The Bang-Bang Club (27 page)

As Joao and Jim dragged me along the ground towards cover, we had no idea that Ken had been shot. We were caught up in our own crisis. Smoke rose from the barrels of the rifles next to us as the bullets continued to crack and whine. I couldn’t figure out whom they were shooting at. Joao was yelling at them to stop firing. He looked down at me and shot off a series of frames: it was important to him to record the moment. I had been hit in the chest. I had seen enough chest wounds to know that it was serious and could be fatal. At first I wanted to know if the bullet had gone right through my torso, so that I could know how much time I had to live. But neither Jim nor Joao wanted to look, and then that panic passed and I felt strangely relieved that I had finally been shot. I had always experienced guilt about being a passing voyeur during other people’s moments of tragedy. A strong sense of peace came over me, a feeling that I had now paid my dues.

Then Gary cried out, ‘Ken O is hit!’ Jim left me and ran in a low crouch to where Gary was trying to get a response out of Ken, whose eyes were glassily open. A trickle of blood was running out the side of his mouth. As Jim bent over Ken, one of the soldiers right next to them fired again, the blast of cordite and the passage of the bullet raising the hair on Gary’s head and then Jim’s - they both dropped flat, screaming at the soldier to stop firing. One bullet had come within millimetres of killing them both. Jim scuttled back. The light-meter he habitually kept in his shirt pocket fell out, stopping at the end of the cord that tethered it. Jim picked it up, and reflexively took a light-reading before slipping it back in his pocket. Perhaps he was checking to see whether it had been damaged in the fall. ‘Ken’s gone, but you’ll be OK,’ he said into my ear.

Joao ran over to see Ken, who was being picked up by Gary and a
peace-keeper. There was nothing he could do but take pictures: Ken would want to see those pictures of himself tomorrow. It passed through his mind that Ken, always exceptionally mindful of how he looked in photographs, would prefer a picture where his hair was not hiding his face. He recalled how Ken had insisted on photographing Joao’s injuries after he had been smashed in the face with a brick during riots in Johannesburg the year before, when Joao was still with
The Star
. Ken, the consummate professional, had instilled in Joao the ethic of getting the picture first, then dealing with the rest later. The minutes on that garage forecourt seemed to drag on for ever as we tried to get an armoured vehicle close enough to the wall to get Ken and me into it without having to risk more gunfire. The peace-keepers near Ken were still firing haphazardly, and their commander shouted repeatedly at them to cease fire. Their shooting threatened no one but their own comrades and us.

Jim was propping me up, waiting for Ken to be loaded into the back of the armoured vehicle first. Gary and the officer I had spoken to earlier were carrying Ken and they clumsily bundled him into the back. Jim and Joao struggled to carry me and, with the help of others, pushed me in. Ken was crumpled in a heap on the narrow metal floor at my feet, and I perched uncomfortably above him. The video footage was more reliable than my own memory, its unwavering eye showing what I could not see: Joao raised his arms to the sky and cursed in frustration, ‘Fuck!’ Then the vehicle began to move and he leapt on to the step pulling himself inside. The white captain we had previously argued so fiercely with drove the vehicle himself, yelling back over his shoulder: ‘We have three minutes! Hang on ... three minutes!’ In spite of all that had happened between us and the peace-keepers, including them shooting us, those words gave us a measure of hope. The captain, surely experienced in this, was certain that we had three minutes - there had to be a chance.

A young British photographer felt Ken’s pulse. There was a moment of hesitation and then he looked up at us and said there was a pulse. Joao instructed him to give Ken mouth-to-mouth, which he immediately
began doing, straddling Ken in the cramped floor space where Ken lay between the sets. We still thought there was hope, but he actually knew that there was no life left. He just could not face being the one to say that it was too late for Ken. Once at Natalspruit Hospital, just off the top end of Khumalo Street, Joao was the first out and he ran into the hospital entrance heading towards where he thought he would find help. It was all familiar from three months earlier when he had rushed in there in search of Abdul, only to be directed to a laundry cupboard and the lifeless corpse. Joao was not sure whom it was he hoped to find - a nurse or a doctor perhaps - but instead he came upon a row of gurneys, and he pushed one back towards the armoured vehicle. Gary and the rest were pulling Ken from the back of the vehicle. They lowered him on to the gurney and rushed him into the entrance foyer, where nurses pointed out the way to the emergency room.

