One Can Make a Difference (27 page)

Two months later, I was in Banjul again, my mother in tow, which was a really foolish move, looking back. Among other things, it was fifty degrees Celsius [122 degrees Fahrenheit], mind-bogglingly hot. This time, I went to the minister of health. I told him that if they could get my mother and me to Bansang, I would see what I could do, that I couldn't promise I could help, but I'd try. To my surprise, the minister arranged transport right away. It took sixteen hours to travel that 200 miles, along a road that had potholes in it big enough to swallow a truck whole. That road has deteriorated since, and now, in places it is totally impassible and you have to take three separate ferries. That first night, my mother and I stayed in a mud hut, the roof of which was infested with rats. We could hear them gnawing and running about and were worried that they would fall through onto us. It was pitch dark, as there was no electricity. We were petrified by the sounds we kept hearing, sometimes sounds like carcasses being dragged around, animal noises. Both of us sat bolt upright much of the time. The next morning, my mother had her things in her case and was at the end of the road at dawn, ready to go back home. I stayed on for four days.

When I entered the hospital, it was beyond bleak.The operating room had a dirty floor and broken windows that allowed dust to blow in. As far as I could tell, there was virtually nothing in the way of pain relief or other drugs. Ether was the only anesthetic. The electricity could be off for days, and the nurses would have to work by candlelight. No electricity also meant no water, as the water was provided by an electric pump. The staff is hardworking and dedicated, but despair and a sense of helplessness was written all over their faces. The sick journeyed for many miles on foot or by horse cart only to be met by hopelessness and despair.

Stepping into the children's ward, it took a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, I saw there were old beds with pieces of foam contaminated with every imaginable body fluid and up to four children sharing a bed. Mothers slept under the bed, at the sides of the beds, and in the corridors. As a mother, my heart broke. My first reaction was one of stunned horror and a feeling of helplessness. It was awful to see children in these conditions for no reason other than they were poor.You don't have to speak the language to be able to communicate. You only have to look into another mother's eyes to know her feelings.

Some of the children had dysentery, and the stench of the place was so strong that it took all my strength to suppress my desire to heave. There were no bandages, just strips of rags holding drips to tiny arms. I learned that an incredible number of children die in infancy and that one in four children in Gambia don't survive to see their fifth birthday. I had brought toys with me, but the children had never had a toy, so at first they had no idea what they were. They didn't pick them up. That was my introduction to Bansang.

Before I left the area, I had an experience that moved me greatly and hardened my resolve. A child had been propped up opposite me on a wooden bench in the back of a jeep going to the hospital. He had a horribly deformed face and I found that I simply couldn't muster the courage to look at him and smile, although I knew he was staring at me all the time. I was feeling too emotional to look at him, afraid I would break down and that he would see me cry. But when we got to the hospital, he was too weak to walk, so I had to pick him up and carry him inside. His frame was skeletal. When I went to leave him, I looked at his face and saw that he was terrified, absolutely terrified. I left him some clean clothes and a washcloth, but he died the next day. He was one of the first children I saw die.

As soon as I got back to the U.K., I knew I had to give talks about Bansang to raise support and money to buy vital drugs and supplies, but I shook with fear. Once, getting ready to address a meeting, I was so tense that a glass I was holding actually shattered in my hand. Eventually I got a prescription for beta blockers to calm my nerves and that has helped, but what kept me going early on was the memory of that child I had carried into the hospital who had died.

I asked everyone to help, including my doctor, Dr. Peter McCormick. He said no, he couldn't, he was retiring and, after all, he was a general practitioner and didn't know anything about diseases like malaria and snakebite, so he wouldn't be any use. But, incredibly, that night, he called me at home. He said he'd been thinking about what I had said and had decided to go to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to learn what he needed to know! Dr. McCormick ended up being a literal lifesaver. He not only has spent time as a volunteer but has set up practices that continue to save lives to this day. If one person's actions can inspire another, then one need look no further than Peter McCormick, whose connection with Bansang led him to devote the rest of his retirement to helping child cancer patients in Cameroon. I may have inspired him initially, but he has been my mentor and my inspiration. His medical knowledge and his input have kept me going all of these years.

Since those days, Bansang hospital has changed from a place of despair and helplessness to a place of healing and hope. Thanks to the love, compassion, and generosity of so many people from all walks of life, the child patients are no longer treated in a dark, dank ward. We have just completed a purpose-built eighty-bed children's unit, and mortality rates have been reduced by a staggering 73 percent.

I go back several times a year to oversee ongoing building projects. My long-term aim is to bring the rest of the hospital up to the standards of the children's unit, as every patient deserves to be treated with dignity and compassion.

It is true to say that my life is far richer now than ever before. You cannot do better than to see a child smile and say “thank you” when all you have done is try to make him a little more comfortable. My heart goes out to the deeply caring staff that give their all in Gambia, resisting the urge to flee to better prospects in the West.

One day after returning from Gambia, I picked up my mail and found in it a tattered letter. The letter was from an illiterate and very poor man who had traveled at great cost back to the hospital from his village to see me. Finding I was not there, he asked for my address and then engaged someone to write to me. The letter simply said “Thank you for loving my son.”

What greater tribute can anyone want in life?

