They can't keep away from war

As Max Hastings has often maintained, all good foreign correspondents are a little bit "touched". If you don't get what is known as the "cosmic joke", you're liable to loose your marbles quickly and completely. But there is a select breed of creatures who cover conflict, cameramen and women, who are probably bonkers from birth.

Often poorly paid, cameramen have to take absurd risks to bring you your "one minute 30" of foreign news from the vilest places on the planet. They have to get in close, keep a steady hand while the bombs and bullets crash and whizz around, and operate a shoulder-mounted piece of equipment that tends to attract the attention of armed men because it looks like a bazooka. It is no wonder they get killed so often.

What motivates them, this small, elite band of brothers and sisters who stumble shell-shocked from war to war leaving wrecked marriages and wrecked bars in their wake? It can't be the money. Agency cameramen earn less than £3,000 a month for lugging their equipment through the jungles of Sierra Leone and the killing fields of Rwanda and Bosnia, where several have perished.

If actors, dancers and musicians lose themselves in their art, they cease to be. Jon Steele, a legendary American-born television cameramen, now based in Jerusalem for ITN, reveals in War Junkie: One Man's Addiction to the Worst Places on Earth, that war correspondents are motivated by a similar but darker force, a craving for oblivion met only by the very real prospect of death in the maelstrom of battle.

This book is hard work. Imagine being grabbed by the throat, turned upside down, and inside out, while someone bashes you in the exposed and quivering viscera - and then leaves you to feel an ill-defined and haunting guilt. But it will go down as a classic of war reportage alongside Dispatches and Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?

It opens with the most authentic literary re-creation of the hollow terror, confusion and soul-crushing cacophony of battle I have read for decades. Which is odd, because the scene is set in Heathrow, Jon Steele is slumped against a wall babbling into a telephone, and the battle is raging inside his head. He's having a nervous breakdown after non-stop filming in Bosnia, Russia, Georgia, and above all Rwanda and Zaire.

Steele is hard on himself. He admits to selfishness, self-indulgence, the emotional range of an earwig, and an unabashed addiction to the high-octane adrenaline fix of war that blasts through the system, heightens the senses, sets the heart pounding and brings perfect clarity of thought. It is the last stage before blind, weeping, snot-pouring, pantwetting panic.

It is in this moment, so often so close to death, that Steele comes most alive. He invites the reader to sit inside his head and peep through his viewfinder as he counts the seconds between machine gun bursts to time his rush through a battle, and the precise range of mortars which are crashing around his ears.

It's heady, racy stuff written at times in the argot of the Lad Mag. But it is not rough hewn, nor is it stream-of-consciousness babble. The staccato dialogue is as authentic as his spare evocation of the icy perfection of a frozen Siberian lake, its waves caught in mid-break. Steele's work is shot through with anger at the stupid drunkenness of Boris Yeltsin and the naive pathos of the Communists who tried to depose him, the cynical idiocy of the Caucasian wars, the evil of the systematic slaughter of a million people in Rwanda, and the world's refusal to stop it. I, too, covered Rwanda's genocide and the absurd and disgraceful media circus which followed. Steele's re-creation of the terror of being surrounded by axe-wielding Hutu mobs who slaughtered Tutsis at a rate of 37,500 a day - by hand - raised a few demons I hoped had been purged from my subconscious. So awful and so familiar and so accurate is Steele's writing that I was left shaking, sweating, and lunging for the drinks cabinet.

In the end, it is not the self-indulgence and the search for oblivion which keeps men and women like Steele going. It is the just rage that burns in the heart of anyone who saw what went on in places such as Rwanda. They - we - are furious that a million people were slaughtered in a well-planned bloodfest, that we filmed and reported it, and that none of you, and none of your politicians, did or said a damn thing about it. As Steele says, next time it happens "We're gonna shove it down your throat", again. "Can't help it."