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VoiceConny MusPublished online: 30 Sep 2008.

To cite this article: Conny Mus (2004) Voice, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment &Trauma, 9:1-2, 291-292, DOI: 10.1300/J146v09n01_36

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Voice:When You Are Alone, It Is Different

Conny Mus

Working and living under extremely difficult and often dangerous circum-stances eventually turns you into a different person. The people around yousee the change but you do not. You become a realist, maybe too much of one.And you become indifferent to many things in life that are important to thepeople around you and had previously been important to you, too. I have cometo see things like paying a bill, repairing a leaky faucet or a garden gate, or tak-ing my daughter to the doctor when she has the flu, as unimportant.

When my partner pressures me to take such things seriously, I often shrugthem off, tell her that they can wait and ask her why she thinks these thingsmatter. In the same way, I could no longer care less if some fellow driver onthe road misbehaves. “Go right ahead,” I think. A while back, I would haverolled down my window to say something nasty to him or her.

I am a devoted father to my little daughter, but if she happens to fall orcough, after ensuring that she is eating, drinking, and moving, I do not make abig deal out of it, when sometimes I should. Once she was running a high fe-ver, but seemed to be doing fine otherwise, so I postponed the visit to the doc-tor for a few days. As it turned out, she was developing pneumonia, and hermother was right that it would have been more sensible to get her to the doctor

Address correspondence to: Conny Mus, Correspondent RTL4 Nieuws, HollandMedia Groep, Givat Hayonim 2, P.O. Box 10-003, Jerusalem 93467, Israel (E-mail:rtlconny@netvision.net.il).

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Voice: When You Are Alone, It Is Different.” Mus, Connie. Co-publishedsimultaneously in Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma (The Haworth Maltreatment & Trauma Press,an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 9, No. 1/2, 2004; and: The Trauma of Terrorism: Sharing Knowl-edge and Shared Care, An International Handbook (ed: Yael Danieli, Danny Brom, and Joe Sills) The HaworthMaltreatment & Trauma Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2005. Single or multiple copies of this arti-cle are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@haworthpress.com].

http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JAMT 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J146v9n01_36 291

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sooner than we did. Once you have seen as many dead, severely injured, dis-membered bodies as I have, you look at the mundane problems of daily lifeand think, “What is everyone making such a fuss about?”

The way you cope with your normal emotional reactions to these atrocitiesis different every time. I usually become very quiet and stare straight ahead,with no desire to talk about what I have experienced. Sometimes I watch adumb movie or have too many drinks. When I drink with colleagues, a conver-sation about the difficult events naturally ensues. This is often accompaniedby inappropriate jokes, but they do serve a purpose. On one horrific occasion, Iwas doing my TV song and dance routine at the site of a bombing, a meteraway from where people were collecting human brains from the pavementwith rubber gloves. “Look out,” said a colleague, “take one more step andyou’ll be standing on it.” My crass reply was, “don’t worry. I’m crazy aboutbrains, but I just ate.” Everybody started laughing and I released my own ten-sion.

If you are ever under gunfire or in a bombing, you had better hope not to bethere alone. When your colleagues or some local people are there as well, thenit is bearable, because you can decide together where to take cover. But if youare alone, it is a different story.

After a night of missile attacks in Baghdad, I informed my office that Icould not take any more and I wanted to leave. Alone in my hotel room withthe whole building shaking, the lobby windows lying smashed on the floor, Itrembled for hours. I had no one to talk to, no one with whom I could sharewhat I was going through. I could not contact my office because we do notbroadcast at night. In such a situation you feel very alone.

How you deal with danger is different each time because the situations areso different from each other. Heroes do not exist. Each of us has to find hisown way to deal with the danger and the accompanying fear, and you never,ever, get used to it.

Why do you keep doing it, at least up until the point when you feel that youcannot do it anymore? I have seen many colleagues quit the job. I think it isvery sensible to do so if you feel that you cannot cope with it anymore. If youforce yourself to continue, both your work and your private life will suffer.

One reason for me to go on after more than 20 years of seeing far more hor-rors than happy stories is that I think it is important that the news reaches theworld. In addition, I feel that so far I can still cope with it. Each time I cope in adifferent way. Yes, I have changed, but I think it is in a good cause and I stillhave a very interesting job.

292 THE TRAUMA OF TERRORISM

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