Ambushed: a War Reporter's Life on the Line.

• Author: McKinnon, Alexander
• Position: In Baghdad: A Reporter's War - Book Review

AMBUSHED A War Reporter's Life on the Line

Author: Ian Stewart Published by: ABC Books, Sydney, 2003, 292pp, $34.95.

IN BAGHDAD A Reporter's War

Author: Paul McGeough Published by: Allen & Unwin, Crow's Nest, 2003, 308pp, $29.95.

It is difficult to comprehend what drives people to pursue a career in the ostensibly soul-destroying environment of conflict reporting. However, both Ambushed, by Ian Stewart, and In Baghdad, by Paul McGeough, provide evidence of the usefulness of their authors' work.

Stewart's book is a particularly remarkable achievement as he wrote it to detail his experiences leading up to and following a near fatal brain injury. In January 1999 he was covering the conflict in Sierra Leone between the Nigerian-led ECOMOG stabilisation force and the insurgents of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). While he was driving through Freetown, rebel gunmen opened fire on his car. One colleague was killed instantly, but Stewart, despite being shot through the front of the head, survived.

Stewart had already covered conflict in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Cambodia before arriving in West Africa with the Associated Press in 1998. Based in Cote d'Ivoire he busied himself reporting on the limitless amount of despair in the region, travelling to Sierra Leone, Congo and Guinea-Bissau. This latter he describes as Africa's 'forgotten war', but tragically, both for the world and for Stewart's later self-assessment of Iris work, the epithet 'forgotten' could be applied to them all.

Stewart is solid on the overviews of the various conflicts, whether it is the rise of the Qaddafi-influenced RUF through the 1980s, or the confusing litany of coup and counter-coup in Congo. However, on deeper history Stewart risks being recklessly facile and inconsistent. At times he effortlessly attributes all Africa's contemporary problems to the colonial period and the corrupting influence of European values, whilst his own indictments of avaricious dictators and failed Marxists at other points seem to show that Africa's woes are at least slightly more complicated.

Early on Stewart artlessly, though honestly, admits to having acquired a taste for war. 'War junkie'--with its connotations of hard living and fearlessness--is the image that he is often found to be self-consciously trying to project throughout the narrative, but in convalescence he reassesses why he has blown everything on 'some macho stunt in a war zone' that nobody cares about.

His determined recovery...