“I’m totally captivated. It feels like I’m running along beside you. I’d forgotten what that adrenalin wrapped in fear felt like. It’s great stuff - every budding video journalist should be made to read it!”

Sandy Macintyre, Vice President, AP Global Video News.

“Alistair Lyne is one of the greatest reporters I ever worked with. Brave as a Lion, talented as the best in the world and a man with the greatest heart!”

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"Olhar o Mundo".

“A gripping taste of life on the front line. Your words are as compelling as your pictures. Any aspiring war correspondent should read this book.”

Nigel Baker, CEO, Thomson Foundation.

“A never ending Gautrain on steroids - like a bullet. Chapter three is … well, hardcore. Maybe a bit of polishing here and there, but it’s rawness makes it unique.”

Claude Colart, coverafrica.com Senior Producer, Sky News

“An amazing e-book about working in wartime Liberia. Alistair has combined words, photos and clip frames from his award-winning video in a download unlike anything I've ever seen. He puts you right next to him on Bad Man's Corner where you'll feel his adrenalin, his fear, his passion and his humanity. This is what it's like to report on a war in Africa.”

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"This book is great. Gripping stuff!"

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“I have had the privilege to have worked with some badass cameramen and women from all over the world. This guy is the biggest badass of them all. Buy this. Read this.”

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“I’m emotional - it’s a phenomenal read that had me gripped. The use of the footage is spot-on.”

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PREVIEW EDITIONCopyright © 2015 Alistair Lyne

Clip frame stills © AP / Associated PressCover photograph courtesy David Guttenfelder

All rights reserved

for Roxanne Kyla Monrovia, firstborn warrior.

http://alistairlyne.com

All rights reserved. Worldwide and in perpetuity. This book, and all of the images and written text, are protected by US and international copyright laws. No part of this publication may be reproduced or copied in any way, shape or form, on or in any media, or transmitted in any way, by any means, without the prior written consent of the Author, Associated Press, Cameraman, and Photographers. The title, text, maps, graphics and photographs are property of and copyright © Alistair Lyne / © alistairlyne.com / 2015. Clip frame stills copyright the Associated Press / AP. 2

During a lull in fighting I sneaked a shot of this kid sitting all alone with his AK-47. He seemed forlorn, vulnerable - a moment dropping his fighter persona and just being a kid. He left as soon as he saw me. This was near the end of the first Liberian War, one of the bloodiest, most brutal civil wars in African history. Between 1989 and 1996, 250 000 people died and over a million more were displaced. On all the front lines children took part in the war - child soldiers. A generation that was lost to terror, tragedy and turmoil. All clip frames, still photographs from footage copyright © Associated Press / Alistair Lyne 2015. 01 © AP. 3

Onto the beach and into the fight. 19 © AP. 30

Monrovia, Liberia, 15 April 1996

16H00 local time.

Day 1

Wrestling with fear and losing. Stomach twisted to nausea. Muscles taught almost painful. Logic and reason spun through my brain a thousand times. What the fuck are you doing?

Cowering within myself and the safety of the dark and deserted first floor hotel lounge. Camera next to my chair. Feet glued to the floor.

The others were all out, on foot, in pairs. I’d made the excuse of having to call London on my satellite phone so I didn’t have to go with. Petrified.

After going on a two week mission to get here, fear had flicked my switch. I barely had the muscle control to stand up out my chair, let alone the balls to leave the hotel and go look for the fighting. I was just getting a grip on myself when the shooting started. United Nations Drive ran right along the beach - and the last building before the steep up-hill to the United States

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embassy was the Mamba Point Hotel. Specially re-opened today on behalf of a handful of visiting journalists who’d made it into the madness of Monrovia. The rest of the capital of this sweltering West African country was shutdown by the street fighting and shifting front lines of a brutal civil-war.

Those shots were fucking loud. Reverberating into the lounge through open glass doors. My body jumps up to take a look before my brain can stop it. More gunshots, louder - and I hit the deck. The firing sounds right over my head but I look up and realise its just the acoustics playing with me. Compliments of an oversized colonial verandah.

Shooting stops and I’m on my feet, peering down through canopied foliage at a view over sudden quiet. A shout. Three fighters run crouched and spread out as they cross the road away from the hotel entrance, an AK-47 swinging. More gunfire and they spark - disappearing between some shacks by the beach.

Crunch time. My brain is frozen but my body moves. War’s come to you boy. You wanted this job. Now go do it. Automatic fire down at the beach. My mind stays numb but I’m moving. In two strides I’ve got my camera and instinct takes over. Controlling my breathing and bracing against the doorway to steady my shot, I zoom in and find a frame in front of me, roughly where the shooting could be coming from.

