Everyone asked us the inevitable question and my answer was yes. I knew I would cover another war. The hardest part about what happened to us in Libya was what we had put our loved ones through, but that had long been the excruciating price of the profession—my loved ones suffered, and I suffered when they suffered. Journalism is a selfish profession. But I still believed in the power of its purpose, and hoped my family did, too.
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A MONTH LATER I met with three editors from Aperture Books in New York City. Prints of my work had been laid out on their conference table. We discussed the possibility of collaborating on a coffee-table book, something I had always dreamed of doing with my photographs but had never felt ready for. We were flipping through prints from Darfur, Iraq, and the Korengal Valley when I found myself distracted by the red light flashing on my BlackBerry. I did what I never did during a meeting: picked up my phone.
The top e-mail on my phone was forwarded from Major Dan Kearney, who had led Battle Company and Tim Hetherington, Balazs Gardi, Elizabeth Rubin, and me through the Korengal in 2007. The subject line read:
Tim Hetherington killed in Libya.
My heart stopped. I was sure I was reading wrong. I looked at the body of the e-mail.
Tim was killed in Libya. Please keep him in your prayers. I know the BATTLE Family will come together to support.
He was a brother I miss dearly.
MAJ Kearney
How could Tim have survived more than a year in the Korengal Valley, arguably the most dangerous place on earth, only to be killed in Libya? I did not want to believe the e-mail. As usual, I needed to say the words out loud to believe them. Tears rolled down my cheeks.
“Tim Hetherington was just killed in Libya.”
Everyone gasped.
I scrolled down over more e-mails, trying to get some sort of explanation as to how this could have happened. Another e-mail had this heading:
Chris Hondros killed in Libya.
It couldn’t be possible. Suddenly all the anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and sadness I had escaped after being released from Libya washed over me, flooding me with emotion. I fell apart in the austere conference room. The three people I was meeting with at Aperture excused themselves, telling me to stay in the room as long as I needed to.
It was not as though I hadn’t experienced the loss of friends or colleagues before: Marla Ruzicka was killed by a car bomb in Baghdad in 2005; Solid Khalid was gunned down on his way to the New York Times bureau in Baghdad in 2007; Times photographer and mentor Jo?o Silva stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan in October 2010, losing both his legs and suffering debilitating internal injuries; Raza had died shortly after we lay on adjacent concrete slabs in a roadside clinic in Pakistan after our car accident; and of course Mohammed, our young driver, had died in Libya, too. But given all the death we had witnessed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Darfur, Congo, Lebanon, Israel, and during the Arab Spring, death and injury had rarely come to the foreign journalist community—until now. Something in me snapped.
Tim and Chris were friends of mine. They weren’t close friends in the typical sense of the word, but nothing in any of our lives was typical. We shared friendships born of long, intimate talks in lonely, morbid places and epic, intoxicated dinners back in the real world. Their sudden deaths hit me profoundly, in a way that my own experience in Libya failed to affect me. For the first time I felt the weight of the years of accumulated trauma. Perhaps it was because I realized how precarious life was and how arbitrary death was. Those e-mails could have easily been about me, Tyler, Anthony, or Steve. There were scores of inexperienced young photographers running around the front lines of Libya, but it was Tim and Chris, two of the most experienced photojournalists in the world, who met their fate in Misurata, in a mortar attack. It didn’t make sense. Did our lives depend on statistical probability? Was it that the longer we covered war, the more close calls we sustained, increasing the chances that something would go wrong? Our lives were a game of odds. I sat paralyzed in the Aperture conference room. I needed to collect myself and walk home, but I couldn’t do it. I messaged Paul and asked him to meet me. I needed him to come pick me up at Aperture. I couldn’t find my way home alone.