Remembering Terry Lloyd
Jon Steele
On March 22, 2003, Terry Lloyd and his crew were caught in crossfire outside Basra. Terry was killed. Two of his team, Fred Néraq and Hussein Osman, went missing and their bodies were never found. They were both declared dead in 2005. Only cameraman Daniel Demoustier survived.
I was posted to ITN’s Hong Kong Bureau from Moscow in 1995. The transfer had been in the works for months, but it was a mind blowing trip all the same. My last assignment as part of the Moscow bureau had me in beautiful downtown Grozny, trying to stay out of the firing line of Russian tanks and/or Chechen rebels. Then, wham, it was time to go. Seventy-two hours later (with a quick stop in Moscow to pick up my suitcases) I landed at Kai Tak Airport in Kowloon. My nerves were jumpy from Grozny. So when I hopped in a taxi and the Chinese driver screamed at the top of his lungs, I fell onto the back seat and covered my head. Nothing went boom, so I looked up. The driver was leaning over his seat and smiling down on me.
“I say Kung Hey Fat Choi! It means Happy Chinese New Year. When Chinese people are happy, we speak loudly. Welcome to Hong Kong,” he said.
“Oh. Right then. Thanks.”
The driver took me to the Central District of HK Island, and I checked into the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. I drew the curtains in my room and did not leave it for days. Eventually, things settled down. Then came a call from ITN’s Foreign desk handing me my first assignment in the Far East— “Go to Manila.” It seems Pope John Paul II was coming to town. He was big news. Then came one more bit of info: I was to meet Terry Lloyd on site. He’d be flying in from London to report the story. I had known Terry for many years. I was happy I’d be seeing him. I was desperate to see him.
Background: The Manila meet would be the first time I’d see Terry since that bad day in Sarajevo (1994) on a side street just off Sniper Alley. A young girl named Marina was gunned down by a Serb sniper. Terry and I were there when it happened. A couple locals lifted the stricken girl from the street and tossed her into a car. I was next to her with my camera. I saw the wound across her neck. It didn’t look the sort of wound a human being survives, but she was still alive. The car raced away to the hospital. Bosnian soldiers opened up over our heads, firing into Serb territory across the Drina River. Terry and I hunkered down and filmed the scene, including the harrowing moment when Marina’s father fell to his knees in the middle of the street, in full view of the sniper who had just shot his daughter. He tore open his shirt, he begged the sniper to kill him. I was sure the suffering man was about to take a bullet, so did Terry. He was about to make a dash into the open to get the man out of the line of fire, but two locals jumped from behind a wall and pulled the man to safety.
When the bullets stopped, Terry and I made our way to the hospital to check on Marina. The hospital in Sarajevo was something of a hellhole in those days, but miracles could be performed there. After all, everyone in the place was an expert on gunshot and shrapnel wounds. But mostly, it was a place of grief. But for a minute, Terry and I imagined we were on the threshold of a miracle.
We didn’t have a translator with us, and we thought we were being told by a watchman that Marina had survived. Terry asked to see her. The watchman led the way. We tried to get our bearings, because it did not appear we were heading to the operating theater or intensive care unit. Then the watchman stopped and pulled opened a steel door set in a concrete wall. The room beyond the door was dark. The watchman turned on the light. There was a bloodied sheet on the floor. It covered the form a young girl. It was Marina.
It was only a few days after witnessing that bit of slaughter that I wound up on the floor of Heathrow Airport, babbling words that made no sense. It was an event that was a long time coming. And it was one of the events that became the source material for War Junkie. The reason that event, and the others in WJ, made it from the simmering slop of my head and into print, was because of my meeting in Manila with Terry Lloyd.
See, word had gone around ITN that I had a crack up but I was muddling through. Truth be told, when Terry saw me in Sarajevo he sensed I was heading for the cliff and he said so then. What he said was — “Christ, Steele. You look like something the cat dragged in.” I told him I was fine. Things like PTSD were little more than an interesting theory back then. A theory that didn’t quite fit the role of a tough-guy news cameraman. It was a role I played to the limit, even though I was a bloody mess.
So the night Terry arrived to the Philippines, we sat in the lobby of the Manila Hotel on Rizal Park, next to the sea. We had had a fine dinner, with a bottle of good French wine. Probably two. Presently, we were settled in the bar with tumblers of single malt, and hand-rolled cigars courtesy of the nice cigar-making lady whom Terry charmed to the skies.
