'As we turn the pages, we learn that the wars of Keane are not just those that he has reported on and from in those years of roving, but his fighting from the deep trenches within himself. Those never-ending battles of the mind that can break the body.'
But the battles in his head, inside what I call the mind’s wardrobe where things don’t get thrown out, began long before then.
Keane began his international journeys, into places most people would run a mile from — and, all the time, part of his story was this unseen war raging within himself. We think we know people. We don’t know their struggles. He drills into the detail of PTSD — what it has done to him. What it does to him. We find him reading into family history, following long lines back to times of hunger and war. And, in different generations, finding what today might be described as PTSD.
“Nobody forced me to be there on the day in Kabuga, Rwanda, when I lifted the broken door and saw the rotting soldier beneath it, blackened and shrunken, the photo album of his wedding lying open on the ground beside him.” Keane forced himself to be there. That is what news is about. Being in those places of the biggest headlines. Places of great danger. Being with the fighting and theKeane is a reader. A thinker. He remembers too much. Knows the damage. Yet, he kept going back.He dreads writing about Rwanda. Of course, he does. What happened there. What it did to him. What it does to him. Remembering the fear and the anxiety of being there.
Keane has much more to think about; what happened on the many — the too many — front lines from which he reported. These stories develop. They never end. Lindsay, a BBC journalist, writes the opening chapter — Hard Cover; his story from Ardoyne in north Belfast on 12 July 2005 — one of those days in the city when parade and protest meet.
“I heard the shots and I ran for cover. She was just laying there on the ground, we didn’t know what had hit her. My friend put his coat under her head and I phoned an ambulance. The police put her in the back of their vehicle and crashed through the burning barricades. They took her to hospital where she tragically died.”
“Not devastation in a foreign field but on our own doorstep, with people dying and suffering all around us.”
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