There was a question back in New York about how Khalid had sustained his injuries. My captions for the images of Khalid were inconsistent with what Captain Kearney, Elizabeth, and I believed to be the truth—that Khalid was most likely injured by NATO bombs the night before we flew into the Korengal Valley. But almost five months before, when I was downloading my pictures in a bunker at the KOP, I naively entered into the file information of the digital image a rough summary from one of the medics—“ . . . medics with the 173rd treat local afghans who claim they were injured by american bombs, though their wounds were NOT consistent with the timing of us attacks ion villages near their homes . . .”—intending to flesh out the information with a more factual account of the events later. I felt that the medic’s remarks were an obvious attempt to protect the U.S. military from a journalist’s scrutiny of civilian casualties from American bombings, but that, as a journalist, I needed to include his opinion. By the time I filed the images from September and October in the Korengal, we had been through weeks of intense experiences, including Operation Rock Avalanche, and I mistakenly submitted photos without updating the captions, instilling doubt in the mind of the editor in chief. The editors at the magazine proceeded to fact-check the issue with one of the public affairs officers with the 173rd Airborne, who very predictably said that the military couldn’t verify 100 percent that Khalid had been wounded in a NATO bombing. The magazine was questioning whether to even run the photo at all.
After months in the Korengal, the image of Khalid was one of the few instances of a civilian injury caused by a NATO bombing that I witnessed with my own eyes. There was no question that these kinds of injuries were happening all around us, but we weren’t able to access the villages or the victims because of security or timing. I missed the opportunity that day on the side of the mountain overlooking Yaka China, and I felt unconditionally that the image of Khalid’s innocent, blood-spattered face both aesthetically and narratively was crucial to our story.
But after all that we had endured in the Korengal, our testimony did not seem to matter. Elizabeth and I had watched the events unfold on the screens in the Tactical Operations Command center, had witnessed the insurgents shooting mortars at troops on the ground, had watched the United States drop five-hundred-pound bombs on the compounds, and had been present the next morning when the boy and his family came to the Korengal Outpost for medical treatment. Most of us who had been in the medical tent and at the base that morning had assumed that Khalid was injured in the bombing the night before. Captain Kearney even expressed this to the editor in chief on our behalf, and the debate went on for days. But because of my incomplete caption, the editor trusted the U.S. military public affairs officer—whose main responsibility was to polish the image of the U.S. military to the greater public—over us.
To make matters worse, from the time we set off to document the story in the Korengal to the final two weeks of the story’s closing, the angle of Elizabeth’s article shifted from the original idea of civilian casualties in war, to Operation Rock Avalanche, to a profile of Captain Kearney. In the eyes of the editor in chief, the image of Khalid as an illustration of civilian casualties was no longer relevant. And he was so resolute that the picture would be too controversial without tangible evidence of the cause of the boy’s injury that he decided to strike the image from the story altogether. He then declared he would refuse to run a slide show of images to accompany the piece online. In a time when the space allotted to photographs in magazines was shrinking, a slide show was the consolation prize; images that didn’t fit into the print edition were at least viewed by the public online. I was desperate. I spent almost two months traipsing around the mountains of one of the world’s most dangerous places, and as the piece went to press, my reporting was being questioned, some of my strongest images were being removed from the layout, and the editor in chief decided uncharacteristically that he would not run a slide show. From my perspective, it seemed that he was fed up with our story. Perhaps the reason was the length of time it had taken Elizabeth to write it, or that Vanity Fair had recently published a multipage piece focusing on the Korengal Valley, or simply that we were challenging his editorial judgment while he was being bombarded with doubt by the military public affairs office.
Elizabeth helped plead my case: She tried to persuade him to at least permit a slide show of my images to accompany her story. Almost until she gave birth, she helped compose e-mails to him, pleading with the editor to honor our reporting.