OLIVER STONE

Guided by Ghosts

Oliver Stone has won five Golden Globes and three Academy Awards for his
films
(Platoon
,
Born on the 4th of July
, and
Midnight Express
), and has
been nominated almost too many times for too many different awards to count.
Parts of his first book,
A Child's Night Dream
, ended up in the East River
when its author, consumed with anguish over his experiences, threw them into
the water, together with certificates for his Purple Heart and Bronze Star for
“extraordinary acts of courage under fire,” the medals he won in combat in Vietnam.
Always controversial—for when is there a time when strong political views
are not the subject of angry debate?—Oliver Stone has rocked complacency
with his challenges to, among other things, the official story that “explains” the
death of President John F. Kennedy. He's also exposed many a raw nerve with
his autobiographical and semiautobiographical portrayal of war and its effects.

Oliver Stone's mother taught him to be kind to animals: he was one of the first
to sign a petition asking NASA to stop sending monkeys into space, a campaign
PETA eventually won. Caged animals even appear as metaphors for his mentally
anguished self in his earliest film work,
Last Year in Vietnam
, a portrayal of his
life as a returned (wounded) veteran who is tormented by what he has seen of war
and is trying to make sense of his life. He is a powerful bear of a man who belongs
in this book because he will be damned if he'll let history slide away unnoticed.

I
grew up believing in service to my country, and that if we go to war we go to war together. On top of which, I felt strongly, and still do, that ignoring your obligations is wrong. So when the Vietnam War began, I went. I believed what we were being told by the government and the press. I believed in a communist threat. It took me several years to wake up. Not that I came back a protestor: I didn't. I came back neutral and alienated, wounded inside and out, tormented by all I'd seen: the carnage, the misery, the suffering, and the aggression of the human race.

I was in the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division and First Cavalry Division, and saw quite a bit of combat in the ground war during 1967 and 1968. I wasn't at the My Lai massacre, but I saw that kind of behavior. Our mission had become distorted, reduced to a survival course. What with the beginning of race issues, and small-scale mutinies, where enlisted men were refusing to take orders from the officers, and the drugs, everything was starting to go wrong. What can I say? Vietnam is a state of mind, what happened there is still going on somewhere else. This both frustrates and saddens me. People now are too young to remember the damage of that war and haven't elected to study it, or those old enough to remember, don't. It could have been a war that brought about a collective shift in perspective, but instead, in the nineties, you could see the march to war beginning all over again. The war in Iraq is a totally logical result of our aggression mentality turned outward.

When I got back, there was little support for veterans.Very few had heard of posttraumatic stress disorder. I was very lucky to be reintegrated back into society, to find my first wife, to get an education. Lots of soldiers didn't make it back at all or never found their way after they did. I landed in New York and enrolled in film school. It wasn't a knowingly pivotal decision, but some friends encouraged me. I'd always liked movies as a kid, and the GI Bill offered a subsidy and New York University was close to home, so off I went. I couldn't believe someone was going to pay me to watch movies! It took time to learn the process of making a film: I started out writing many screenplays that were never produced, held other jobs, but I knew from the strong reactions I got, pro and con, to my book
Last
Year in Vietnam
that I could make something important for the screen.
Platoon
is semiautobiographical, and when veterans saw it, many were deeply moved. Here was someone from the ranks willing to tell the story straight, from the ground point of view. This was not the same war story we were officially hearing. I felt in 1986, when the film came out, it was a great moment for America, that we were ready to move beyond what we were being fed, ready to get to the raw truth of it all, somewhat like what's going on finally in Iraq.

There's a tendency to denature and sanitize things and to come up with the easily digestible answer, a sort of virtual reality. Hitler said, “the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it,” and, sadly, he was right. The danger is in becoming a nation of sheep, each of us a rubberstamp, a cipher, an unengaged and unthinking person rather than a participant in the democratic process. But real democracy is about listening to all the arguments, learning to think for ourselves, and resisting being spoon-fed by the politicians and the press. That's the Socratic method. I can't think of anything that is more important than the pursuit of truth, even if you have to wade through blood and dirt to get to it, even if pursuing it requires sacrifice and effort. It's my hope that my films help.

All life is change, but we're destined to repeat history if we don't study the past, especially our history of war. Some people think we should let the ghosts rest and that we shouldn't show the blood and guts of reality, but I disagree. Everyone who watches films such as mine is strong enough to take something from the bad energy as well as the good. As for ghosts, I believe in them: they have important stories to tell if we'll just listen.

HELEN THOMAS

Keeping Presidents Honest

I first heard Helen Thomas speak at the memorial service for a mutual friend,
her contemporary, the humanitarian reporter Ann Cottrell Free. Like Ann's,
Helen's career has spanned the Great Depression and taken her into the White
House. Both women cared about the poor, the oppressed, about fair play, and
democracy, both took no prisoners when pursuing a story. Helen Thomas is
called “The First Lady of the Press,” and known for her sharp, probing questions,
ones she has asked of every president since John F. Kennedy as well as
of their press secretaries. For forty-six years she has sat in the front row at
all White House news conferences, and until the current Bush administration
broke with tradition, had always spoken the last words, “Thank you, Mr.
President.” A servant of the truth with a probing questioning style President
Ford described as “acupuncture,” she is fond of saying that the shortest distance
between two points is a straight line. Her views on how to make a difference in
life suit this book perfectly.

W
hen I was a sophomore in high school, we had to write something for English class about news reporting. I can't remember what it was, but my report got into the school paper.

I saw my byline and said, “This is for me!” In my view, I'd arrived. I knew that if I chose reporting as a career, I'd have the kind of life that would allow me to indulge my curiosity, keep me learning my whole life through. There would be work before me every day because something happens every day. Reporting would allow me a sense of independence while I was out there getting the story, and it would satisfy my drive to achieve something good. I'd found what I wanted to do. I'd recommend that to anyone: do what will make you happy in life, happy at work, because if you aren't happy, you're not in good shape.