Iraq through the eyes of a photographer

I don't give a damn if I upset someone's sensitivity with these pictures. I've seen worse but I don't post them. It's time we took the pretty little pictures out of our own brain of happy, smiling troops coming home to their families. It's time we all opened our eyes whenever we get a glimpse of what they see in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam even still today as it all comes back. More come home wounded than you will ever know because you can't see the wound unless you look very hard and they don't want to talk about it. It's damn near impossible to get them to even try to find help with the demons they hitching a ride back to the states. Worse is that most of them are sent right back into the arms of hell already wounded.

Specialist Lucas Yaminishi holds up the bloody shoe of the victim of a suicide bombing in Mosul, Iraq. Nine people were killed and over twenty wounded in the bombing, one of the first of its kind in Mosul.

Specialist Jeff Reffner of Altoona, PA is turned on his side by doctors checking for lacerations on his back. Reffner was severely wounded when an IED impacted next to his humvee in Baghdad. Although in extreme pain, Reffner was more concerned about his friend Jeff Forshee who was also wounded in the blast. Reffner was evacuated back to the U.S. and is still recovering from his wounds, while Forshee suffered lighter wounds and was returned to his patrol base to see out the final six months of his deployment.

War Photographer Revealed
Peter van Agtmael talks about what drives him to the most dangerous assignments on earth: the hope that pictures can play a role in improving the future.
By Joerg Colberg
December 10, 2007
In our ongoing series recognizing today's top professional photographers, Joerg Colberg speaks with Peter van Agtmael, a 26-year-old graduate of Yale University who has spent the majority of his young career in hotspots like Iraq and Afghanistan. Van Agtmael was named one of "25 under 25 - Up and Coming American Photographers" by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in 2006 and won a World Press Photo award in 2007 for General News Stories.

Joerg Colberg: Over the past few years, you spent time both in Afghanistan and in Iraq as a photojournalist. The risk of getting killed in these countries seems awfully high. How did you decide to become a photojournalist covering war?

Peter van Agtmael: I was interested in war from a very young age. I loved the shapes of fighter planes and the confidence and strength projected by uniforms. For a time I wanted to be a soldier. But I was also a sensitive child, and had no real conception of what war meant. Several events changed me. The first Gulf War ended when I was ten. I had rigorously followed the buildup to war, spewing statistics to anyone who would listen and laminating pictures of U.S. troops I had cut from The New York Times, and which I carried in my pockets everywhere I went. Sometime after the war, I was in the local library and came across a photo retrospective of the conflict. Inside were the obvious jingoistic icons but there were also images of the road of death leading back to Iraq, the Kenneth Jarecke picture of a horrible burned Iraqi soldier, the David Turnley picture of a wounded soldier weeping next to a body bag containing his buddy. Those pictures shocked me. Until that point my conception of death was the exaggerated, bloodless, noble kind from old war movies.
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Until we figure out what we are sending them into, what kind of wounds they come with, we will never come close to taking care of them. Wars will never end. Mankind is too unkind for that to happen. Violence will never end. Trauma will keep wounding them and there is nothing we can do to prevent it short of world wide peace, prosperity, an end to hunger, an end to corruption and greed, hatred and judgment. Until we end the causes of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, we better figure out how to deal with it. If we do not open our eyes, we will never understand it.

I don't know about you, but after 25 years of hearing their stories, reading the accounts of lives lost, families destroyed, suicides because of hopelessness, homeless veterans walking our streets and the willingness of so many of these magnificent characters still ready to serve despite all we put them through, I'm tired of them being discarded, dismissed and abused. We torture them when they come home wounded. You didn't think of it that way did you? What else would you call it when they get wounded doing what they were sent to do as part of their jobs and then finding out they cannot support themselves because of all of it. They cannot make a living while they are battling the ghosts of combat, unable to think straight or even get one nights sleep without nightmares, or spend a single peaceful day without a flashback or even hearing one fool after another telling them to "get over it" while they suffering.

You would think in this "brotherhood" of the armed forces, there would be a lot more brotherhood and no combat veteran would be left behind to suffer at the hands of this enemy, but it happens all the time. They come home and no one cares. They come home wounded and no one takes care of them when time is the enemy as well. For those who come home without a single scratch and a seemingly fine, they should be the first ones in line to fight for their wounded brothers. After all, the veterans with PTSD cannot fight for themselves anymore. They lost that ability a long time ago. They lost the brain functions that allowed them to think clearly and they lost whatever it was that made them courageous enough to serve by the side of the others. They didn't become cowards, as they were accused of being when they were shot for being mentally wounded, but they were no longer able to find the ability to live through the horrors their eyes had to see.

Take a good look at the pictures and then Google Iraq images if you really want to know what they see, what they have to go through and what they have to live with and then maybe, just maybe you can begin to understand what it is like when they come home wounded.

I've had complaints about my videos being "hard to watch" as if that should come close to what they have to go through. I avoid horrific images as much as possible and use the milder ones I've come across. It's not for the casual observer's sensitivity I'm trying to protect but for the sake of the wounded, so that they will be able to watch the videos with just enough to help them understand what the hell happened to them that made them the way they are.

It's time the rest of you understood it as well. If not, then we better get out of the business of waging any wars at all, locking up anyone who even thinks of committing a crime, take all the police, firemen and emergency responders off the streets, stop all storms and pray to God no one ever thinks of attacking us again. We can't take care of anyone we depend on when they need us. For the men and women we send into combat, they risk their lives to serve this country and it's about time we figured out they should not have to give up living just because they came home wounded by PTSD.

Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.namguardianangel.blogspot.com/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington