![]() ![]() MARTIN: You ended up turning down your next assignment to Iraq, right?įLEET: I did. We took a risk that way, but we - know, we miscalculated. Both of us are bleeding in the head.īut, I mean, I really - at the moment that all of that was unfolding, I just thought, we made a mistake. I was hit with shrapnel in the head or something. Salam (ph) is bleeding, and I've got - I don't know. One hit my flak jacket and thankfully shattered. Stop - so Will (ph) can catch up to us, please. We've just come under attack, under attack.įLEET: There were, like, 12 rounds that came into my car.įLEET: Stop. But they chased us and shot into our cars. They're saying don't film.įLEET: And we decided to leave. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken). UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: We're going to stop. But once we got in there, we were almost surrounded by a couple of pickup trucks with guys with AK-47s in the back. And we deemed it safe enough to go into the town. Can you tell us about that moment and how it then changed how you assessed your own risk out in the field?įLEET: So we were coming down from the north and investigating Tikrit, which was Saddam Hussein's hometown, and it was thought that if he were to make a last stand, he would make a last stand there. You recount one reporting trip to Iraq when the vehicle you were traveling in came under attack. A warning to listeners - you're about to hear the sound of gunshots. And while covering the Iraq war in 2003, Maria Fleet found herself in a situation that would change the rest of her life. MARTIN: With each new assignment came new risks. But there is a residue of this information and these horrible images that rest with us. And, I mean, it's nothing compared to the trauma that the people we've witnessed have gone through. You're thinking about, where is this going? Where might I need to move? What might be happening around me that is unsafe? And, you know, I think it does take a toll later because you - you know, those images - as visual people, those images float around in our brains afterwards. So you have a million things going through your mind. And that's exactly what you have to do when you're in the middle of something unfolding like that that is really horrific. Back when you were covering these stories, we didn't really talk about PTSD, especially not for journalists.įLEET: No. How did you learn to compartmentalize that trauma? - because no doubt, it had - it - now we call it that. But these stories in particular, especially the coverage of the genocide in Rwanda - it is hard to imagine how difficult it was to shoot those images. MARTIN: You and the other women in the film each kind of nod to the toll that this kind of work takes on anyone who does it. And we felt like that actually could maybe capture the viewer's attention more readily and help them understand what was happening in this conflict. We didn't focus as much on the hardware and the strategy, but what was happening to the people who, through no fault of their own, were displaced and uprooted by these conflicts. What was that?įLEET: You know, as women, I think we have a particular different experience going through the world, and so that gives us a different perspective. But at the same time, the film points out that you brought something different to the work. MARTIN: There's a sort of duality in being among the first to do something, right? I mean, as women in this field, you and your female colleagues wanted to be treated equally to your male counterparts. So we had to prove ourselves in the field and make sure that the guys took us seriously. And it's a very aggressive business, too - a very competitive business. MARIA FLEET: Many times, people would look at me and say, that camera's bigger than you are. I asked Maria about the sexism she faced on the job. She's joined by Mary Rogers, Cynde Strand, Margaret Moth and Maria Fleet. MARTIN: That's the voice of Jane Evans, one of the camerawomen profiled in the film. I had to be better to be seen as an equal. JANE EVANS: I had to be twice as good and twice as fast just to be on the equal playing ground as a guy. She's the director of the film "No Ordinary Life." It reveals how these brave women carved out careers in a male-dominated profession all while on the frontlines of war zones. But the reason I did the film was because I didn't think that people actually knew that it was these women behind the camera. HEATHER O'NEILL: It was literally walking through decades of history from the fall of the Berlin Wall, early Gulf War, Lebanon, Sarajevo, I mean, to the Arab Spring uprising. In a new CNN documentary airing tonight, we meet five women who forged careers behind the video camera starting in the late 1980s. Before smartphones or social media, the only way to see images of war zones from around the world was through someone else's camera. ![]()
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