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Introduction: Scott Anderson's Triage
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18164 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1999 |
428 Words |
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In journalism, combat reporters and photographers are a breed apart. Chasing war around the globe, these voyeurs of its horrors eventually become alienated loners--casualties who are as numbed and scarred as the combatants themselves.
First-time novelist Scott Anderson, 40, a contributing editor at Harper's and former foreign correspondent in such hot spots as Uganda, Beirut, Chechnya, and Bosnia, knows the torment firsthand. He is the youngest son of an American foreign-aid officer posted to "frontline states" South Korea and Taiwan during the sixties. Both his father and godfather were World War II veterans, and all his playmates while growing up were children of army officers. Consequently, as Anderson said in a Harper's article last year, the spirit of war has surrounded him all his life. "War came to seem like a natural phenomenon to me, a cyclical storm always massing on the near horizon." Rather than being frightened he was excited by war; defying and cheating death gave him a guilty rush. But it didn't last. Reporting on and photographing war had a cumulative effect, bringing home its terror, perversity, and senselessness.
Anderson says that writing Triage was a means of exorcizing demons and resolving the alienation and moral quandaries that obsessed him. He deliberately removes the romantic veneer from war and explores the human debris left in its wake. The protagonist, Mark Walsh, a combat photographer covering a skirmish in Kurdistan, barely survives a deadly artillery attack. His colleague and friend, Colin, does not. After a close call in a battlefield hospital, Mark is shipped home to Brooklyn, where his girlfriend, Elena, tries to nurse him back to health. She notices that Mark remains strangely disoriented, and there's evidence of a growing paralysis of his legs. Traumatized, he's reluctant to divulge Colin's fate to Elena, to Colin's wife, Diane--or even to himself.
Against her wishes, Elena's grandfather, Joaquin Morales, who ran a psychological "purification" clinic for war criminals at the end of the Spanish Civil War, comes to New York to help heal Mark's affliction. Joaquin's "therapy" forces Mark to confront his own complicity in the events that continue to haunt him. The excerpt that follows recounts one of these therapy sessions.
In a commentary, writer and veteran Pat Hoy describes how Anderson penetrates his characters' tormented consciences as they wrestle with postcombat trauma, hampered by psychic walls of secrecy, denial, and guilt. He questions the nature of heroism and makes us
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