Tim explained that all the men’s bodies had been removed before they arrived, but injured women and children were laid out for them to see.
I felt like a failure and sensed the limitations of my gender. Capturing civilian casualties of war was a fundamental angle of the story I hadn’t yet been able to illustrate. A good photographic essay, and a truly lasting historical work of documentation, would have images of the entirety of what happened in the Korengal, from the American soldiers to the Afghan villagers. Afghans dying was an enormous part of that reality, and I was just failing to witness it. I knew that had I been stronger—had I not been a woman with finite physical limitations and with a partner who was almost six months pregnant—I might have opted to go with First or Second Platoon and attempted to scale the vertical terrain with my gear alongside my male colleagues. A writer and I functioned as a team, and when I was with a partner who encouraged me to challenge myself beyond my natural capabilities, I often went along, and relied on him for occasional support. But when I was coupled with someone whose physical condition I was worried about, I didn’t feel empowered to take on the challenge, even though Elizabeth would never ask me to compromise my work on her account. We went into the embed as a team, and I felt we needed to stick together, even if it meant I couldn’t make the dramatic images that Tim and Balazs had made.
Tim and Balazs were careful not to rub it in. Unlike most male photographers who covered conflict, they were thoughtful and sensitive, not arrogant or brash. Balazs and I had met previously in Afghanistan, but Tim and I met for the first time there in the Korengal. Several times over the course of the almost two-month embed, in between patrols and shooting scenes on the base, we found ourselves immersed in some philosophical conversation about the effectiveness of photojournalism, or our similar desires to broaden our work beyond still photography. As still photographers, we covered the same scenes over and over again, and it was a challenge to repeatedly engage the viewer. Balazs shot powerful, painterly images, mostly in black-and-white. Tim had been innovative with mediums and subject matter, often experimenting with slower, more cumbersome medium-format cameras in war zones or combining still images with sound or working in a totally different medium, like video. I had recently seen a series of his simple, poignant portraits from Liberia and admired his ability to step back from the chaos and find beauty in simpler things. Unlike breaking-news photographers, who simply reacted to the action in front of them, he was able to capture original, intimate stories when nothing was happening at all. With every conversation, we learned how much we had in common, especially in terms of our personal desire to be thinking photographers rather than reactive ones. My impulse to write Tim off as just another thrill-chasing war photographer was proved wrong.
That night we were airlifted to the Abas Ghar ridgeline—another cold, lonely, pine-filled stretch of land in the mountains. We trekked uphill in search of a place for Kearney and the overwatch team to set up. In the few months that we were with Battle Company, we had grown accustomed to seeing the world through night-vision goggles and could navigate the awkward depth of field and jagged rocks and shrubs as seen through the goggles’ green haze. The walk up the mountain seemed interminable, but we were stronger and more agile than when we first arrived. Everyone was so exhausted, underrested, and stressed at this point that each soldier worried primarily for himself.
Elizabeth was still going strong, and I helped her carry some of her gear when she wasn’t too proud to let me. No one uttered a word as we trudged along—we always assumed the enemy could be lurking nearby. The silence was broken by the whining sobs of a private first class. He was weak, pale, and pudgy when he arrived and was continually hazed and insulted by fellow troops who had long endured the miserable conditions and rigorous patrols in the Korengal. He must have been carrying a hundred pounds’ worth of ammunition rounds. Something in him snapped. Through the fuzz of my goggles I could see his large black silhouette fall out of the patrol line and drop to his knees. He began weeping aloud.
“I can’t do it anymore. I can’t walk anymore. I give up.”
I pitied him, but in the darkness I was secretly relieved it wasn’t us—the girls—who’d broken down first.