The Bang-Bang Club (36 page)

We eventually forced him to go to hospital, where he spent three days in intensive care. After Gary was discharged, we drove him to a
drug rehab centre. He did not want to go, but Robin told him that unless he went for treatment he would lose his job. During the entire six-hour journey he said no more than a few perfunctory words to us. We had become the enemy, we were trying to come between him and his fix. Within an hour after we had dropped him off, he left the centre and returned home. He went on a binge but then checked himself into a Johannesburg centre, where he made a real attempt to kick the crack. Some weeks later, he began talking to us again, explaining his addiction and the things in his life that had so fucked him up. He was going regularly to therapy and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and was doing well at work again - he had even won the same top South African press award that Ken and Joao had earned. It seemed to me that he was beginning to turn things around, but I was disappointed with him and had decided to keep my distance.

On 12 September 1998, Gary would go on an all-night crack binge. In the morning, he carefully arranged a duvet and pillow on the floor of his kitchen, attached his vacuum cleaner hose to the gas stove outlet and then opened the tap fully. He lay down and put a plastic bag over his head and slipped the hose into his mouth. When Joao and two other friends got to the flat that night, hours later, Gary’s eyes were open and his hand stiffly frozen in the position in which he had held the pipe to his mouth. It was a rainy Saturday night in spring and I was on assignment out of town, some 300 kilometres away. Yet again, it was Joao who had to call me with the news of a friend’s death. I raced back along the highway slick with rain, I wanted to get back in time to say goodbye before the body was removed. The endless back and forth motion of the windscreen wipers and the hiss of the tyres kept my thoughts going round in circles. I kept thinking about the decision I had made after his previous suicide attempt. I had decided that I would not help Gary any more, that I could not do any more for him. I had mentally played through a scenario just like this, in which I would hear that Gary was dead. In that make-believe rehearsal I felt I could justify my withdrawal-Icould not watch him 24 hours a day nor could I force him to choose life over death. But I still felt like a shit.

20

FINISHED BUSINESS

Redemption is living with one’s self.

Joao Silva

I was sitting low in the drainage ditch, bullets whizzing several feet above me. I had been eyeing possible cover throughout the morning and when the inevitable gunfire broke out I immediately knew where I wanted to be. The handful of journalists and photographers with me in Ndaleni township in Richmond, KwaZulu-Natal, that misty summer’s morning, were amused, but theirs was an uncomfortable laugh.

They were not sure whether to join me or to keep well away from me, because, despite being wounded twice more since the Thokoza shooting, I had survived. My thoughts were not quite the same as theirs. ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ ran through my mind several times - I had half-promised myself to stop covering this kind of stuff. Doing cat-portraits was something I recall mentioning. One reason was that the bloody political turf battle going on in this small town was too interesting to resist, but there is no single, simple answer - perhaps it is just the way I’m wired.

In the years since 1994, I had been shot once with buckshot during some riots in a township and once more seriously just a few months previously, when South African troops had entered the tiny land-locked kingdom of Lesotho to restore order after a partial military coup. Joao had been with me on both occasions, as we continued to work together whenever the bang-bang went down. He had always escaped unscathed. The Lesotho episode had, however, been one of the scariest moments in both our careers.

Lesotho had been brewing a coup for weeks and, as we made plans to visit this mountainous rural country in the middle of South Africa, the
NYT
bureau chief Suzanne, Joao and I were expecting to cover a charged political story with perhaps the chance of the occasional shot being fired. As it happened, South African troops, as part of the regional mutual defence agreement, had invaded during the night. But we still did not take the situation too seriously, expecting the vastly superior South African army to have the little country under control by the time we got there. Our biggest fear was, in fact, that we had missed it all. As we got nearer to the Lesotho border, we saw massive palls of smoke rising in the distance.

Lesotho’s capital, Maseru, is not far from the border post and soon we were amidst the looters ransacking the downtown business area, carting away as much as they could carry and setting the rest on fire. We heard on the radio that the Lesotho army had made a last stand and had then surrendered at the army barracks just outside of town, so we decided to drive out there and see. Suddenly at the entrance to the base, which looked deserted, we started taking sniper fire. We scrambled out of the car and ran for cover behind a guard-post.

After a while an armoured South African column came by, the soldiers looked at us and left. They had taken no fire, so we dashed back to the car with the idea of getting out of there. But, just up the road, we ran into the column again. This time they had been stopped and were taking heavy fire. It was an ambush and we were caught in the middle of it. We ditched the car and Suzanne took cover in a shallow gully, where she spent the next hour unable to see a thing, just hearing
the sound of the battle raging all around her. Joao and I ran straight towards the action and into a scene of utter confusion. The bullets were whining past us as we tried to find places among the armoured cars that would offer us protection from the cross-fire. That’s when we laughed. This was good bang-bang. Right in front of us, a South African soldier roughly pulled a dead comrade out of a light tank and dumped him at the base of the ambulance that was also armour-plated. The medic inside paid no attention, he was too busy working on injured soldiers. The most bizarre part was that he was standing on the corpses of two other soldiers. We were getting good pictures.

The column finally retreated and we were able to use them for cover and leave too. But a few kilometres away, at a South African army staging area, it became clear that a larger and better-armed column was preparing to go back to engage the BaSotho soldiers at the base. They were to replace the bloodied unit we had been ambushed with. Joao wanted to follow it. That’s when we had an intense discussion about what to do next. Suzanne though that going back was ridiculously dangerous and argued that Joao already had more pictures than certainly the
Times
would ever use. Joao argued that the story wasn’t over and he wanted to see it through. I agreed with him, but there was no way I wanted to go back down that road. So we found a compromise of sorts. We would stay back a couple of kilometres until the battle was over and then go in. We all thought it was a matter of an hour or two.

