Hack in a Flak Jacket: Peter Stefanovic’s darkest hour
Peter Stefanovic is sharing his harrowing experiences as a foreign correspondent.
Abandoning a weekend of snowboarding in California, Peter Stefanovic found himself hurled into an apocalyptic vision in Haiti shortly after a devastating 7.0 earthquake flattened the country in January 2010.
Thousands of bodies lay broken in the rubble. With proper funerals impossible, they were scooped up in garbage trucks and disposed of in mass graves.
In almost a decade as Channel Nine’s foreign correspondent in Europe, the US, Africa and the Middle East, it was Stefanovic’s darkest hour, but even in this unimaginable horror, he found hope.
American firefighters who had already faced the devastation of 9/11 pulled a young boy, Kiki, from the hole where his house once was. In a hospital, a brave young girl put aside her agony for a moment and smiled at him as he knelt to hold her hand.
He shares these incredible stories in his new memoir Hack in a Flak Jacket, available from August 9.
“Rarely does a day go by when I don’t think about the future of Haiti, especially those two kids,” Stefanovic tells The New Daily.
“That was a place where people are extremely generous. They’ll offer you the only food that they’ve got. As bad as it all is, they still manage to smile and that encourages you.
Natural disasters, with the frustrations of aid blockages and corrupt governments, are one thing. However, Stefanovic has also witnessed first-hand the cruelty inflicted by humans, including in the devastation of Gaza, the cold-blooded executions of far-right Anders Breivik and the unrelenting march of ISIS.
“When you go to these kind of places, you see the worst of humankind, but you also see the best,” he says.
“People understand they are in a situation that they have absolutely no control over, so they just power on as best they can. That’s the hope, because you see so much love in a place of hate.”
You see the worst of humankind, but you also see the best.
People can seem like pawns in the face of governments ordering assaults. “In Gaza and Israel, and also Libya for that matter, the government is talking about bombing places but when you are on the ground and you are seeing the death toll, you wonder if the pictures you are broadcasting and the stories you are telling are getting through to the authorities.”
Making the salient point that not all Christians were condemned when the IRA were bombing Britain, Stefanovic has sympathy for the plight of the Muslim community here and abroad.
“The vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people and a lot of them kept me alive, especially in Gaza. There is an extremist element, there’s no doubt about that, it’s just unfortunate that they’ve given the whole religion a bad name. I’ll always try and at least give them a voice.”
From hurricanes bringing the roof down on his bed to bullets whistling past his ear, Stefanovic says the adrenaline rush kept him coming back for more, but it can take a toll.
“I see a lot of the war reporters out there who I feel have lost a little bit of what’s real and are too confident and cocky. They feel like they’re bullet proof and that’s a really dangerous place to be.”
Today, Stefanovic is desk-bound as anchor of Channel Nine’s Weekend Today and engaged to big brother Karl’s Today co-star Sylvia Jeffreys. Looking back on it all, he nominates the 2008 election campaign and ultimate inauguration of President Barack Obama as one his happiest moments in the field.
“It was incredible to be a part of history. Obama rode this wave of hope all the way to the White House and now it seems that Donald Trump is riding this wave of fear. I’m obsessed with the details of this campaign. American politics is like a rock and roll show.”
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