The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD from Sunday Times Bestselling Author and BBC Correspondent Fergal Keane

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Sometimes the presence of a journalist as witness may reduce brutality, even perhaps save lives, if aggressors fear someone recording their misdeeds. But it can also make things worse, retraumatising survivors, or spurring punishment for speaking out, as Keane fears may have happened when he reported from a refugee camp during the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. “I didn’t know one way or another. But that question unsettles me. If you are a journalist, if you cannot make things better, you should at least not make things worse,” he writes of that night, when there was a vicious, possibly punitive, raid. The telling of the story of Britain and Ireland has been dominated by narratives of conquest and rebellion in which a powerful empire attempts to subdue an indomitable native spirit – two different identities colliding throughout history. Fergal presents a more complex narrative. He begins with the old kingdoms of the Irish Sea, and travels through the time of the Vikings to the 19th and 20th century migrations, all the way to present day. Throughout the Irish have shaped literature, culture, politics and the physical landscape. I used to be able to deny it to myself, but it got much worse. By the 2006 Lebanon war I was petrified. In Rwanda the thing that troubled him most was encountering a group of people seeking sanctuary at a prefecture, people who were likely subsequently murdered. It tormented him that there was something he might have done to protect them, though it was by no means clear how. It wasn’t even clear that his own crew would escape violence. “Everybody I know who went [to Rwanda] was, if not damaged by it, certainly hurt by it.” Keane, a veteran journalist with the BBC, is renowned for his dispatches from war-torn zones in South Africa, Rwanda, the Middle East, Iraq and Ukraine. He is particularly good at bringing out the human aspects of the conflicts with novelist attention to detail. He reported the downing of MH 17, noticing the bodies from the Malaysian jet scattered in the sunflower field in Ukraine and a toddler on the roadside, covered by a flimsy sheet.

The Madness : A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD Fergal Keane

This is a book that can be read without following its chapter chronology. One of the writers is Barbara McCann, a broadcast journalist with a career that stretches beyond 40 years. She knows the story of this place and other places, and she shares something I have not read before. Martha Gellhorn. There’s a sense of empathy and of being present with people that really moves me. I was going to say Ryszard Kapuściński, but though he writes magnificently, I’m not sure how much of it I can believe. In this programme, we’ll be hearing about the extraordinary life of BBC war correspondent, Fergal Keane. His reporting helped his television audiences make sense of the horrors of war, but underneath there were more personal reasons attracting him to the frontline. Was he 'addicted' to war? Listen to his story and learn new vocabulary along the way. This week's questionI can visualise him writing it. Hear him reading it. Agonising. Trying to let it go. But, go to where? Quite a few people have said to me: “You’re really hard on yourself.” It’s a self-protective mechanism – if I’m really tough with myself, then nobody else can be as tough on me. It’s been a habit all my life and goes hand in hand with shame, beating myself up; but it isn’t healthy, and that’s something I learned from writing the book, and the reaction to it. And yet he continued to return to war zones. He believes that he is, to some extent, “addicted to war”. “If you’re a drug addict or an alcoholic killing yourself people will say, ‘Oh, my God, stop.’ War is the only addiction that people will come up to you and say, ‘That was brilliant’.” Chapter one is terrible and I thought of lobbing the thing out the window. But the prologue was good enough so I persevered. And it was brilliant from then on.

BBC Radio 4 - The Madness by Fergal Keane - Available now BBC Radio 4 - The Madness by Fergal Keane - Available now

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. Why would anyone want to be a war correspondent? And yet without them, how do we learn the truth of what’s going on in the world?Keane tells many stories about the hot spots he’s reported from. He also considers the nature of evil and provides cynical but illuminating commentary on the entire journalistic enterprise. As might be expected, a significant part of the book is dedicated to describing how he attempted to run from, then wrestle with, his demons, including his hospitalizations, his interactions with his Alcoholics Anonymous advisor and his psychotherapist, a specialist in the treatment of PTSD. The Madness, an informative and often wrenching memoir, confirms Hedges’ remarks and then some. Keane opens up about his experiences in many conflict zones, including South Africa, Rwanda, Kosovo, the DRC, Sudan, and Ukraine. Some of these stories concern the tragic loss of colleagues. His main focus in the book, however, is his own mental health: his alcoholism, breakdowns, and diagnosis of PTSD. He knows his initial impulse to be a reporter was a good one. He felt strongly about “people with power beating up people without power. Do you know The Grapes of Wrath, where Tom Joad is saying goodbye to his mother? She says: ‘Where will I find you?’ I’ll get emotional saying this, but he says, ‘You’ll see me everywhere, wherever there’s a people fighting for their rights, wherever there’s a cop beating up on a guy.’ I read that when I was in my teens, and it just really hit home.” The book, part memoir and part war reporting, explores his own demons and the ethics of war reporting. Some war correspondents, himself included, are addicted to the dark glamour of war reporting for its thrill and heroism.

The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420437 | World of The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420437 | World of

I will return to it because this is important work; the experiences of correspondents, reporters, camera operators and photographers that take the reader outside the often strict boundaries of news.

In the end though The Madness isn’t about self-discovery, but about rediscovering the world beyond the prison of addiction. Beauty, where it’s found, is fleeting; flowers on the frontlines, friendship among the mass graves and Keane makes a promise to the reader: he’s going to hold on to those moments. He’s going to keep hold of what is good. I questioned how much control the author really had over his choices given the unconscious drive to put himself in dangerous situations. The destructive cycles are easy to hide under layers of heroic ideation and real world cynicism. And I’m Sam. In this programme, we’ll be hearing about the extraordinary life of a well-known BBC journalist, Fergal Keane. As a BBC war correspondent, Fergal witnessed some of the most violent events in recent history. Fergal’s reporting helped his television audiences make sense of the horrors of war, but underneath there were more personal reasons attracting him to the frontline. Fascinating. From his childhood in Ireland to reporting in the most terrible zones of conflict in recent times.

The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD

Belfast, and Northern Ireland in its wider frame, has not stopped — that imperfect peace I described still makes too many headlines; the stories we read in the book Breaking: Trauma in the Newsroom, edited by journalists Leona O’Neill and Chris Lindsay. Not devastation in a foreign field but on our own doorstep, with people dying and suffering all around us.” And finally, the phrase call it a day means to stop what you are doing because you no longer want to. Once again, our six minutes are up. Goodbye for now!I got very close to being diabetic and was told I had to lose weight. I went at it and got one of those calorie-counting apps, and I think it got slightly obsessive. I lost a lot of weight, but I now feeling guilty if eat French fries. A brutally honest exploration of what motivates Keane to keep reporting on atrocities despite the toll on his mental health... Gentle but unflinching' Guardian, Book of the Day