just to go back, we should recap because a lot of people don’t remember the Bali bombings. I think there’s a moment in the book where you’re counting over 200 bodies, counting them, right?
Dean Yates:
That was in the Boxing Day tsunami-
Chris Hedges:
That was in the Boxing Day. I did the same, and a way it becomes a kind of … it gives you something to do. It creates a distance between you and the carnage, but I remember also, doing exactly what you did. Give us just a brief kind of summary of the kind of traumatic events that you had to cover as a reporter.
Dean Yates:
Yeah. I think the Bali bombings, Chris was … it was one of those seminal events, right? So, 9/11 had happened. The world had been shocked and horrified by 9/11, those attacks. So the war on terror had begun and the war in Afghanistan had begun. Then a year later, I’m sitting in Jakarta and I get this phone call from our stringer in Bali who said, there’s been these explosions in Kuta Beach. Of course everyone knows Bali. It’s this tourist paradise, one of the holiday islands of the world. I said, what can you see? And he said, “Headless bodies and cars on fire.” And I knew something terrible had happened, but I just didn’t know how bad it would be. Of course, the final death toll was 202 people dead, including 88 Australians. This was the worst attack for my country, Australia, outside wartime.
It was very quickly identified that the attackers were an offshoot, a Southeast Asian terrorist group called Jemaah Islamiyah, which was affiliated with Al-Qaeda. I went down there the following morning, I was on the first flight and the whole area had been obliterated. Thousand kilograms of explosives in a minivan just exploded outside this nightclub, which was full of young holiday makers. This is what I think … this is why this attack reverberated around the world because it was ordinary people, young people having fun, going to the beach and on holiday. It was a brutal evil attack, and that that was the beginning of what we saw then, during those years of these wave of terrorist attacks around the world, Spain, London, France, elsewhere. It was the beginning after 9/11 of that decade long, if you like, wave of terrorism,
Chris Hedges:
And talk about what you saw when you got there.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, I get to the bomb site and it was this big crater in the ground and Indonesia being Indonesia, there was no security there. There was no tape around the site. I actually walked over the bomb site looking just to see what I could see. There was still some bit of smoke coming out of the debris. My foot bumped a bit of debris and I actually dislodged and there was a shown of hand there, and I nearly stepped on it, and the whole thing was just … I actually could feel evil there, and I was a real methodical news agency journalist. I just did one story, moved onto the next, but I could actually feel evil there. It’s the first time and the only time I’ve ever felt that. Then I went to the hospital because this is where all the survivors were, their families.
All the bodies had been taken to the main hospital in Bali. When I got to that hospital, I was about to go in and then a burned victim was brought past me, young man, face looking up, badly burnt face. And I froze, there was something about that moment where I just thought, I can’t go into that hospital. I was really confused about my role. This was the biggest story I’d ever covered, and we’re talking 20, 21 years ago now. I’d never been trained for this sort of thing. I’d never been … no one had taught me, how do you go into a hospital ward, full of grieving people who’ve just lost loved ones in a horrific attack? And what do you even say to these people? Well, people think I’m a … Well, they think I’m a voyeur? I just didn’t have the emotional skills to deal with that.
And so I actually, didn’t even go into the hospital. I couldn’t do my job. And I felt such shame about that for nearly 15 years. I didn’t even tell my wife for 15 years because I wasn’t able to do my job, and it was only years later that I was actually through lots of therapy. Bali really affected me. I felt very … it really traumatized me. It was only years later that through a lot of therapy, I was able to work out with my psychologist that I just didn’t have … I didn’t have the emotional skills to go into that hospital ward. I didn’t know how I could deal with the distress inside, and I was very tired. I’d been up all night and exhausted, and the shame I felt was that I didn’t do my job. I didn’t give those people a chance to tell their story. You and I both know working in conflict zones, working in disaster zones, a lot of people want to tell their story.
