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Kelly Kennedy and photographer Rick Kozak had gone out on a patrol earlier that morning in Adhamiyah, one of Baghdad’s worst neighborhoods before the troop “surge,” and were supposed to go on that second one during which the IED detonated — but at the last moment decided to stay and do some interviews on base. In the aftermath of the deaths that day, Kennedy and Kozak were asked to stand away, to give the soldiers privacy to deal with their anger and grief.
One soldier she interviewed months later confessed that he’d “locked and loaded on me, had me in his sights,” she says. “He was bawling as he told me this. He’s a kid, and thought we’d sensationalize the story. That he’d considered hurting me really upset him, and he wanted to apologize about it.” In a story she posted the day after the bombing, Kennedy wrote that “this day showed why soldiers come back home with mental health issues, and why there should be no stigma attached to seeking help for those issues.”
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