The first in a series of reports by C.J. Chivers on the early days of Operation Moshtarak, the major offensive launched in Marja, Afghanistan, in late February.
After spending more than six weeks with the Marines and Afghan National Army in Helmand Province, Tyler Hicks and I left Afghanistan in early March. We plan to return a few times this year. Meanwhile, our colleagues will follow developments there, as Rod Nordland just did. But even as the conversation pitches forward, there are items from the opening of the Marja offensive that merit more attention. The limits of space in the newspaper, as well the shortages of electricity and time while on the ground, meant that material worth sharing at the outset never found an outlet.
Since 2007, Ashley Gilbertson has been recording the bedrooms to which young American service members will never return. “You walk into these rooms,” he said, “and you feel like these are the kids you used to hang out with.”
“I’ve been covering conflict and war for more than 10 years, but this is the first time that I’ve really felt like a war photographer,” said Mr. Gilbertson, who is based in New York.
These images, taken from news footage from across all networks demonstrate the lack of clear detail or understanding of what is actually being shown. The fragments of information are subtly suggestive but offer no clear verifiable or objective fact.
The acclaimed frontline photojournalist speaks about the horrors of conflict, struggling with ‘this terrible name, war photographer’, and why shooting landscapes instead of battle zones has finally granted him a sense of peace.
Moises Saman, a freelance photographer for The New York Times, arrived there just after United States Marines had secured the district center. Traveling with Taimoor Shah, a Times correspondent and translator who is based in Kandahar, Mr. Saman was working independently from the military, unembedded, seeking to document conditions since the offensive.
Our ethical position is that we will take every step we can alongside the people we cover in combat, but never ask them to take a step for us, or to take us somewhere they would not go on their own. If they were to get hurt doing something we asked them to do, it would weigh on us personally forever. Chris and I follow this code. We believe in it and do not deviate from it.
One of the greatest disservices of “The Hurt Locker” is the impression that soldiers in Iraq were masters of their destinies. If they snipped the right wire, made the right shot, cleared the right room, they would stay alive. In fact, the opposite was true. Certainly there were firefights, but the vast majority of U.S. deaths were from I.E.D.’s.
This is what was so absolutely terrifying about the war. A faceless enemy was catastrophically destroying U.S. vehicles every day with I.E.D.’s (and I can assure you the enemy did not stand in the open, as per several scenes in the movie). Regardless of your training, if you were in that vehicle when the button got pressed, you were dead.
They had slogged through knee-deep mud carrying 100 pounds of gear, fingers glued to the triggers of their M-4 carbines, all the while on the lookout for insurgents. Now, after five near-sleepless nights, trying to avoid hypothermia in freezing temperatures, the grunts of the 1st Battalion of the 6th Marine Regiment finally had a moment to relax.
To those who think this picture is disrespectful, I say that perhaps you prefer it if we remembered him only as a statistic. I’m sorry but again I have to respectfully disagree. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, if I was a soldier killed in action, you can be damn sure I would want a photograph of my death plastered across the front page of every publication in the world.
CNN’s chief international correspondent, best known for her coverage of conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, lives in a “big and comfortable” rental apartment overlooking Central Park.
1. Most Amiable Dictator: Slobodan Milosevic. He would slap you on the back, offer you a drink. He tried to be charming. But many of them do. You have to be on your guard.
This career retrospective shows that time and familiarity have not dulled the impact of photojournalist Don McCullin’s astonishing combat photography, writes Andrew Pulver
It feels like a state honour: the photojournalist Don McCullin, one-time employee of the Observer and the Sunday Times, is being dignified with a retrospective at a national museum. The venue – the new Libeskind-designed Imperial War Museum North – tells you the emphasis is on his astonishing combat work.
“The day I came across that boy was a killer day for me. There were 800 dying children in that schoolhouse. The boy is near death. He is trying to support himself. And to see this kind of pathetic photographer appear with a Nikon around his neck…”
He falls silent again for a moment. “Some times it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It’s as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.”
A couple of years ago I stumbled upon McCullins autobiography ‘Unreasonable Behaviour‘ in Dublin and couldn’t put it down. It’s an unflinching account of his life. I really had no idea about the man at all (indeed might be due a re-read). Truly gripping a life like his defies fiction you really couldn’t make up the reality. A lot of the book does deal with his combat experiences but he also deals with the changing face of journalism and his own demise along with that of the newspapers in Britain during the tumultuous 1980’s.
Have a look at the “trailer” for Stanley Greene’s new book Black Passport, a deeply personal journal of life and a career in conflict. Or perhaps it is, as compiled by Teun van der Heijden, a biography.
When I give talks or lectures people often ask me my personal feelings about war, usually I dodge the question. Sometimes I say that I don’t expect my pictures to stop wars, but rather I hope they help citizens to understand what going to war means. On that level at least I think the Tal Afar pictures fulfill my goals as a photographer; for they shine a rare and unsparing light onto war’s brutal-yet-routine realities. And people should know about them.