I kept the conversation light, on the funny side, beating around the bush. Terry could see right through me — “Yeah, that’s all fascinating, Steele, but how long are you going to fuck about before we get to the part of how fucked you are?” So I did get to the point.
Terry listened like a friend. No, strike that — Terry listened like a guardian angel. He didn’t say a word. He simply sipped at his single malt and puffed at his cigar. His piercing eyes stayed locked on me through clouds of smoke. Words spilled from my mouth, then came emotions. Not the breakdown-and-cry sort of emotion. (Though I was known to do that for no reason at times.) This was more along the line of me knowing I was standing at the edge of the abyss and losing my balance, and I was telling someone I trusted about it. I told him I was trying to write a few stories about the last couple of years to sort things in my head. Sukhumi, Moscow, Kigali, Zaire. I told him I was nowhere near writing about what happened to Marina in Sarajevo, but I might get there. Then I said it: “Terry, if I don’t get these feelings down on paper, all this stuff, I think I’m done for.”
“So what’s keeping you from doing it?” Terry said.
Then I said this: “Because I’m still terrified of feeling anything.”
Terry nodded and smiled. In the rough and tumble world people like Terry and I lived, the revealing of emotion was something to be met with jokes and laughs, and I thought a corker was coming. Terry was a prince of the artful jest, but not this time. He reached over and rested his hand on my shoulder — “Jon, we’re going to work this out. Right here, right now.”
He ordered another round of single malt. But instead of talking about my fucked-upness, he talked about writing. And he talked to me as if I was already a writer; not someone wishing he could write. And he did that by asking me questions. He wanted to know how I’d write my stories. As histories, as straight non-fiction? What was my angle? First person, third person? What did I want to say? I laid it out as best I could. The conversation went on like that into the night. Terry asking questions, me babbling like I was still on the floor of Heathrow Airport — but somewhere along the line things went quiet. I couldn’t think of anything more to say. That’s when Terry smiled again, leaned forward, and set his cigar on the ashtray. He took a last swallow of whiskey, and he looked at me. For a moment I thought there were tears in his eyes. It could have been the light, and we were well pissed. But this much I’m sure of — Terry rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and held out his arm, then he said this:
“Look, Jon. You see that? You see the hairs standing up on my skin? Chills. I’ve got bloody chills listening to you talk about this bloody book because you’re telling me an honest to God story from your heart. It’s good. It’s very, very good.”
That was the first moment I saw a real way out from under the crushing weight of terrible memories. There had been stops and starts, always with me falling back on my drunken ass. But that night in the lobby of the Manila Hotel, Terry gave me my first flash of genuine hope. And it was Terry who laid out the format of WJ — “You start with Heathrow, then you go back and tell the story of how it happened.” It was Terry Lloyd’s idea, not mine. I wish I could remember everything Terry told me that night. I only wrote down a few lines in my journal. And this was the most powerful thing Terry said that night: “You must write this book, Jon. Not just for yourself, but for all of us. Do you hear me? You must write this book for all of us.”
Over the next year I started writing for real. Mostly in airports while waiting for a flight. It became something of a joke within ITN — “Jon Steele is writing a book.” No one believed I’d actually finish it. Let’s face it, you can’t swing a dead cat in a newsroom without hitting at least a dozen reporters all trying to write a book. And I wasn’t even a reporter, I was a fucking cameraman/editor. Truth be told, I doubted I would finish it either. It was too much of a struggle. Enter Terry Lloyd again.
He made another parachute job into the Far East during my last days in Hong Kong. A Mad Brit was flying a balloon around the world. Things weren’t going to plan and it appeared the Mad Brit was going down somewhere in Burma. I was scrambled to Bangkok to meet Terry, and then do what we could to get into Burma and get the story. We went to the Burmese Embassy in downtown Bangkok. In those days, the days of the military junta, journalists were as welcome in Burma as the plague. In fact the lobby of the embassy was packed with like-minded journos trying to get into Burma; all of them being told by authorities to “Fuck off, we don’t care about your stinking Mad Brit in a balloon.”
Terry weaseled his way into the back office of the Assistant Permanent Secretary in charge of Something, dragging me along. There, Terry charmed the Assistant Somebody into Entry Visas under the explicit condition that we did not attempt to do a political story, or contact Aung San Suu Kyi (who was under house arrest). Actually, it was more than a condition; it was a threat. Fuck about, and we would be in serious trouble. Terry smiled and gave it his best poetic lilt: “I promise you, sir, neither me nor my esteemed colleague wish to rot in a Burmese jail.”
