‘Accidental war correspondent”, says the subtitle. Kiwi TV journalist Lisette Reymer is young, talented and intrepid. War correspondents have become the glamour guys and gals of journalism in the past decades. Remember “Scud Stud” Arthur Kent, reporting from a Baghdad rooftop as US missiles speared down? When he appeared on a US talkshow later, the women-only audience erupted in mating calls.
Kent and his kin have become familiar TV tropes, with their PRESS flak jackets and concerned expressions, against backgrounds of ruined buildings and ruined people. Some imply that the real drama is them, but the very best put the victims in the foreground. Supreme among the latter was Norman Lewis, reporting from wartime Italy, Mafia Sicily, Bolivia when the government was “cleansing” areas of indigenous inhabitants, to replace them with white settlers fleeing Rhodesia.
Lewis was also a wondrous narrator. In Guatemala, three chaps with large machetes in their belts entered a bar, advanced on him, paused. “Excuse me for addressing you, sir,” one said, and nodded at the nearby jukebox. “But are you familiar with the method of manipulating the machine over there?” Matchless.
The trade now includes Waikato-born Reymer, who, after covering the Tokyo Olympics, found herself in the UK, where she became Newshub’s Europe Correspondent. She burst into tears when she got the job, which is instantly endearing.
Her next three years were “London, August 2021 … Przemyśl, Poland, March 2022 … Bucha, Ukraine, May 2022 … Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye, April 2023 … Tel Aviv, October 2023 …” So it goes, with other locales in between, ending in Ethiopia, Lucerne, London again, and Barcelona, August 2024.
In Ukraine, someone kicks a landmine and Reymer chucks herself on top of the camera and its operator.
Her commitment to catastrophes starts with watching the Twin Towers fall on Mum and Dad’s TV. It’s the first of many, many narratives in a text that’s anecdotal rather than analytical. But then, stories are frequently the best way of getting to the guts of an issue, and Reymer tells hers with clarity and competence-plus.
So what happens to her? She starts with the training exercise where ex-SAS types teach her and others “how to cope with everything from violent interviewees to missile strikes”.
Then, in random order – which often seems to happen in her work – she does a live news cross with pasta sauce on her face, and gets temporarily arrested in Türkiye while filming deaths and debris after the February 2023 earthquake. (For months after that assignment, rubbish bags in London streets evoke body bags in shattered Turkish towns.)
She and cameraman Daniel exit Moldova in spite of a pot-bellied, scruffy-bearded border official, and are only a few metres into Ukraine when they’re bundled into trucks by “huge men, dressed head to toe in combat black”.
She’s in London for Queen Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee: “One particularly patriotic woman revealed her custom-made Union Jack underwear to the camera.” She feels homesick over photos of her small goddaughter in school uniform.
While they’re filming a wrecked home in Ukraine, someone kicks a nearby landmine and Reymer chucks herself on top of the camera and its operator, in an act of professional if unappreciated self-sacrifice. She’s in Paris, with streets of burning cars, days after police kill a 17-year-old immigrant. In The Hague, she reports on demonstrations against Israel’s attacks on Gaza, and is admirably – I reckon – forceful in her condemnation of that campaign. That’s just a few episodes.
It could become one noisy thing after another, which is probably not too inaccurate a picture of life in her job. But she keeps each episode brisk. She’s open to fear and distress; read her account of little Bonnie in Ethiopia, dwindling from malnutrition and TB. She stays wide-eyed and clear-eyed. She’s generous to her colleagues, upfront about her own limitations.
Exciting times don’t always mean an exciting book. Reymer states her case boldly: “The truth that follows in these pages is wilder than fiction.” Truth? Or facts? They’re not necessarily synonymous.
Her writing is energetic and lucid, though an adverb cull wouldn’t hurt. There’s a lot of four-letter exclamations and epithets, some in Trumpian block capitals. They fit the voices, and they soon become background noise. Oh, and I wish journalists could be taught the real meanings of “surreal” and “incredibly”.
Is there a danger that reading books by war correspondents becomes a substitute for taking action? Maybe, just as singing Blowin’ In The Wind may have done, a couple of generations back.
But being informed has to be a step up from being ignorant, and I Don’t Get Danger Money does its job in that regard. It’s more width than depth, but it’s direct, subversive in the right places, and always belts along. You’ll warm to Reymer herself, and you’ll get a strong sense that Mum and Dad are hugely proud of her. So they should be.
No, I Don’t Get Danger Money, by Lisette Reymer (Allen & Unwin, $37.99), is out now.