They want the world to know. I didn’t give them a chance to do that. That was the shame I felt but then 20 years later, all this therapy, I was able to show myself compassion for that younger reporter who just didn’t know how to respond to that situation, and that helped me deal with all those emotions.
Chris Hedges:
And then quickly the tsunami and then Iraq. I should point out you were 700 days in Iraq, and we were talking about before we went on the air that although I probably have been in more combat than you have, I went in and out of combat. So there were periods where I was relatively safe or certainly didn’t feel the fear or the terror. When I was in Sarajevo, which was being shelled all of the time, it was constant fear, which we would pull out after three weeks because you don’t sleep. I’m really curious about those 700 days, but just talk briefly about the tsunami and then Iraq and then we’ll go into the effects.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, the tsunami was just … for some of us who covered the tsunami, we actually consider that the big story of our generation, actually. I mean, this was a natural disaster, unprecedented in modern times. In Aceh … Indonesia’s Aceh, 166,000 people killed in 20 minutes. The destruction, the death. I saw thousands of dead bodies. I walked into a mosque, the day I got there. I walked into a mosque, the main mosque in Banda Aceh, the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque. There were just bodies lined up in this mosque, bloated. I just thought, I’ve got to count these bodies. It was sort of like … there was a journalistic part of it, right? I write my story, I want to count how many bodies are there, but it was sort of like someone had to do it.
It was paying them respect by doing so, and I counted 156 bodies in this mosque, but it was just horrific, but what I found covering the Boxing Day tsunami was unlike Bali where I froze at that hospital, I just had this energy and this passion to cover that story, to report the hell out of that story. It was one of those events where it happened on Boxing Day, and those news images and the pictures that came out galvanized the global community in contributing something like 14, 15 billion dollars in aid for the tsunami victims all around the Indian Ocean. It was an incredible effort and it was partly due to that sort of media coverage, and the thing about the coverage for me personally, was that while the death toll was horrific and while the … and I spent a month up there and I went back six months later and 12 months later. Boxing Day tsunami didn’t traumatize me as much.
And I think it was because I was able to work … I was really proud of the work I did, and I was really proud of the work that Reuters, my employer put into that story, through the kitchen sink at it. We threw so many people at that story. So I felt that week that I did the story justice and our organization did the story justice, I think that means a lot to journalists, that if you feel you are bearing witness, if you feel you are doing your job properly, I think that actually is a protective measure when it comes to trauma. I mean, it’s different, a manmade atrocity versus a natural disaster. They are different, but they’re still trauma. For me, I just felt that I’d been able to do my job really well and that protected me later when the trauma came.
Chris Hedges:
And let’s talk just briefly about Iraq.
Dean Yates:
And the thing with Iraq was just the fear. Again, it was something that I didn’t realize until literally 18, 19 years later, that fear of getting kidnapped had been trapped in my body, and this was something that every single journalist was frightened about, obviously in Baghdad, was getting kidnapped because if you got kidnapped, you were likely going to get killed. There was … the way Al-Qaeda was operating and some of those other militant groups, they weren’t taking prisoners. You’re dead, and that fear manifested itself in my nightmares. In my nightmares, the most common nightmare I would have was of being chased through the streets by insurgents in Baghdad. I could see the streets of Baghdad, I could see the shopkeepers.
And some colleagues were able to grow their beards and look Arab, I could never do that. I always looked like a Westerner and in these nightmares, I’d be running through the streets, gunman chasing me, and I wouldn’t know how to get back to the office. My feet actually moved in the bed. It was like I was … and my feet were scratching the wooden frame of our bed and my wife, Mary, we’d wake up the next morning and she’d say, “You were running in your sleep again last night.” I was literally running to try and get away from these people. Sometimes I’d scream out because they’d caught me. It was just … the nightmares were terrible, so that fear, I thought was … when I look back at that now, and I look back and it’s sort of interesting, and it’s an interesting element to the trauma, was that it’s sometimes things that don’t actually happen to you can be traumatic.
