I looked up and the cameraman was filming me again. We had brought gas masks, thinking there might be chemical weapons strikes, but I wasn’t supposed to be lying bleeding in a hospital near the body of my friend. I was in Kurdistan, the part that was supposed to be relatively safe. It was only the third day of the Iraq war and the fighting had barely begun. It was my own, trying to tell me I wasn’t here. The explosion had wrecked my hearing and everything sounded muffled, even someone wailing just a body’s length away. I wasn’t sure if it was the woman with the mutilated leg, or the man with the wounded stomach, or the other man who’d been shredded by shrapnel, or my neighbour lying on the floor beside me. Screaming or moaning was best: it gave viewers a feeling of the pain and horror and they could imagine the wounds that caused it. Blood without the gore usually got through. Too much injury was bad: you couldn’t show it. I had done it often myself-walked round war zone hospitals looking for shots with the most pathos. I didn’t look as badly wounded as the others so he didn’t linger long, moving off to the next room where people were more photogenic because they were lying in their own blood.
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