Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  A day came when we got word of a big battle near the country’s second major army garrison, the garrison near Usulután where we had been taken for interrogation. The army had a spotter plane up when we got to the area and we could hear heavy firing. Without noticing we ran into a position where the guerrillas had taken control of the road. There was a fallen tree ahead, blocking our path. Behind the tree was a rocket launcher and behind that a young boy. He was aged no more than fourteen. John was able to start an amiable conversation with the guerrillas in Spanish.

  ‘They’ve captured a small hamlet outside town,’ he said.

  ‘Any chance we could get in there?’ I asked.

  Overhead a spotter plane, like those I had seen in Vietnam, was circling. We sank into the dappled shade of some banyan-like trees with the guerrillas, who were in radio communication with their newly won position. John translated: ‘Okay, man. We can go in.’

  They took us slowly through ravines and dried-out river-beds and dried-up roads. It was very hot. There were men, armed guerrillas, on all the hills, watching us go in. At length we reached the mangroves and the newly won conquest.

  The guerrillas—about 150 of them—seemed to outnumber the villagers. They proudly showed us a couple of dead soldiers, a rather unpleasant sight.

  I wasn’t keen to stay too long. I knew that the army was bound to retaliate—and soon. They would not be able to accept the loss of face involved in losing a position so close to their stronghold, and when armies reclaim lost ground, they do it with as much firepower as they can muster, and that meant a lot more than anything at the disposal of our guerrilla hosts. We took our pictures very quickly.

  I said to John, ‘Can we take any wounded with us? Take them to hospital?’

  ‘Hang on, this might be tricky. Let’s take it slowly.’

  John began to reason with the guerrilla commander, sorting the thing out. Ten minutes later he said, ‘Okay, man, we can take them.’

  People started appearing with their wounded. One man was brought out in a garden chair with a bullet hole in the side of his stomach. Another had received a bullet through his arm and a wound in the chest cavity.

  ‘There’s one more,’ John said. ‘And it’s going to be nasty.’

  We were then taken into a house where a man was lying on a handwoven rattan carpet into which a pool of blood was soaking. At first I could see only his shoulder blades and the twisted torso. He had been hit in the face. The whole area from nostrils to throat had been blown away.

  We brought him along a beautiful gladed track to the road. He was making a horrible noise and flies were trying to settle on the congealed blood around this orifice. A dog, scenting the blood, came after us. I asked one of the women accompanying us for her white shawl to cover the man’s terrible injury.

  On the way back from this foray we ran into an army encircling movement, but as some of the wounded in our truck were soldiers from their unit, we were helped on our way.

  There was no one around at the hospital when we arrived. When I found some of the staff lounging around in the dark at the back, I started shouting in English, which is not widely understood in the country. When they saw our travelling wagon and its burden of wounded, they just stood and stared. I clapped my hands and slowly they lifted down the wounded, except the man whose jaw had been shot away. I became angry and opened the truck door wide, lifting him down myself. As I carried him in I hoped to God he wouldn’t fall or faint on me. They laid him on a trolley and took him away.

  I kept returning to Usulután like a bad dream. A guerrilla onslaught on the town itself took John and me and an American girl photographer back there one afternoon when the town was under heavy gunfire. We saw a group of soldiers, almost as young as the guerrillas, firing without helmets on down a road. They were ill-equipped and undisciplined, and went into some houses and started clambering across the roofs. I followed them but Hoagland wasn’t keen and the girl dropped behind as I climbed on to a roof for pictures of the soldiers. A rattle of gunfire rang out. As the soldiers took cover I found myself falling backwards, trying to hang on to Spanish roof tiles. They were giving way under the weight. Just before I hit the ground I got my elbow in position to break the fall and protect my spine. I was in a frenzy.

  I jackknifed off the ground and rolled over in the dirt. The pain was indescribable. I seemed to be paralysed all down one side. The inhabitants of the houses were taking cover from the gunfire and the soldiers had cleared off as I writhed in agony on the ground. An old lady came out and threw up her hands in horror at the sight of me. I did not want to be caught and taken by the guerrillas for a mercenary, so I dragged myself back over the roof in the reverse direction from the way I had come, back in the direction of Hoagland. I dropped into a courtyard where the pain started hitting me terribly.

  Crawling on my hands and knees into a doorway, I heard the crackling of a military radio. It was some kind of communication post, with a soldier in residence. I dragged myself into the room and tried to speak to him in English, but he didn’t understand. I lay on that floor for twelve hours through the sleepless night. I thought I had broken my hip, but my abiding worry was that the guerrillas would kick in the door and throw in a grenade.

  In the morning the gunfire had stopped, and a woman and a small boy appeared at the door. She screamed with surprise but quickly recovered and made a splint for my left arm from a cardboard box. A truck eventually arrived and took me to the same hospital I had visited with a cargo of wounded only days earlier. They put me in plaster and released me on to the streets once the battle was finally over. Victorious soldiers were parading, and among the crowd I found John Hoagland and the American girl.

  ‘Jesus Christ, man. I was worried,’ Hoagland said. ‘I thought you were killed. God, am I glad to see you.’