We often think something must happen to someone, they get shot at or they get blown up or they get attacked, but for me, it was something that didn’t happen, but that could have happened, and that what was I found very … ultimately was a big factor in my PTSD.
Chris Hedges:
Well, I had that story, well, I still to this day have dreams of being shelled and although I spent far more time covering the war in El Salvador, five years where I was in a lot of combat and I wasn’t ever hit by a shell, but it’s exactly the same thing where it’s the fear and living with that fear 24 hours a day, obviously ingrained itself so deeply within my psyche. Let’s just talk briefly about the collateral murder video, what happened, and then I want to get into your own struggle.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, so obviously with Iraq and Baghdad, for me, the biggest traumatic event was the deaths of my staff. Namir Noor Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, the Reuters photographer and driver who were killed on July 12th, 2007 by a US Apache gunship call sign, Crazy Horse 18. I was in the newsroom that day, and out of the blue, there amongst a group of men, shot dead by this gunship, and that for me was … it was the start of, I guess a slow burn chain reaction, traumatic event that eventually brought me to the brink of suicide nearly 10 years later because of all sorts of reasons. I failed to protect my staff. When Julian Assange released the collateral murder tape, I didn’t speak up. I was literally frozen in shock when that tape came out and I couldn’t speak. The fact that I didn’t speak up meant that Reuters allowed the US military to get away with its deceitful narrative around what happened.
In other words, Reuters allowed the US military to lie about the events of that attack and didn’t challenge it. Then, there was just all … and so that narrative was allowed to continue. So, that to me was a lack of courage on my part, a lack of moral courage. All of that came together 10 years later. And that guilt and that shame from that brought me to the brink of suicide until my wife, Mary intervened and said, “You need to get help. You need to go to a psych ward.”
Chris Hedges:
I want to ask, just from my own experience, I did war for 20 years. My last war I covered was Kosovo. I felt myself … I don’t know that I had a breakdown, but I felt myself breaking down in that war. I did my job, but it was much harder than any other conflict that I covered, and I wondered if you had a kind of final period when you were covering, I assume in Iraq, where you felt the same kind of thing.
Dean Yates:
For me, that breakdown was actually a couple of days after Namir and Saeed were killed. I was told that the Iraqi staff felt that I wasn’t being tough enough on the US military in our reporting, the Iraqi staff basically wanted me to report in our stories that Namir and Saeed had been killed in cold blood. I just couldn’t report that because we didn’t know exactly what had happened and you know what it was like in these war zones. Information is so sketchy. I hadn’t seen anything from the tape by that stage. I could only report what we knew, but it was like the Iraqi staff were calling me gutless. And that ripped my heart apart, and I just thought, I can’t do this and I wept, and my young deputy from Lebanon who told me this, I just said to her, “I can’t do this. I need to resign. I wanted to resign my post. I wanted to leave Baghdad.”
She knew that if I did that, it would break me, and she urged me to stay on. And I have to probably thank her for saving my career at that time because I think if I had resigned I would’ve never gotten another post again, because Reuters was pretty tough, like all news organizations and if I’d have bailed, that would’ve been probably the end for me. I managed to keep going after that event, and I don’t know, but it all caught up with me, Chris, in the end,
Chris Hedges:
Let’s talk about how it caught up with you.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, so funnily enough, it caught up with me in this beautiful island where I live now of Tasmania, this peaceful, pristine little part of the world where we eventually-
Chris Hedges:
I just want to interrupt. There are a lot of ghosts in Tasmania. There was a genocide before you got there.
Dean Yates:
You also got the Tasmanian … yeah, that’s right. There are a lot of ghosts. It’s been a brutal place over many years. So my wife, Mary comes from Tasmania, and so we decided to move here after … I’ve been on the road for 20 years for Reuters, and I was pretty tired and decided let’s go back to Tasmania. And Reuters said that I could work as a subeditor wherever I went, as long as I had a broadband connection. So we relocated here in 2013, and it wasn’t long before the symptoms started to emerge of PTSD, the noise sensitivity, the agitation, the anxiety, the depression, isolating myself, that sort of stuff.