I selected a safe-looking dip alongside the road to park in and we sat listening to the sounds of the battle. It was hot and we wondered if the shop a little up the road was open. Then a machine-gun opened up on us. The rounds were hitting the earth bank behind us as the gunner began to find his range. I started the car and pulled off as fast as I could making a U-turn. But as I reached the middle of the road, the car stalled. The gunman then had time to correct his aim. A bullet came through the wheel-well of the car and hit me in the leg. I also felt a sharp pain in my solar plexus, and I could not breathe properly. It seemed like I had been hit twice, but I did not want to think about it. I concentrated on getting the engine started, hoping I could still
operate the pedals. I did not want to tell Suzanne or Joao that I was hit until after I had the car going again, then I screamed ‘I’ve been hit.’ There was a lot of yelling and screaming going on inside that car, as the bullets cracked and whined through the open windows. As I sped down the road, the fusillade of bullets continued. I was completely terrified, bracing for the pain of more bullets entering my body. The magic bubble of invulnerability had once again been burst, and I felt as helpless as I ever had in my life. I have never been more scared. Yet, even in my state of panic, I noticed that the people who had gathered at the side of the roads to watch the outcome of the battle between their army and the invading South Africans were fleeing the verges of the road as we approached - we brought with us a rain of bullets. But we finally did escape the machine-gunner’s range and I pulled over to let Joao drive.

I looked at my chest and saw no wound, nothing. I must have jerked forward as I was hit in the leg and pulled a muscle. My trouser-leg and right boot were soaked with blood. Still, I was relieved to note that I could move and feel my toes. As I hopped around to the passenger side, I noticed that the tyres had also been hit, and that the race for safety had shredded them. Joao took over, but by now the car was struggling, the shredded rubber was wearing down rapidly and Joao was trying to keep it going as fast as possible. The fuel gauge read empty - the tank must have been hit too. We were still about ten kilometres short of Maseru, where the South Africans were presumably in control and we would be safe.

Along the way we caught up with the retreating South African column that we had been ambushed with. We came alongside their armoured medical Casspir, and I caught the driver’s eye and showed him my bloody leg, but he just waved us forward. The message was clear - they were not going to stop until they got to Maseru. Suddenly, there was more gunfire. I could hear bullets flying close by us again and could see the dust dance on the walls of houses and shops alongside the road as the South Africans returned fire at their hidden attackers. Joao just kept the accelerator floored as we passed the lumbering column. At
one point he was doing 110 kilometres an hour on two tyres and two bare rims. When we came to a traffic circle it was clear we had lost the brakes too. But in the end, Joao got us in to Maseru. There the South Africans bandaged my leg and agreed to chopper me out with the rest of their wounded. Leaning on a fence, waiting for the helicopter, I fainted. But Suzanne caught me.

After our close call in Lesotho, the word throughout the photographic community was that Marinovich was a human target, a bullet magnet. Word had spread as far as Baghdad, where one of my friends told me there was a debate going on about whether it was dangerous to be beside me or whether that might be the safest place in the world because I always got the bullet. Very amusing. But I had begun to wonder about my luck too. Joao, besides taking far more chances than I ever did while photographing, had also taken up a long-time passion for fast cars and had begun motor-racing. Shortly after Lesotho, he walked away from an 180kmh crash at Kyalami racetrack without suffering even a bruise.

The Lesotho bullet sliced through the back of my lower calf, but luckily missed the tendons. I was basically flat on my back with my leg up and oozing for almost four weeks. But no real permanent harm had been done. Still, my caution under fire in KwaZulu’s Richmond just four months after Lesotho was understandable. Let them laugh, I griped to myself.

Whether taking to that convenient Ndaleni ditch had saved me yet another bullet that day, I will never know. But it introduced me to a heavy-set man who huddled near me, a revolver hidden in a shoulderholster under his shirt. His name was Brian Mkhize and 11 of his relatives had been massacred the night before as part of the feuding that had been going on here between the ANC and an upstart political party, the United Democratic Movement. I kept seeing Brian Mkhize throughout that day, as clashes and an attempted revenge-assassination by the warlord’s bodyguards and militants kept the village and the township cooking. Things eased off in the afternoon and I was resting on a grassy bank outside the police- and military-command centre with
several journalists, when a young television cameraman Dave Coles cracked, ‘Every time I see you, you’re getting shot at.’

Then Mkhize, who was sitting alongside us on the grassy embankment, said: ‘Be careful you don’t get killed like Oosterbroek!’ Dave, the cameraman, jovially responded that I had been shot with Oosterbroek in Thokoza. This was too strange. What did a guy living in a village hundreds of kilometres from Thokoza know about Ken’s death? How did he come up with that comment? I began to quiz him.

It turned out Mkhize had not only been a peace-keeper in Thokoza that day, but he was among the soldiers cowering against the wall with us. I tried to hide the emotions churning inside as we talked, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘Then you were one of those bastards who shot us!’ I said. He turned away laughing. ‘No, it was Inkatha from the hostel who shot you.’

‘No way,’ I said, the blood rushing through my ears making it difficult for me to hear myself speaking. Was I shouting? ‘We were behind the wall. If the shooting had come from the hostel, it had to go through the wall, and the wall had no bullet marks on it. It was you guys, I know it was you and you know it!’ I pulled back, controlling the anger, remembering that he had seen his own family massacred just the night before: ‘But it was a long time ago. It does not matter now, and anyway, it was an accident.’ Mkhize readily seized at the escape route offered, and agreed that it had been an accident.