By Nancy Peacock
He never fired a weapon. But journalist Kevin Sites is haunted by what it feels like to kill someone in combat. And it is why he felt compelled to write The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won’t Tell You About What They’ve Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War. (Harper Perennial, 2013) A self-described “danger dilettante,” Sites began his career as a novice 23-year-old freelance journalist, covering the U.S.-backed war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1986.
“I felt like I had transcended my small-town Ohio upbringing and had become part of the larger world, one that was comprised of excitement, danger and men with guns,” Sites wrote. “While I never saw combat there … it was my first taste that would eventually help make war my heroin.”
His “addiction to war” came to an end in November, 2004. Sites was filming a Marine methodically shooting wounded prisoners in a mosque. The Marine left the mosque and one of the wounded prisoners named Taleb Salem Nidal, who had been hiding under a blanket, revealed himself to Sites and begged for his help. Sites turned his video camera away and walked out of the room. Three years after the mosque shooting, Sites filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. government to find out what had happened to the prisoner. He learned that Nidal had been killed with 23 bullet rounds fired into his back.
“Had I simply walked Nidal out of the mosque, he might’ve lived,” Sites wrote. “He had been the only witness besides me. Left alone in the aftermath, he never had a chance. To this day, I can’t begin to fathom how I could have been so stupid.”
His attempt to deal with the resulting Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) took on the all-too-familiar responses of addiction and abuse. He became curious about how other PTSD combat victims dealt with their experiences. He reached out to veterans he met during his time as a war correspondent and asked them fundamental questions: what is it like to kill in war; to be shot, bombed or burned; what can never be for-gotten; what is it like to kill your own men or civilians with friendly fi re, and how do you know what is right?
His research was distilled into the personal narratives of 11 veterans from the United States, Israel, and Holland. The result is a gripping account of the lives that were forever changed by their actions.
“It was, after all, their perspective as combatants that I was seeking,” he wrote. “They are difficult stories all, and
I’m both grateful and hopeful that these acts of sharing will help bring these soldiers, and those who surround them, some peace.”