Inside the rudimentary emergency area, the doctor immediately began trying to resuscitate Ken. I followed unsteadily and nurses and colleagues helped me on to an operating table. The doctor examined me briefly. ‘I’m OK. Look at Ken,’ I said and he turned away. Joao would not leave the room. He wanted to be there, to make sure that no one mistakenly pronounced Ken dead if he were still alive. Or maybe he needed proof that Ken was not coming back. The doctor pronounced him dead after Joao had helped him lift Ken’s torso and peel off his blue journalists’ union T-shirt to look for a wound. Joao ran his hands through Ken’s hair, but in their haste, he and the doctor had missed the tiny entry wound under his arm. ‘Could be a broken neck,’ the doctor erroneously surmised and then Ken’s corpse was covered by a sheet and wheeled into a corner. A bullet had penetrated Ken’s chest cavity at his armpit. The high energy of that point-blank shot meant that the bullet had disintegrated on meeting the soft tissue of the organs in his chest: that was why there was no exit wound.

I was alive, despite some minutes during which I had been doubtful, but when Ken was declared dead, some of the resilience I had regained evaporated. I looked up and saw Mark Chisholm and Rob Celliers, two of the most hardened television cameramen I knew, just staring at me,
their faces in total despair; their cameras weren’t rolling, just hanging at their sides. The doctor turned his attention to me. With a distinct lack of gentleness, he slashed through the flesh under my arm and shoved a foot-long plastic drain deep into my chest to draw the blood and fluid from my collapsed lung. I gasped, ‘Jesus, that’s like being shot again!’ He agreed, and then said, ‘I put it in wrong, we have to do it again. Sorry.’

He had started to examine the gaping, dinner-plate sized wound in my chest when a woman was wheeled in, a victim of a car accident and in a bad way. The doctor left me to try to resuscitate the woman, her head a bloody mass and strange, watery breathing sounds coming from her. She died within minutes and was wheeled away. He came back to me, finished cleaning out the wound and sewed up the flaps of flesh and skin with large, untidy stitches. Then he began to examine the wounds to my butt - shrapnel had made large holes in my left cheek. Joao watched in fascination as the doctor’s finger disappeared into the holes peppering my bum - not the most dignified of wounds. I had not known about the wounds, nor even noticed that another piece of fragmented bullet had shattered the bones of my right thumb. Joao stepped outside to get away from the image of Ken dead and covered. Ken was now just a corpse in the corner of an otherwise distracted room - all that vitality and personality was gone.

Brauchli began a series of phone calls. His first was to the AP news desk to report that two journalists had been shot in Thokoza and to get them to send an ambulance to get me out of the township hospital. Next Brauchli called Ken’s wife, Monica. He was nervous about telling her: ‘No fucking way I was going to tell Monica. She was way too fucking unstable.’ But he knew he had to: ‘Monica,’ he said. ‘Look, Ken has been shot in Thokoza, can you get hold of
The Star
and get down to the hospital right away?’ ‘What?’ she screamed. ‘Hang on, just get hold of
The Star
and get here.’ ‘Is he OK?’ she asked. Brauchli prevaricated. ‘I don’t know, Jim just told me that he was shot and that’s all I know.’ He did not have the heart or the courage to tell her. ‘Please, Monica, call
The Star
.’

Before the shooting, I had called Heidi at home and told her that I
could not leave Thokoza just yet, but that I would come fetch her as soon as things quietened down a little. The next call she received was from Donna Bryson at the AP, who told her that she had something to tell her but not over the phone. ‘Why not? Come on, Donna, what’s up?’ ‘Greg got shot in Thokoza.’ Heidi felt numb. ‘Is he dead?’ ‘No, but nobody actually knows what’s going on out there.’ Donna promised to pick her up to take her to Thokoza.

Heidi and Donna went to Thokoza with the new bureau chief, John Daniszewski. John drove, Donna sat next to him, looking at the map to find their way to Thokoza. John was a notoriously slow driver, and that day was no exception. They had been in the car for a full hour, when someone up front switched the radio on. The news reader was saying, ‘. . . Ken Oosterbroek died on the spot. Greg Marinovich was seriously injured and now is being treated in Natalspruit Hospital.’ Heidi lost her temper. ‘Why didn’t one of you tell me that Ken is dead?’ she shouted. ‘And can’t you drive faster?’ She immediately apologized; it wasn’t anybody’s fault, but Heidi was scared and tense. They reached Thokoza, but then they got lost trying to find the hospital. When they eventually got there, Heidi rushed towards the entrance, but Jim stopped her, saying, ‘I called
Newsweek
. You don’t have to worry, they are paying for everything.’ Heidi thought he was very sweet, but the last thing on her mind was bills. Outside casualty, Chisholm with his Betacam on his shoulder, told her, ‘Greg is OK, but don’t go in there, he’s about to be operated on.’