  As the effects of the morphine shot they had given me in the hospital wore off, so the pain once again became severe. John and a very kind journalist from Time magazine organised my return to San Salvador where Philip Jacobson took over and had me X-rayed. (There had been no X-ray unit in Usulután.) My arm was broken in five places. I was put on to the first flight out with—for the second time in my life—a first-class ticket paid for by the Sunday Times.

  I seriously wondered whether it was my luck or my skill that was running out.

  Part Four

  THE END OF THE AFFAIR

  36. THE TASK FORCE GETS AWAY

  El Salvador was the beginning of my undoing—of my health, of my marriage, of my career. I was going home to a family which had always had to live with the fear of my coming back a broken man. My wife had seen me injured before, and I had suffered the pain of seeing her pain, and her dread of what might become of me. Now it was not just in my own home that I would be inflicting pain, for there was also Laraine.

  On the flight back to London my mind drifted over the emotional tangle in which I was now caught. Laraine knew about my wife but not how close I still was to Christine. Christine did not know about Laraine, though I guessed she suspected something. I swallowed more painkillers, poured some more beer, turned up the Panasonic.

  My spirits were lifted at the airport by Mike Rand, the Sunday Times art editor and friend of many years, who brought with him a newer friend, the writer David Blundy. They took my films and whisked me straight to the Middlesex Hospital where I lay for the best part of a morning, naked under a sort of shroud. Staff kept coming up with a cheery ‘Hello’ and lifting the sheet inquisitively before I could stop them.

  ‘Could I have my clothes back?’ I said finally. ‘I’m tired of being a peepshow.’

  Then someone, a visitor, walked up as I lay waiting, and I saw it was Laraine. It was like going public on our secret.

  My hip wasn’t broken, but my ribs had been snapped like dry twigs, sending paralysis down one side of my body. It was to take almost two years to restore reasonable mobility to my
arm.

  I went home to an unhappy household. My wife had discovered my affair with Laraine. I should have made a complete break but could not bring myself to abandon her or the children. We lived in a home we’d built together, and my ties to both family and place were still very strong. I had made the mistake a lot of men make; I had allowed myself to fall in love with someone else. It was a savage time emotionally.

  It was not long before I began to fret about work also. A crisis in the Falklands was blowing up. With my arm in plaster, like a broken jackdaw wing, I got on the phone to the office, disturbed that they hadn’t already been in touch with me about it.

  ‘Listen, I want to be in on this,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, okay. We want you to be in on it,’ I heard down the line with the merest touch of hesitance. ‘Do you think you can make it?’

  ‘Yes, I can make it,’ I said with concocted bravado. ‘I can get my hand up to my face now. I’ve already taken some pictures with one hand. Of course I can do it. So will you get me on to this task force?’

  ‘Okay, Don. Everyone here’ll be working on your behalf. We’ll get you on if we possibly can.’

  We were in the fourth year of Thatcherism, and the magazine was now in the hands of a new Murdoch-appointed editor, Peter Jackson. Already policy had started going against too much hard photo-­journalism and further into softer areas, like consumer goods and fashion. Mike Rand and the rest of the old crowd on the magazine were hanging in, but it wasn’t always an easy matter.

  One day Mike had come on the phone and said, ‘We have a problem.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but there’s a real battle in the office. Jackson’s spiked your Salvador story.’

  I said, ‘He can’t have. He can’t have thrown out those Salvador pictures. If he’s done that, I’m going to resign.’

  ‘Jackson says it’s because the Falklands task force is assembling. He doesn’t want pictures of dying Salvadoreans when there might be dying British soldiers at any minute.’

  ‘That can only be an excuse,’ I said.

  It would be weeks before the task force made any contact, assuming they ever did, and British soldiers dying then could hardly exclude Salvadoreans who had died already. Those pictures of El Salvador had been taken at some cost. I went to the office and spoke to two friends there, Phillip Knightley and Stephen Fay. I was pacing up and down like an angry lion. There was more than my pictures at stake, there was a principle. No front-line photographers could be expected to go out and take risks if they were to have their work junked for non-photographic reasons when they got back.

  In a fuming condition, I typed out my resignation. Knightley called out, ‘What are you doing? No, don’t resign. You mustn’t. It would be very foolish. See Frank Giles. Try to negotiate this one with the editor.’

  Despite his good offices, I went over the top. The editor was out, so I slid my resignation under his locked door.

  Giles called me in to see him soon afterwards. He was adjusting his clothes, shooting his cuffs to expose his gold Rolex, grooming himself as if he had difficult things to say. But in this case he was generous. He was searching for a solution, trying to prevent me from falling into my own emotional trap.

  ‘I’m not going to accept your resignation,’ he said. ‘What we need is some kind of compromise. Don’t panic. This can be sorted out.’ Agreement was reached. They would reinstate my story. I would withdraw my emotionally charged resignation.

  But Jackson still wanted to impose his will. Mike Rand had made a brilliant cover from my Salvador pictures. It was all laid out and in proof. Jackson chucked out the cover. I was very fed up at this: I had an arm which the doctor said would never be 100 per cent again, which might mean fewer prospects, and now the hard-won cover was thrown away. For all the danger and damage, I felt I had received a wretched award.

