? ? ?
BEFORE I LEFT Iraq for good, I made a push to widen the scope of my coverage. I was in Istanbul when Life magazine had called with an assignment to photograph injured American soldiers. The father and grandfather of the reporter, Johnny Dwyer, were both doctors in the military. We would have five days in the field hospital at Balad Air Base, where hundreds of soldiers would be coming directly out of battle, en route to the U.S. hospital at Ramstein Air Base, in Germany. As far as I remembered, the military had never given journalists that type of access to photograph injured soldiers. The human costs of the war had been carefully concealed.
The military rules of coverage stipulated that we did not attempt to photograph or interview anyone who didn’t agree beforehand. I had to get a signed release from every soldier I photographed, and if a soldier was unconscious, I was allowed to shoot but could not publish the image until he regained consciousness and signed the release. Almost every soldier I photographed signed the release. In fact, they were so thrilled with the idea that their contribution to defending America was being recorded in Life magazine that many begged me to take their picture. The censorship was coming from above, not from the soldiers themselves.
I was finally photographing the wounded Americans I’d been prevented from photographing. I was sure that the series of images would enlighten Americans to the reality of the war in Iraq. They would see the images and protest our presence there. These were things they hadn’t seen before.
The story was slated to run in mid-November, but it was held by Life magazine for weeks, and eventually months, through Bush’s inaugural speech in January. In February 2005 I received an e-mail from my photo editor at Life. She explained regretfully that Life would not publish the essay of injured soldiers coming out of Fallujah, because the images were just too “real” for the American public.
I was a freelance photographer. I walked a fine line between being assertive about my work and not so high-maintenance that no editor wanted to work with me again. But on a story like this, where as far as I knew no other still photographer had had access to the injured soldiers at Balad—where the soldiers themselves were eager to have their stories told—I was devastated that the images wouldn’t be seen.
Almost five months after I shot the story, they finally did run in the New York Times Magazine, but something in me had changed after those months in Iraq. I was now a photojournalist willing to die for stories that had the potential to educate people. I wanted to make people think, to open their minds, to give them a full picture of what was happening in Iraq so they could decide whether they supported our presence there. When I risked my life to ultimately be censored by someone sitting in a cushy office in New York, who was deciding on behalf of regular Americans what was too harsh for their eyes, depriving them of their right to see where their own children were fighting, I was furious. Every time I photographed a story like the injured soldiers coming out of Fallujah, I ended up in tears and emotionally fragile. Every time I returned home, I felt more strongly about the need to continue going back.
PART THREE
A Kind of Balance
SUDAN, CONGO, ISTANBUL, AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN, FRANCE, LIBYA
CHAPTER 7
Women Are Casualties of Their Birthplace