She waited anxiously outside, but then saw journalists leaving the room and thought that if they could be there, so could she. When I saw her, I burst into tears; she took my face in her hands as I blurted out that I was sorry for getting shot. Heidi had always cautioned me when I went into dangerous situations. She had feared my getting hurt and I had always assured her that nothing would ever happen.

Monica arrived a few seconds later and went straight to Joao who was standing outside the entrance. She knew that he would tell her the truth. ‘Is it true? Is Ken dead?’ Joao felt that she wanted reassurance that it was all a mistake, that Ken was OK, but he looked into her eyes and
said, ‘Yes, it’s true.’ Monica ran into the hospital and found Ken lifeless in the corner of the emergency room, his shoes, socks and shirt neatly packed below the sheet-draped figure. She began weeping, a deep, anguished sobbing, hugging Ken’s body. She was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Heidi went over to comfort her. Monica said, ‘His hair is so strange, this morning it was much smoother.’ Then she began to talk to her dead husband. ‘You can wake up now, Ken, it’s over. Wake up!’

Heidi, always the straight arrow, said to Monica in her Euro-English accent, ‘Ken doesn’t wake up any more.’ Monica turned to her and said: ‘You’re lucky, your man is alive; mine is dead.’ Then Monica just sat quietly next to her husband’s body, holding his hand, and weeping.

Kevin had raced back to Thokoza after hearing about the shooting on the radio. Outside the entrance to casualty, Gary flung his arms around Kevin’s neck and blurted out that Ken was dead. Kevin just stared straight ahead. His best friend was dead.

Newsweek
and the AP (with remarkable loyalty to a freelancer who was no longer working for them) had begun to try to get me evacuated to a better hospital.
Newsweek
had no plan in case someone got hurt; AP had a list of phone numbers, but no step-by-step procedure despite Abdul having been killed while working for them in neighbouring Kathlehong just three months before.
The Star
had no set plan either. Nor did I, other than a vague faith in my colleagues and the comrades getting me to a hospital as quick as possible. A planned emergency procedure would not have helped us that day - the helicopter rescue services that were called that afternoon all refused to go to Natalspruit Hospital, never mind Khumalo Street - too dangerous, they said. There was no way an ambulance was going to enter an ongoing battle to get someone out. But in any case, no rescue service could assist someone hurt in a township battle faster than the people that were around. We had all, on many occasions over the years, had to abandon photographing the news and rush wounded fighters or civilians to hospital - often we were the only ones with a car available. There is an elaborate, unspoken code about helping people in trouble, in any war zone, in any
country. The limits and responsibilities are unclear, just how much risk to take to assist colleagues, combatants, civilians. The rules are fluid, yet seemingly understood - if you can, you help. If it is a friend you do whatever your heart tells you to, but for strangers, it was uncommon for us to risk our lives.

When they finished with me and the ambulance had arrived, I asked them to wheel me to Ken. I touched his foot, the only part of him I could reach. I said goodbye, starting to weep, as the meaning of Jim saying ‘Ken is gone’ finally sank in. Brauchli loomed over me with a camera and said ‘Greggy!’ to get me to look towards him. ‘Nema dozvola, nema slike,’ I said weakly in mock-pidgin Serbo-Croat, mimicking how often we had been told ‘No permission, no pictures’ in the former Yugoslavia’s civil war.

I was loaded into the back of an ambulance with Heidi. Once inside the panel-van I was surprised that it was not an intensive care ambulance. There were no medical facilities whatsoever, not even straps to keep me in place on the stretcher. The medic - if he had any medical training at all - was only concerned about not losing the pistol he carried, in case ‘the blacks’ attacked him. The ambulance service that had been commissioned to fetch me had been beaten to it by a pirate company that specialized in listening to the hospitals’ radio messages and stealing the business. Unfortunately these privateers had none of the equipment needed to sustain life, and as the shock began to set in, I started to lose it. My pulse dropped and my breathing became more and more shallow - having survived Thokoza and Natalspruit Hospital’s crude but effective casualty department, I was going to slip quietly away in the back of a panel-van, stuck in rush-hour traffic. Heidi knew I needed oxygen as I had a collapsed lung that had filled with blood, but there was none, and she kept asking me questions and demanding answers to ensure I did not lose consciousness. Watching my condition deteriorate, she yelled at the driver to switch his siren and emergency lights on and get to the hospital, quick. He complied, but by the time we got to the resuscitation unit in Johannesburg, I was slipping in and out of consciousness.