Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [9]
Phil Littleton, my cameraman, is South African. He’s worked in Africa for much of his career and has developed both a strong dislike of authority and a wildly inappropriate sense of humor. I don’t need to tell him what to do here. We all know why we’ve come.
“I’m going to go shoot around the temple,” he tells me. “You know, ‘the cups that the little hands will never touch again,’ that sort of thing.”
At first I’m shocked by his comment, but then I find myself laughing. He’s making fun of us, of course, of what I’m thinking, of what Charlie is thinking as well. We’ve all seen the cups, all know what they represent; Phil has just spoken the words out loud. As a journalist, no matter how moved you feel, how respectful you are, part of your brain remains focused on how to capture the horror you see, how to package it, present it to others. We’re here because children have died. Phil is just cutting to the chase. He’s just getting what we came for.
Maduranga doesn’t speak much English, but he shows me around what’s left of his village, walking slowly through the labyrinth of huts and small houses made of cheap brick. He pauses by a muddy ditch and points to a spot about five feet away. “Sister,” he says, and I realize that this is where his sister’s body was found. A short distance away is his house, and next to it, in the backyard, is a mound of earth covered by a worn wooden board. It’s his brother’s grave. The wood is used to keep the rain off. Maduranga has no photos by which to remember his brother or his sister; soon even the mound will disappear. There will be no sign that either of them ever existed.
MY BROTHER WAS twelve when my father died, and as hard as his death was for me, for my brother it must have been even worse. They’d had a more mature relationship. They’d shared a love of literature, and my brother often discussed with my father the history books he was reading. We were two years apart, but as kids, we were together all the time. A voracious reader of history and military campaigns, my brother had labeled me “Baby Napoleon” while I was still in my mom’s womb, but he was the true leader of our childhood campaigns. He created giant battlefields for war games with our toy soldiers. The rules were too intricate for me to follow, but I loved to sit and watch him direct armies across the sweeping plains of our bedroom floor.
After the funeral, both of us retreated into separate parts of ourselves, and I don’t think we ever truly reached out to each other again. I can’t remember ever discussing my father’s death with my brother. Perhaps I did, but I have no memory of it.
Suddenly the world seemed a very scary place, and I vowed not to let it get to me. I wanted to be autonomous, protect myself from further loss. I was only ten, but I decided I had to earn my own money, so I could save for a future I couldn’t predict. I got a job as a child model and opened a bank account. My mother was wealthy, but I didn’t want to have to rely on someone else.
In high school I started taking survival courses: month-long mountaineering expeditions in the Rockies, sea kayaking in Mexico. I needed to prove to myself that I could survive on my own. I left high school a semester early, and at seventeen I traveled for months by truck through southern and central Africa. I’d completed the credits I needed to graduate, and was sick of the pressure, wanted to forget about college and those silences at home filled by the murmur of television and the clanking of cutlery. Africa was a place to forget, and be forgotten in. My brother was already away at college. I assumed he’d come up with his own way to deal with the loss. I thought he could take care of himself.
He was smarter than me, more sensitive too. He lived much of his life in his head. In high school he fell in love