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Shirtless and UN beret advance, UN Drive. 23 © AP. 50

NPFL child soldiers on the move. 55 © AP. 90

Monrovia, Liberia / Freetown, Sierra Leone. 16 April 1996

07H00 to midnight local time.

Day 2

I awake to the sound of distant gunfire and venture out with Christophe Simon from AFP and Patrick Robert who’s shooting for Time magazine. Two veterans of war, photo-journalism, and Liberia. They’d been camping in Charles Taylor’s garden prior to the opening of the hotel - the first and only western journalists in the city. Those facts doing very little to help my fear on my second day filming in Monrovia.

They’re completely calm - I’m petrified - as we walk down the road toward the gunfire. Fear having crept back in the night. Legs are like lead. Pushing the what if ? thoughts from my numbed brain. Logic and reason are trying to win me over again - and they’re doing good. It seems ludicrous what we’re doing. My brain is screaming at me to go back to the hotel but my legs are winning. Left, right, left, right … We’re walking down a beachside road in morning sunshine listening to the Atlantic shore break crashing onto the beach. Interspersed with sustained bursts of heavy and light calibre automatic gunfire a few blocks away. That’s where we’re going.

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I roll some tape on a lizard sunning itself - trying to take my mind off the fear - and getting some distant gunfire audio as we get closer to the fighting. Trying to loosen up.

We hit a left at the T-junction into Newport Road and first right into Sekou Toure Avenue, down towards United Nations Drive. Everything we pass is trashed. The further we walk, the worse it gets.

UN buildings, foreign embassies, NGO offices all down the street have been gutted. Bullet holes riddle the walls and trash and electricity wires cover the streets. Broken glass and burnt-out vehicles. Shop fronts mangled, devoid of goods, telephone lines lie across the road.

A blackened, burnt body bloated a sickly yellow and covered in white flour lies buzzing thick with flies in a doorway. Pity you can’t get the smell onto TV.

I move to the side to film a long lens shot of the trashed scene from the ground - my tripod still in Sierra Leone where it would remain for the duration of the war.

My long lens picks up a distant soldier, uniformed, an RPG over his shoulder. I see a bit of swagger as he walks down the middle of the road. Alone - far - not wounded - not scared either. No ducking for cover as I hear loud gunfire coming in hard from my right. He looks like ECOMOG.

More firing down Sekou Toure Avenue and I zoom …

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Advancing up UN Drive towards the BTC. 56 © AP. 95

US Marine takes position as gunfire erupts. 87 © AP.144

Monrovia, Liberia, 18 May 1996

PART ONE

06H00 to 11H00 local time. DAY PLENTY

Goose-bumps on my arms from an early morning sea breeze. We suck down a couple Marlboros on the street outside the Mamba Point Hotel before Jean-Marc and I have to split-up.

I’m back in Monrovia nearly a month. After a short week in Nairobi, APTV had asked me to return. Nothing in Liberia had changed.

Overcast skies add to unease as we punch knuckles and Jean-Marc heads east toward the usual frontline - and I go west to the United States embassy, a 600 metre walk up the road.

Its quiet, no gunfire. Early on Saturday. From experience I know shit can go down today. From Khartoum to KwaZulu-Natal - Mogadishu to Monrovia, Saturdays have a way of getting hot in Africa.

No rush. Assigned by my APTV head office in London to shoot a story inside the embassy. After the US TV

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network ABC had a team spend a week doing a news story on US Marines guarding the embassy - their main competition, NBC - had to match it. At the very least.

NBC were a client, so APTV in London told them: “Our man in Monrovia will do your story for you”. So here I was, walking the opposite direction to the Press. Not amused.

An interview with William Milan - US Ambassador to Liberia, was scheduled for 9am. Nearly three hours early, I was hoping to get some shots of Marines in decent light.

Light grey cloud cover smudging the early West African sun meant I couldn’t even do that.

If I didn’t have my hands on my camera they’d be in my pockets - and if I’d come across a soda can in the road I’d have kicked it. I was pissed.

If anything was to go down this Saturday I’d miss it. Buried in the embassy on a network story.

I shot general views - usual stuff: Marines walking past the US flag, looking over a sweaty city from sandbagged guard towers, squinting at far-off fighters through hi-tech binoculars, playing cards in mirror sunglasses.

Each shot had to be planned carefully without a tripod and I hardly shot interiors because the light was so low.

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A soundbite from the US Ambassador admitted that“…sometimes I get scared when the gunfire comes close ”.

Another from a spectacled African-American Marine stated “... thank God my ancestors were slaves and I wasn’t born here ”.

I film a Marine patrol along the fence outside embassy grounds. Rolling tape and sticking to my AP brief: make it shine.

I lined up my long shots carefully. Choosing positions to balance the camera on a wall or place it on the ground to keep it steady.