Off to Rangoon we went. And with a map, a Burmese driver who was stoned on khat, an unauthorized laptop satphone connecting us to London (so we could be fed updated co-ords of the balloon’s trajectory,) Terry Lloyd and I found ourselves in a jungle clearing at the exact moment the Mad Brit in his deflating balloon made contact with Mother Earth.
My God, did we laugh our way across Burma covering that story. The journey was punctuated with cries of, “Onward!” and “Failure is not an option!” We were like a couple of giddy kids in a land of make-believe. In fact, we were applying the same skills and discipline to this story as those required to stay alive in a war zone. But there were no guns this time, and we were loving every minute of it. It remains one of my favorite “when I was” tales. Thing is, while laughing our way through Burma, Terry asked me how the book was coming along. I hemmed and hawed about it. He kept after me — “The fucking book, Steele! What about the fucking book?” I said I was working on it. He grabbed my arm— “Promise me you will finish the book.”
It took me four more years, but I did it. And there were frequent telephone prompts from Terry along the way — “Don’t forget, you’re writing for all of us. Even if you’re a Yank.”
War Junkie was published in 2002, after I had moved to the Jerusalem Bureau. There was one day when my cellphone rang. It was Terry. He had just finished reading WJ. He was genuinely happy for me, and proud — “I knew you could do it. I bloody well knew it.”
I thanked him for getting me through it. I told him I would have never made it without his constant nagging. I told him he was one of my heroes. He got choked up. It was no secret Terry was having a tough go of it then. In one of its more dense moves, ITN management had relegated Terry to the back benches. One of the UK’s finest reporters shifted to the back benches — go figure. He endured his wilderness years with grace, but his friends knew he felt humiliated and hurt. That’s why what Terry said next made all the struggle of writing WJ worth it. He said — “You gave me back some of my dignity, Jon. God bless.” It was my turn to get choked up.
Not long after that call, a reshuffle of ITN management meant Terry was back in the game. He was over the moon. I could hear him laughing all the way from Jerusalem. When we talked by phone he was brimming with life and joy. He was as happy as a Hong Kong taxi driver on Chinese New Year.
By then it was obvious Bush and Blair were going to pull off their scam to lie the world into WWIII. I was to be based in Baghdad, and I hoped Terry would join the Baghdad team. We had a right piss-up in room 406 of the Al Rashid Hotel (seven and a half weeks before the war) talking about how great it would be, while working our way through three bottles of wine I smuggled in from Jordan. I mean, more than anyone I knew in television news, Terry Lloyd lit up the screen with brilliance. His comforting presence in the worst of places, his well-crafted scripts, the cadence of his voice were masterful. But there was so much more he delivered in one of his stories— courage, honesty, a cry for justice, an unwavering belief in the nobility of broadcast journalism, compassion, humanity, a sense that we all share the same journey. I never worked with Terry again. Sadly, tragically, he was killed in crossfire on the third day of the war. And the world was made less.
The anniversary of his death comes and goes, year to year, and I always stop to remember it. But I’ve never written or said anything about it publicly. So why now? Why this odd-numbered thirteenth anniversary? Because — I was sitting in my writing room, and I saw four books published under my name (with a few of them translated into foreign languages) sitting on a bookshelf, with one more hiding in a cardboard box under my desk (one that is dedicated to T.E.L.) — and I realized not one of those books, from 2002 through 2016, would have been written without Terry Lloyd’s intervention in the lobby of the Manila Hotel. And one more thing I realize while staring at my books on the shelf just now, and the reason this day is hitting me so; something I did not realize before this very moment in space and time— the voice of the battered hero in The Angelus Trilogy, Jay Harper — every time I heard Harper’s voice in my head, it sounded like Terry.
So here it is: I want the world to know on this day of memory that Terry Ellis Lloyd was, and remains the single most important influence in my development as a writer — that one gracious and compassionate being who appeared at just the right moment to offer just the right amount of wisdom and encouragement, so that I might dare to become the writer he believed I already was. And when I face darker moments, moments when I fear there will be no more words, I remember him telling me — “You’re writing for all of us.” And I remember his comforting hand on my shoulder. Like I said, a guardian angel.
Bless you, Terry.
Jon Steele is an American writer living in Europe.
