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THE WEEK OF April 20, 2011, was a reckoning. Dozens of photographers, journalists, and editors came together in a way I had never witnessed before, flying in from all corners of the globe to grieve collectively. But before I could confront the overhwhelming sadness, I needed strength. I boarded an Amtrak train for Washington, DC, and took a taxi to Walter Reade Army Medical Center, where I found my friend the photographer Jo?o Silva among dozens of other wounded and maimed veterans of war. I hadn’t had a chance to visit him since a land mine severed his legs from his body and forced him into months of serial surgeries, but I knew that I craved his inner strength. Even after his injury, after one of his closest colleagues and friends had taken his own life and after another had been killed beside him, Jo?o remained resolved to cover war. His unfaltering belief in what we dedicated our lives to and his sage generosity of spirit and experience—despite the fact that he had lost half his body to war—rivaled the fortitude of anyone I knew. I simply needed to be with him to face reality head-on, to sit beside him in the very place that epitomized the devastation of war. I needed to hear how he kept going.
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THAT SAME EVENING, I took the train to New York and reunited with Elizabeth and many other colleagues from throughout my travels. Groups of us met up, night after night, and traded stories about Tim and Chris, often clenched in long embraces, expressing years of pent-up sorrow from, for many of us, exactly a decade of covering war. Along with our editors, who functioned as adopted parents, we had formed an iron bond, inexplicable to those outside our circle. The colleagues I had spent the decade with—sharing meals of stewed lamb with mounds of rice woven with sweet raisins and grated carrots in Afghanistan, or stale bread in cities overrun by insurgents—had become an essential part of who I was; they were family, and the only people with whom I found consolation at such a desperate emotional time.
One night that week a group of us close friends got together for dinner on New York’s Lower East Side: the photographer Samantha Appleton; Marion Durand, a photo editor at Newsweek and the wife of the Magnum photographer Chris Anderson, who’d stopped covering war after the birth of their son; the brilliant photo editor Jamie Wellford; Tyler and his girlfriend, Nicki; and me. Samantha, Marion, and I arrived first and ordered a bottle of wine. Tyler, Nicki, and Jamie showed up shortly thereafter, their faces blotchy and swollen. No one seemed to be able to stop crying.
I was shocked by Tyler’s appearance. I saw in his face the same devastation I was experiencing: These deaths broke him in a way that Libya hadn’t. Hondros was one of Tyler’s oldest friends. He had ushered Tyler into the world of photojournalism when they were young men fresh out of college, living in Ohio and working for the Troy Daily News. Their careers developed in tandem as they covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Libya. They’d amassed accolades together, grew into accomplished men together. We all sat and looked at one another and cried openly, a display of emotion that was uncharacteristic of our profession. The bravado was gone.
Two days later we went to Chris’s funeral in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, at the church where he was supposed to have married that summer. Instead of walking down the aisle with his beautiful Christina, he was carried down the aisle in a casket, his mother and his bride-to-be walking a few steps behind. Bach, Beethoven, and Mahler echoed off the cathedral walls. The simple image of one of us in a wooden box, after leading such a full life, was too much to bear. The finality was inescapable. Friends, colleagues, relatives, and people who never personally knew Hondros squeezed inside and spilled out onto the sidewalk. During the eulogies I stood with Michael Robinson Chavez, a photographer I had met in Iraq and who had become a dear friend over the years, and David Guttenfelder, another photographer and friend. We were wrecked.
Paul stayed with me in New York that week. His bosses at Reuters allowed him to take time off to console me after Libya. And I finally felt that it was the right moment to step back from all the drama and death of the past decade and make love, without worrying about the consequences.
CHAPTER 13