ANDREW GRAHAM-YOOLL
397
said that he would stay as short a time as possible because he wanted to
get
to
the agencies to sell the pictures for 'the European morning
papers.
If
he moved quickly he could get a good deal. It was all so
natural and so reasonable. It was a job.
We were among the first to arrive. The patrol car that had
overtaken us had left the road in a cloud of dust and we followed it
beyond some trees. The police knew where
to
go. "They've probably
been tipped off by the guys who took him," our driver said. There was
no bar to our approach to the body and the two photographers with me
went to work before they could be stopped. The two policemen nearest
to
the body stepped back out of the pictures. Several plainclothesmen
stood by two cars that had no markings and no plates, but they did
nothing to help the men in uniform and nothing to stop us. As a
reporter, I had little to do except ask how long the body had been there
and other routine questions.
It
was nearly two hours since the first
flash in the wire room.
The body lay in shallow grass. Blood was on the blades and the
clumps of taller weeds were still working themselves upright after
being trampled. The blood seeped from the wounds all down the
body's left side, from just below the ear on down. The face, half of it,
had a look of life. The bursts from one or more machine guns had
ripped up his side, down to his thigh. He had been wounded before
arrival but had obviously been forced by his killers to stand facing them
and then had turned as the trigger was pulled or as the first bullet .made
his body swerve.
Soon after our arrival, there came the police photographers and a
police ambulance. The body was put on a stretcher and loaded into the
ambulance. The sight of the body on its back, the head flopped over
one end of the stretcher and the face half shot off-one bloody eye and
one good one staring up at the sky-made a good photograph. I kept
the picture for some time in my terrorist file. But that image kept
leaping out of the file and into my mind as I lay in bed awake at night.
I went to the cocktail party and enjoyed it.
The next afternoon I wrote the old man's and the son-in-law's
names at the end of the list which was the paper's way of keeping track
of those being killed on all sides. A few days later I had a dream in
which a man with no face , smartly dressed, but with one side of his coat
in latters and bloody, enlered the office, wenl to my desk, and put my
name at the end of the list.
I told my friends about lhis dream, which was repealed for several
nights, lo clear myself of it. Bul il has never gone. I lhink il reflecled a
