I recently came upon a 2013 NPR interview in which Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning American journalist/war correspondent and self-described “adrenaline junkie,” commented on the psychology of those who report from conflict zones: Yes, it’s about the conquest of Ireland by the Elizabethans – basically the beginning of Empire. So much of history, to me, is about people who don’t see the ground shifting under their feet, and this new book is very much about that. It’s called The Golden World, from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. His words are a personal description of the physical and psychological wounds that come with Belfast’s reporting beat. Keane has not just the courage to risk death so that the most important stories can be told, as well as the eye to tell them with vivid subtlety, but also the humility to reveal the havoc that this task visits on the beholder' Spectator

BBC Radio 4 FM - Schedules, 3 - 9 July 2023 BBC Radio 4 FM - Schedules, 3 - 9 July 2023

But the work still matters, he says. “I don’t care if one person sees it, it matters. It’s institutional memory.”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. Some of the most moving parts of this rich, intense, and thought-provoking memoir concern his efforts to transform his personal narrative about Rwanda by thinking about the goodness, kindness, and deep humanity of people living in the direst and most distressing conditions. He writes warmly and lovingly of Anatoly and Svetlana Kosse, a Ukrainian couple in their sixties living in the bombed-out village of Piski in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine (whom he met after war began in the eastern part of the country in 2014). He also describes going to visit the novelist, poet, and Rwandan genocide survivor Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse. Her counsel to him came in the form of a poem by French Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo, whose husband was executed in the camp: Fergal Keane not only talks of his struggles, but tells us about the friends and colleagues he met along the way. About what a special bond they formed, stronger than most workplaces. And the maiming and killing of this same circle, as unfortunately this is the nature of the beast. We don’t think much about that either, do we? That people lose their lives reporting from places of conflict. Woman's Hour — Christina Lamb on Victoria Amelina, Alex South, Actor Beth Alsbury, Debbie and Helen Singer, Female photographers Having read through the Keane memoir and into Breaking, I found the experience too much — too soon for me after my own writing of Living with Ghosts.

The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD from Sunday Times

The Madness is engaging without resorting to sensation. Fluent prose follows the decline of the political situation - and of Keane’s own mental health - in chilling, compelling detail” - Observer Instead, Fergal turned to booze– an informal name for alcohol. Fergal had been addicted to alcohol before he arrived in Rwanda, but now he had another addiction to cope with – the need to keep returning to war. Fergal knew it wasn’t healthy, but he couldn’t stop. You know, the truth is, I was an alcoholic long before I got to Rwanda. But I was in the kind of functioning alcoholic - what they call, you know, managing it stage of the of the disease. War became another addiction for you. Now that you’re no longer going to the frontline, has that addictive side of your personality found other outlets?

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. What is it like when PTSD symptoms get bad? “What happens is my mood starts to get lower and lower. All the time I’m hypervigilant and twitching and stuff like that ... I noticed when I’m sliding, because I start forgetting things. I misplace things. And then I start fixating on an idea, a worry ... a particular fear.”