Backgrounder: Jimmie Briggs

By Fatima Quraishi

She lay by the side of the road, a narrow, muddy road in a jungle between Kisangani and Ubundu, towns in the former Zaire. "’She's dead, isn't she?’" asked reporter Jimmie Briggs. "At that moment," Briggs writes in his first book, Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War, "I heard the moan: 'Uuunh,' came the sound again." It was the sound of another Hutu refugee dying, one of over two million who fled to Zaire after the Tutsi-controlled government came to power, ending the 100-day 1994 genocide. But even now, eight years later, Briggs can hear it.

Briggs says he encountered the dying Hutu woman in 1997 on his first trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, then known as Zaire, to cover a civil war for LIFE magazine. While there he noticed that adolescent boys served in the military. After seeing the child soldiers carrying weapons, he decided to write his first book, Innocents Lost. The dying woman, he writes, reminds him "of every housing project, drug infested-street corner, and scarred village" in the United States and Zaire he had "ever entered and left, as a journalist, without a backward glance." He says that writing the book about child soldiers is his way of going back.

Briggs decided to explore the subject in five countries, which he believes are off the American newsmedia's radar. He visited Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Uganda, and Colombia over the course of six years to chronicle the stories of child soldiers and their families. They are among over 250,000 children forced to wage war, planting land mines, wielding AK47s, and in some cases being raped and forced to bear their officers' children.

Objectivity has become a straitjacket, says Briggs. Given his subject, remaining neutral was simply impossible.

A philosophy major at the all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, Briggs was neither interested in Journalism, nor thought he would one day be covering children in conflict halfway across the world. Only after graduating from Morehouse in 1991 with a B.A. in philosophy did he decide he wanted to be a journalist. Briggs began his career in 1992 as a mail clerk for The Washington Post. After moving his way up to writing music reviews, he covered juvenile violence in the U.S. for the Post from 1992 to 1993. After a brief internship at The Village Voice in the summer of 1993, and a year-long job at Emerge as assistant editor, Briggs joined LIFE magazine as a reporter. He ended his four-year career at LIFE to focus on the research for his book, which involved finding and talking to children affected by war.

"These stories…are graphic and violent," said Carol des Lauriers Cieri in a review published in the August issue of the Christian Science Monitor. "Briggs took enormous risks to find them, hoping that by exposing the horror, he would help to end it."

While des Lauriers Cieri valued Briggs's empathic style for the raw, emotional jolt it conveyed, some reviewers have been critical of what they see as his tendency to insert his thoughts and frustrations into his accounts of child soldiers. For example, a writer for Kirkus Reviews bridled at his confessional asides, in which he confides his guilt over making some of the children re-live their harrowing pasts, in pursuit of his story. "Briggs has put himself into many dangerous situations to gather his material, but he insinuates himself and his own traumas a few times too many in the course of his narrative; the reader is impatient to get back to the real subject," the reviewer wrote in the May 15 issue of the magazine.

Briggs responds that it was impossible to tell these stories without including himself in the narrative; he believes his reactions help put a human face on the war for American readers, far from the battlefield. He wants his audience to journey with him, to experience the impact of war on the children firsthand, as he did.

Briggs says that the notion of objectivity in Journalism has become a straitjacket. Journalists are to remain neutral. But for Briggs, given the subject, this was simply impossible. Briggs sympathizes with the child soldiers and admits to crossing the line of neutrality. He uses his own voice in the book to urge his readers to take action, to do what can be done to increase awareness of the issue.

"On one of my first trips to Uganda, someone in the strife-torn area of Gulu told me, 'If a dying man tells you his story, there's an obligation to pass it on,' says Briggs. "[Innocents Lost] is my attempt not only to tell the stories [of child warriors] but also to make people care enough to do something about this scourge."

Fatima Quraishi is a graduate student at NYU, where she is majoring in journalism, with a concentration in magazine writing.

SOURCES

Briggs, Jimmie. Innocents Lost. Basic Books. New York, NY; 2005.
Briggs, Jimmie. Interview. September 22, 2005.
Briggs, Jimmie. Interview. September 24, 2005.
Des Lauriers Cieri, Carol. "The Real Stories Behind the Headlines." Christian Science Monitor. (Aug. 2005).
Hudson, D., Miller, K., & Briggs, J. "The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm." LIFE. http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf01.html (Nov. 1994).
"Innocents Lost; When Child Soldiers Go to War." Kirkus Reviews. (May 2005). National Public Radio. "Jimmie Briggs on 'Innocents Lost,' Saving Child Soldiers." (Aug. 2005).
"The Official Jimmie Briggs Website." http://www.jimmiebriggs.com

Backgrounder: Jimmie Briggs

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