Despatches from the front line

It is in man's nature to want to test and terrify themselves. Whole industries have sprung up to serve this purpose - mountaineering, whitewater rafting, or just going on a big dipper. War's great siren call is, of course, that it's for real.

'I felt like I was at the coalface of history,' says Adam Holloway MP, 46, who, after Cambridge, joined the Grenadier Guards. He worked behind enemy lines in Iraq in 1991, before moving to ITN as a reporter. He once disguised himself as a deaf and dumb Bosnian Muslim to report on the advancing Serb army.

'By risking your life for a higher cause, your adrenaline-seeking behaviour is somehow justified,' says Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Williams, the 44-year-old former head of the SAS. Not only does he come from an army family - his father is a Brigadier - but, like Kiley, he's a white African, born in what was then Rhodesia and brought up in South Africa. 'I joined the army because it was the biggest adventure on offer.' He commanded raids against al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the IRA in Northern Ireland. In Bosnia, he was smuggled into the safe haven of Gorazde in the middle of a Serb attack, dressed as a French paratrooper. 'The biggest trick the army plays is to train young men into thinking that it is normal to man a machine-gun post. Actually, it's normal to run away. We're brought up on a diet of romantic heroism. It makes you think this is a worthwhile thing to do.'

Jerome Starkey also thinks he was culturally brainwashed. 'I read too much Rudyard Kipling and Graham Greene; I saw too many Sunday afternoon war movies,' says the 30-year-old Times correspondent in Kabul. Jerome went to Kabul in 2006 fresh from the newsdesk of The Sun. 'I was spat at by one of Jude Law's friends. It wasn't what I'd gone into journalism for.' He got a job on NATO's Sada-e-Azadi newspaper in Kabul. 'It was the best-paid job I ever had.' After six months he resigned and started freelancing, working for the Evening Standard and The Scotsman; then he landed The Times job.

'It beats the shit out of doing weddings,' says Kate Holt, a 38-year-old former BBC journalist, who now works as a photojournalist based in Kenya. She broke a people-trafficking story in the Balkans, finding Moldovan girls literally being sold 'in an open market. On the street. For $100. Not for a night, but for life. As a commodity. No one could believe it.'

Holt, like Kiley and Williams, was born in troubled Africa: 'I was born in Zimbabwe,' she says. 'My dad was a doctor in the civil war. I didn't have to go looking for adventure. It was just there.'

'People who are drawn to conflict zones often come from conflict zones themselves,' says Sarah Briggs of The Grove Practice, which specialises in trauma counselling. 'They may also be trying to get away from stuff in their family of origin.'

Kiley's and Williams's parents are divorced, as are Jerome Starkey's.

But war can also be an escape from monotony. Dr Javid Abdelmoneim fled to the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) from an A&E department in Worthing: 'Worthing has the oldest average population in the UK. Nothing ever happened there.'

Javid has just got back from Lebanon; he recently worked in Basra and post-earthquake Haiti's drugs-and-guns slum Cité Soleil. 'There were lots of rapes, stabbings. No health and safety so people would be sawing their arms off at work. You'd see six children die in a day; you probably see one a year in the UK. It's hard to stomach. But you do make the best of friends.'

On the phone, Javid sounds English but he's not: 'There is nowhere in the world where I look and sound as if I fit in. My dad's Sudanese, my mum's Iranian, we moved from the Sudan to Cambridge when I was seven. I look wrong in the Sudan and Iran. I'm obviously not English when you meet me. There are parts of North Africa and Brazil where I look normal as long as I keep my mouth shut.'

In a war zone, as long as you are good at your job, wherever you come from, you belong.

Henry Gray, 37, has been setting up an MSF maternity clinic and a mental health hospital in Misrata for the past few months. His Damascene moment came when he watched the 2004 tsunami on television. Brought up on a Hebridean island with a population of 'between four and six, depending on whether my brother and I were away at boarding school', Gray had trained as a water engineer. 'I volunteered. But nobody wanted me.' He got a job designing water plants in Edinburgh, bought a flat, got a girlfriend. 'Eighteen months later I bumped into a friend who said she was off to Congo for MSF and they were looking for people. By that time, I was bored with my job and had split up with my girlfriend, so I volunteered. Ten days later I was on a plane.'

Since then he has worked in Haiti, and now in Libya. 'I get a real buzz out of doing it. It beats working at a desk. You actually feel you are doing something useful. It's interesting, exciting, occasionally terrifying, but the one thing it is not is boring. It's a bit addictive. Once you start is quite difficult to stop.'

It's very hard to replace that kind of fulfilment back in the West, with its peaceful, quotidian pace. Added to that, one of the great seductions of war is that, as you are constantly dealing with other people's problems at their most catastrophic, it's easy to forget to deal with one's own life and one's own relationships.
Richard Williams is divorced; Adam Holloway unmarried. 'I've lost several fabulous girlfriends by refusing to settle down,' says Gray.

Starkey refers to the 'Lost Boys' in Kabul. 'It's like Neverland, full of people who don't want to grow up. Obviously there's a huge element of escapism living somewhere like Afghanistan.' But he is self-aware enough to have a note of concern in his voice: 'I'm in the worrying position of being the longest-serving correspondent in Kabul. But I'm not ready to cover the bond markets yet.'

Giving up war, with its intellectual and emotional intensity, is not an easy thing to do and most end up with a compromise, still using the old skills and instincts but in less dangerous surroundings.

Dr Javid is joining the Foreign Office as a diplomat. Williams now runs a gold-mining company in Afghanistan. 'We've raised $40 million. I spend 50 per cent of my time in Afghanistan. I may have got to the stage in my life where I like gardening and making jam, but if somebody says to me, "Do you want to go to Afghanistan?" I say, "F*** yes!" '

Adam Holloway, now a PPS in the Foreign Office, has just returned from a fact-finding mission to Libya and was on a similar trip to Afghanistan earlier this year.

It turns out that even Junger's definition of giving up covering wars is rather elastic. He is currently setting up a series of free combat-first-aid courses for freelance journalists to cut down on the number of unnecessary deaths. 'I tried to think that nothing could have saved Tim, because that made me feel better,' says Junger. 'But then this combat medic told me that there was a simple way to stop the blood flow in minutes. Then they could have got him to hospital. But nobody there knew how to do it.' His courses will be held in London, New York and Beirut.

'Being shot at is not necessary to understanding the war itself,' he continues. 'From now on I will focus more on the social and political aspects. I'm going to the Middle East later this year.' Although he did admit he was worried about falling off the wagon, being that close: 'You quit cigarettes and then you go outside the pub with a friend who smokes and the next thing you know you are having a puff.' ES

Charlotte Eagar's novel about Sarajevo, The Girl in the Film, is available to download on the Amazon Kindle for £2.09