Susie Ferguson on how she became a 25-year-old war correspondent: ‘There was no reason to say no, so I said yes’

Susie Ferguson was 25 when she went to a war zone for the first time.
Photo: Susie Ferguson/Harper Collins

Saturday morning Presenter Susie Ferguson now marvels that she started a six-year stint as a war correspondent at the age of 25.

“You have a different sense of your own mortality when you’re young… I had nothing holding me back, no special responsibilities or no reason to say no, so I said yes.”

In the new book Bloody in spiritFerguson reflects on how a ‘stubborn’ Scottish child became an award-winning international journalist, despite the crippling pain of endometriosis.

Although Ferguson completed hostile environment training before flying to Iraq in 2003, she told Perlina Lau she couldn’t prepare herself for what a war zone actually looked like.

“There were times when missiles came in or bullets were fired or missiles came at you.”

In Iraq, Ferguson never knew what sights she would see in a day or where she would sleep that night.

“You live on your mind 24/7. There’s downtime, there’s a lot of time where nothing much happens and then there are bursts where everything happens.”

After seven weeks in Iraq, returning to her previous life in Britain was “a very hard landing” for Ferguson.

Susie Ferguson now presents RNZ’s Saturday Morning.
Photo: RNZ/Jeff McEwan

“You think, ‘I’ll come home and everything will be great because I’ll see my family and friends again and I’ll be home again,’ but in some ways you’re torn.

“You live at a very high, very intense, very exciting level in some ways. And then you come back and then you have to decide which bag of frozen peas to buy, as if none of this matters anymore.”

Ferguson said a small piece of her heart was left behind in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where she took 15 painkillers a day to stave off the pain caused by undiagnosed endometriosis.

After having “really painful” periods since she was 15, Ferguson was 28 when she was diagnosed with endometriosis.

“The endo pain when it gets really bad (it feels like you’re) six centimeters dilated during labor. That’s the point where I start sweating.”

In Britain at the time, laparoscopic surgery was the typical but expensive route to a diagnosis, she says.

“One of the big barriers to endo is that it’s not easy to diagnose other than having a surgeon look at it.”

A diagnosis of endometriosis often brought a lot of emotional pain, Ferguson said, and she only sought medical treatment for the condition after having her first child at age 31.

While tolerating years of extreme pain may have made her stronger, she said it wasn’t a badge of honor.

“I shouldn’t have to go through 15 years of being ‘six centimeters dilated during labor’ to decide whether I have the courage or not.”

She was “quite stubborn” as a child, growing up with her mother, an anatomy teacher, and her father, a general practitioner.

In new book Bloody Minded, Susie Ferguson reflects on her Scottish childhood, the excruciating pain of endometriosis and ‘living by her wits 24 hours a day’ in war zones in the Middle East.
Photo: HarperCollins Publishers

Before becoming a journalist, she completed four years of drama training at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, which was good preparation for taking up the microphone later.

“Working in radio, which I love, has a huge resonance, I think, with theater and with drama.”

To bring the scenes to life Bloody in spiritshe drew from an archive of handwritten notes and a bit of method acting to evoke and describe specific sensations.

“The dust of the desert in your mouth doesn’t really look like sand, because it’s very fine. It’s more like flour. What is it like to live in that? What is it like to run your fingers through your hair, but it doesn’t work because it is clogged with very fine dust?

“We’re all trapped in our bodies and to some extent it felt like that was the story I was telling. It wasn’t about the gunfights or the bombings I’d been in. It was about ‘well,’ what was it like it for a 25-year-old woman to be there?’”