Chris Hedges:
I just want to interrupt. I just want to ask why you thought … it happened after you left. I didn’t have nightmares in war zones. I would have them the moment I left. And the other point that you bring up in the book that I liked, you talk about trauma. You may be quoting somebody, but you’re talking about trauma, like all these items packed in a cupboard. And then every once in a while they’ll fall out. You can’t control it. I mean, I feel that I keep them packed, I try and keep them all packed in there. I thought that was an incredible analogy. So why did the trauma hit you after you left, and how did those things fall out of the cupboard?
Dean Yates:
Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. So for me, and I think it’s the same for a lot of people, when you’re working in intense places, there’s no room in your head for a lot of that trauma to come out right. You’ve just got so much on your mind. You’ve got so much to do. You’re focused. You’ve got your job to do. When I left Asia and the Middle East and came back to Tasmania, my brain had space to start ruminating, and when you’re in this beautiful environment, you start to think about the past, it’s just inevitable. It’s going to happen. So, that allowed room for the memories to start coming back in. Before, there’s just no time for those memories to come back. It’s easy to keep memories down when you’ve got so much else to do and so much here and now to focus on with your work.
That’s why some people who have been traumatized can keep going until they’re old. And then when they stop work, bang, the trauma really hits them. So for me, being here in Tasmania, I was still working, but I wasn’t working as hard. I wasn’t working those same hours. That’s when all this stuff started to accumulate. And I would literally be sitting in my home office trying to work on stories, edit stories and I was editing things like … this is the thing, right? Editing stories, MH 17, terrorist attacks, other sorts of events that were triggering as well, reminders of what I’d covered in the past. And I would get so stressed out, I would bang my fists on the table, I would yell, I would scream, and it would be like I was sitting back in my office in Baghdad. I would be so stressed that I’d be physically transported back.
So eventually, after many years of pleading, my wife Mary got me to get help because I was horrible at home. I’m terrible to live with. And I was very quickly diagnosed with PTSD, and I was given time off work, but as I went … and this was the thing, this was the critical thing, as soon as I took sick leave, the nightmare started, within days of me taking sick leave and stopping work, that’s when the nightmare started, and I think that was because I wasn’t working then. My head wasn’t filled with news planning calls wasn’t filled with what stories am I editing who I got to discuss that story with no emails to answer. My head’s got nothing in it, in come the nightmares, the flashbacks became very intense at that time as well. So rather than get better on sick leave, I went downhill.
Chris Hedges:
I want to just ask a quick question. When you cover war, you’re getting all sorts of adrenaline rushes almost constantly. I’m just curious whether you think that that was … those soldiers call it a combat high? It’s very real. I’m just wondering if those adrenaline rushes ward it off in your idea, in your thoughts, trauma and then, I just want you … because we only have about seven minutes left, I want you to talk about the road to recovery, what it is you had to do.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, no, I think those adrenaline rushes do ward off the trauma. Absolutely. I think the problem is if you keep looking for those adrenaline rushes, you’re going to have to confront at some stage in your life, you can’t keep putting it off-
Chris Hedges:
Well, the problem is you leave and you keep looking for it. I mean, the title of your book is A Journalist, Memoir of War Trauma, Infidelity and Healing. I mean, they can read that chapter.
Dean Yates:
You can’t keep putting this stuff off, right? You will have to confront the trauma at some stage. You can keep trying to delay it, but it will catch up with you, I guarantee it. It’s just a matter of when, and the longer you leave it, the harder it is and the longer it’s going to take too to get to that recovery. That whole thing about the linen cupboard and the items stacked in the cupboard, the first day I went to the psych ward, this was just … and I loved this imagery. The first time I went to this psych ward in Melbourne, a lot of coppers, a lot of veteran specialist PTSD facility. I was given this notebook, this notebook, and it had this piece of paper, and I’ve still got it on my notice board up here, treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, the linen covered metaphor.
