Operation Rock Avalanche. The Korengal Valley, October 18–23, 2007.
Other members of the scout team, Sergeant John Clinard and Specialist Franklin Eckrode, emerged carrying Rougle’s body in a body bag. I couldn’t believe Rougle—so vibrant and alive just an hour before—was now dead, in a thick, black, rubbery bag, being carried to the first of so many stops along the way home to his final resting place. Clinard and Eckrode were openly crying as they walked toward me, the limp body dangling between them. A bunch of young Americans who should have been out drinking beers at bars back home and living up their early twenties were instead carrying the lifeless body of their dearest friend through the lonely mountains of Afghanistan—a place that no one would care about twenty years from now. I wondered what we were doing there when so many others had failed to occupy Afghanistan in the past. Were we trying to influence and change a culture that was hundreds of years old? We were in what seemed like the most desolate place on earth, with no people around, neither Afghans nor Americans, and I wondered why we were there, fighting in a forest in the name of democracy. We were giving our lives for a policy that wasn’t working—something completely intangible.
I raised my camera in a gesture to ask permission to photograph. I felt horrible asking, but we had been with them for two months, and I knew it was important to document Rougle’s death. They all said yes as they knelt down momentarily and paused for a rest. What would it feel like to carry your best friend in a bag? Did they question the war the way I did? The four scouts who carried Rougle’s body each bowed their heads and cried. I photographed through my own tears, sitting nearby. The hum of the second medical evacuation helicopter approached to collect “Wildcat.”
The minute Rougle’s body flew away from the Abas Ghar ridgeline, I knew I had to get out of there. I was spooked, convinced we were about to get ambushed again and not confident I would survive. Every time I walked over toward the team translating the Taliban intercepts on the radio, my sense of urgency grew. Kearney and the commanders of the 173rd Airborne back at Camp Blessing retaliated for Rougle’s death with a series of two-thousand-pound bombs on the villages surrounding our position. Everyone was ready to kill, to avenge Rougle’s death and Rice’s and Vandenberge’s injuries. It was only going to get bloodier.
“Kearney? Is there any way to get me out of here?” I cringed as I asked him to also deal with me: a freaked-out girl who was pleading to be extracted from the middle of a hostile ridgeline, where every Black Hawk flight in risked getting shot down by an insurgent on the mountain.
“I’ll see what I can do, Addario,” Kearney said. “There isn’t much air willing to come in here. It’s hot.”
That night I lay awake, my heart pounding, my eyes wide open through the night as I listened for any sound of an ambush. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was undeterred. She was determined to stay until the end of the mission in order to see the story through, to see the soldiers arrive back at the KOP safely. She was not interested in flying out with me on any helicopter.
As a photographer in a war zone, I didn’t have a weapon. I needed to get as close as I could to the action in order to get the photographs, but I also needed to stay alive. And the only thing that had kept me alive during Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Congo, and Darfur was my inner voice that told me when I had reached my personal limit of fear. It told me when I needed to pull back to preserve my sanity, and possibly my life. Elizabeth and I as a team were often willing to take the same risks, and this symbiotic relationship was a fundamental part of a successful partnership in war zones. But I was definitely the conservative one, perhaps because of her many years of experience or perhaps because she was braver. Her fearlessness, her commitment to the story, and her boundless energy to take notes every waking second were only some of the things that made her such an incredible journalist. I couldn’t bear to listen to the whisperer saying they were going to attack again.