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.
War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfa
In Peter van Agtmael’s “2nd Tour Hope I don’t Die” and Lori Grinker’s “Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict,” two haunting books of war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war’s savagery.
The soldiers shouted in English. Most of the residents stared back in frightened incomprehension. Like others, Jabbouri raised a white handkerchief, in a universal sign of surrender. With hundreds of others, he was blindfolded, bound with plastic cuffs and forced to lie on his stomach. Helpless, he listened as his wife and five children cried nearby.
“I was afraid they were going to line us up on the wall and shoot us as revenge,” he said. Lying next to him was his cousin, Saad Salah Ali, short and balding.
“What do you do?” an interpreter barked at Ali. “I’m a taxi driver,” he replied.
It was in early March 2002 when I first arrived in Kabul – just weeks before springtime and Nawroz, the Persian New Year. The Kabul Valley looked cold and barren-dry as the Ariana flight descended through the clouds. Snow-covered peaks of the Hindu Kush lay on the horizon, aloof from all that was happening here.
I’ve been to Afghanistan eight times in the last 18 months. My apartment is slowly taking on the look of a caravanserai. I have more friends in Kabul than Manhattan. My mind is full of snippets of Dari, counterinsurgency strategy and half-remembered warlords, major and minor. My son – not yet quite born – will have a Pashto middle name. I make no claims to being an expert on the place but, God knows, I seem to love it.