On one side, you’ve got this messy cupboard with clothes falling out on the other is a very neat cupboard. The idea is that messy cupboard is all your traumatic memories, right? And you open that cupboard and they all start tumbling out. The idea of therapy is to process those memories, deal with them, work through them, and then you fold them up and uniquely stack them away in the tidy side of the cupboard so that if you want to access them, you just open the cupboard and you can pull them out if you want to, and you can put them in. They don’t just tumble out if you happen to bump the cupboard accidentally or brush past it. That is one of the biggest problems with PTSD is that people have no control over their memories. Those memories can just come flooding back at any time.
The memories are unprocessed. Whereas once you’ve done the therapy and you’ve gone through it, you’re able to … those memories are properly filed. They’re stored away in that linen cupboard.
Chris Hedges:
Do you ever reach a point where all of the memories jumbled in the one cupboard are folded and processed? I mean, isn’t it to a certain extent, always with you that trauma or not?
Dean Yates:
Chris, I’ll be honest, because I’ve spent seven years writing this book. I’ve spent seven years in really immersive therapy and really working hard on my recovery. I honestly believe that most of my memories now are folded up and put inside that cupboard. I still get … there’s no question that I still get jolted sometimes, but I know where every memory is. I know where they all are, and I know that the anniversary of Namir and Saeed’s deaths are coming up next month. I’ll feel emotional about that, but that’s fine. It’s okay. I’m at peace with myself. I’ve made peace with myself over that, and I’ll know to expect the emotion-
Chris Hedges:
I just want to add, that was a very important part in your recovery was a ritual.
Dean Yates:
Yes.
Chris Hedges:
A religious ritual of your own design, but that doesn’t matter. I went to seminary. I mean, I’m a believer in ritual and that it was carrying out that ritual that … and as I remember, I think you spoke to them in that ritual, but just talk about that briefly.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, and it was basically … and actually, I got this idea by reading books by American veterans, by American … essentially American spiritual healers, people who have worked with American veterans and brought them to peace with what they saw and did in Vietnam. And the idea was … people helped me come up with this idea for a ritual … a memorial service in a chapel on the 10th anniversary of Namir and Saeed’s-
Chris Hedges:
It was a mosque, wasn’t it? It was a mosque.
Dean Yates:
No, I also went to a mosque. I also went to a mosque nearby and got advice from an imam. So I brought the two religions, Christianity and Islam together, but it was having that memorial service where I wrote them a letter. I wrote them a 5,000 word letter, which took nearly a week and in it, I sort of poured my heart into this letter and that memorial service that I held, I was able to … that process, it wasn’t like, “Let’s have a memorial service and I’ll forgive myself.” It was the process of getting to that service, the planning, the thinking about it, and I had a spiritual care worker who did the work with me, and then, the culmination of that memorial service, she poured cold water over my hands.
She anointed the sign … did the sign of the cross on my forehead. I felt absolved. I literally felt clenched. I’m not religious, but it was the ritual of that process that helped me make peace with myself. It was very important.
Chris Hedges:
Just to close, where would you say you are now?
Dean Yates:
So I actually don’t like to use the word recovery because I think recovery is more of a physical manifestation. I just feel like I’ve written a new narrative for myself. I’ve healed, that’s a better way of referring to it. I really feel healed. I feel like this is a new chapter in my life, but the trauma that I experienced and what happened is just part of my … it’s part the new identity that I’ve forged for myself, and it’s integrated into who I am and who I want to be. I got to say I’m a pretty happy person these days, Chris.
Chris Hedges:
Great. That was Dean Yates on his memoir, Line in the Sand. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