By late morning I was claustrophobic from the confines of embassy walls and I escaped to a guard tower overlook- ing the main gate. Both for a bit of air and to hear what I was missing on the other side of town.

Sounded dead quiet - maybe I wasn’t missing anything. Set up camera on sandbags in the tower and put a lapel microphone on a Lieutenant with a brow furrowed seriously under his helmet.

As I finished adjusting the audio levels of his slow, southern drawl - the street outside started going off. Shouting, running, pop-pop, pop-pop - gunfire down the road. Sounds like the Krahn’d remembered there was raiding to do. Saturday morning had just got hot!

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Young NPFL gunman shouts as he runs. 102 © AP. 156

Monrovia, Liberia, 18 May 1996

PART TWO

11H00 to 14H00 local time.

CROSSING THE LINE.

I take a deep breath and blow it out slow, load a fresh cassette into the Betacam and consciously free myself from the NBC story on the Marines. Back to my real job.

Quick stop to look and listen up and down the road before I turn the corner to the dirt alley leading towards the back of the United Nations refugee compound - Greystoke. Nothing at all like the manor of the same name in the legend of Tarzan.

The alley is quiet. Running right up to the tar road opposite the main US embassy gate I’m not surprised. Still, I keep to the left and move cautiously forward: camera strap over my shoulder, lens forward on my hip, hand resting on the camera handle.

Tape is locked into the record head, ¼ Neutral Density filter in place for bright sunshine. Zoom at its widest and unlocked, colour temperature set to 5.9 to help contrast and warm my pictures. Focus on infinity. Camera’s not on my shoulder - looks too much like a weapon that way. I like my

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field of view completely open too - see what’s going on around me.

I’m cautious, but not creeping. Always careful not to be mistaken for a fighter. When you first bump fighters there must be no confusion as to who you are. None whatsoever.

Been in this war a bunch of weeks too - kept my image consistent. Black jeans, boots, t-shirt, pouch on my waist for tapes, bandannas tucked into my belt for sweat, hair tied up.

No jacket, hat, backpack … no changes to my appearance. Even when it rained cats and dogs it was easier to just rain jacket the camera and carry on working. You’d be dry in half an hour anyway.

Most days I’d be with fighters I’d been with before. I preferred they recognised me asap. Doing my bit to keep my ass alive. So far so good.

I’d shoulder the camera now and again when I wasn’t rolling to take an average exposure - always trying to speed up the time it took to roll and record if something went down in front of me.

The microphone levels are set low to compensate for explosions and gunfire. Auto on the other channel. Three battery slots were mounted behind each other at the back of the camera. One powered the rig, the other two spares.

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The unique, six-colour South African flag sewn on 3 sides on the camera jacket hid a tightly folded US 100 $ bill for emergencies. Pack of Marlboro red tucked into the rain cover pouch. Lapel microphone, chamois to wipe the rig and a paintbrush to brush the gear clean - all stuffed in too. Locked & loaded - ready to roll. My standard procedure.

Gunfire gets louder as I approach along the wall - side of the alley. Houses built against it from the other side - and an empty indent in the wall - the size of a small room. Half broken walls on two sides, completely open front with no roof whatsoever. Concrete floor - bright. Good for cover.

End of the alley a single house with a verandah against the corner of the refugee compound wall. Right is a line of bullet-tattered palm trees and tall Strelitzia in front of dirty whitewashed buildings.

At the corner a double story with a dark green corrugated-iron roof. The buildings are remarkably intact, considering the state of downtown. No doubt due to close proximity to the US embassy.

The Greystoke compound housing the refugees is surrounded by a 10 foot high concrete-block wall. Runs the whole length of the road. Eighty metres further down an opening in the wall housed a strong diamond wire gate - locked with chains and padlocks - covered with rolled razor-wire - separating the people inside from the war.

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“You gonna die today white boy, Krahn are gonna eat out your heart”. Nothing like encouragement from locals to keep a news Cameraman on his toes. I was stranded in “no man’s land” - that murky dead zone between sides in a war. After letting one army pull back in retreat, and while waiting for the other side to arrive, I was getting some lip from refugees. Living right on the edge to get a TV news job done in the madness, mayhem, blood and bullets of a wild West African war zone. Making sense of Monrovia going haywire. Journalism at the extreme.

Being in the eye of the storm is sometimes the safest place to be. “Bad Man’s Corner” is a story by a frontline Cameraman gathering combat footage. Risking all to film news for worldwide broadcast, and try stay alive and sane at the same time. Covering Liberia during the civil war as an International Journalist, you had to go the extra mile. Facing danger daily in the street battles, gun fights & shifty front lines of a city at war. © David Guttenfelder 1996 © AP / Alistair Lyne. 2015.