  I threw myself into the Falklands prospect. The selection system for the task force was that each newspaper put forward the names of journalists they wanted to go, and the Ministry of Defence decided which of them actually went. The reason for this was said to be the need to limit the number of correspondents. There were other reasons too, it emerged.

  I phoned the MoD. ‘My name’s Don McCullin and I would like to check my name is down for the Falklands on behalf of the Sunday Times.’

  ‘Yes, we know who you are, old boy. We’ll put your name down on the priority list.’ It should, I thought, have been there already. ‘There’s no problem. Don’t worry about it. We’ll come back to you.’

  They didn’t. I could see the task force getting away without McCullin being part of it. I started drinking. It was painful to me not to have been one of the first people they had approached. I even wondered, in the light of the Salvador episode, if my own newspaper had blocked me. Whatever it was, there were no signs I was going to be aboard one of the ships that were leaving almost daily. The Uganda set sail, the Canberra got away. I plotted their course. They were going to Ascension Island, before they made the long run to the South Atlantic. I was heartbroken.

  I convinced myself that the Sunday Times had deliberately avoided establishing my credentials. It was utterly plain I wasn’t going. I was frantic, and more depressed than anyone can imagine. I wanted to be with the British task force. I had been with every other serious army in the world in the last twenty years and had more experience of battlefields than any senior officer or soldier going down to that South Atlantic war.

  I made one last desperate effort. I went to the Imperial War Museum and discussed the situation with their photographic department. I knew they had sent a woman artist to paint and draw pictures of the action, and asked if I could also go to the Falklands as their official photographer. They said they were amazed I wasn’t already on the high seas, steaming south. I was promised a speedy answer to my suggestion. It came soon enough. They would very much like me to go for the Museum but they could not afford the fee.

  ‘I’ll go for one pound,’ I said in a rush before they could change their mind.

  They promised to make arrangements immediately.

  Weeks went by. The last ship to leave headed south. I sent telexes to government ministers and was on the phone constantly. I knew that Commander Jeremy Moore had not yet departed and that he would be flying to Ascension and joining the convoy there for the last stretch of the voyage. I also knew that one of the trustees of the Imperial War Museum was an Air Vice-Marshal, and that if they really wanted me to go then he would be able to fix it for me to fly with Moore. I waited on tenterhooks.

  There was no explanation. It just didn’t happen. I became overbearingly demonstrative. I felt a terrible humiliation from my arm and everything else.

  Yet it was not my arm that had led to this situation. Nor had the Sunday Times dragged their feet on my behalf. It wasn’t until I read an article by Fred Emery, an old Vietnam hand, in The Times that I discovered the real reason. Those chosen to accompany the task force were, for the most part, inexperienced people, and this was a calculated policy designed to keep the flow of information under tight control.

  I later learned that my name had been on the original list at the Ministry of Defence to go to the Falkland Islands but it had been struck off by higher authority. By whom exactly? Mike Nicholson of Independent Television News and Max Hastings of the Evening Standard were the only really experienced, senior war correspondents who got there. They worked impeccably. Max knew how to get himself in, and his stuff out. Few others did. It became a very British wall of censorship. The Falklands war was—and is now—pretty poorly documented, even at the Imperial War Museum, not to say the Sunday Times, which didn’t have a photographer there at all. Only one reporter, John Shirley, went for them. Only two photographers were there for the entire campaign, and of those one was an agency man.

  I wrote a letter to The Times. This was most u
nlike me, but I was angry. I dictated it and Christine typed it out. I felt I had earned the right to be at the Falklands war with my own blood. I’d spilt blood in Salvador, I’d spilt blood in Cambodia, but when it came to my own country, my blood wasn’t good enough for them. I would rather have bled for England, bled in the Falklands, along with my own army. But that army was denied me.

  It was a point of honour. I felt dishonoured by my own country. I sat awake at nights, a man of forty-six, in tears. I was boozed up and tearful when the bulletins and dispatches started coming back from the Falklands.

  37. BREAKING POINT

  I was saved from too much vodka and introspection by another war. While the task force was mustering in the South Atlantic, a new conflict broke out in the country I had been drawn back to again and again over many years—the Lebanon.

  This time the Israelis, incredibly, were to press their war against the Palestinians into the city of Beirut itself.

  There were risks in my getting there. A death warrant was still out for me in East Beirut, and there was no quick way into West Beirut. The airport, of necessity, had been closed. I could only get there in good time by boat from Larnaca in Cyprus, and that boat docked in Jounieh, above East Beirut.

  It was an edgy crossing. The boat, which was run by a forceful blonde woman and her chap, was called the Ark. I felt I needed an ark. I was still in a pretty raw state. Indeed, I had a row with some Lebanese who pushed in front of me in the queue, which was not wise. While I slept on the overnight crossing, the offended Lebanese inquired of the blonde lady who I was and where I was going. His story was that he wanted to make amends, to invite me to his house. I didn’t believe a word of it.

  ‘It sounds to me,’ I told the lady when she reported it to me, ‘more likely he wants me killed.’