Afghanistan Veteran Shocked After Being Photoshopped by ISIS

US Army vet who served in Iraq and Afghanistan shocked to discover he's in an ISIS propaganda video 
Daily Mail UK
By TOM WYKE FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 10:19 EST, 18 December 2015

One of the photos is an iconic image taken in 2006 in Afghanistan by photojournalist Richard Nickelsberg, showing two men with bandages wrapped around their heads.

Two wounded soldiers were being taken back to the nearest hospital following the ambush. Will Hammond features in the video (top right, holding a gun)

American army veteran Will Hammond shocked to see himself in ISIS video
Footage uses a 2006 photograph of Hammond from Afghanistan tour days
Mr Hammond said he was surprised by the quality of the video's graphics
He compared it to a National Guard commercial

An American army veteran was shocked to discover that he had unknowingly featured in an ISIS jihadi propaganda video.

Will Hammond, from Alberta, Canada, was told the staggering news by a friend and was shown the footage on social media.

The 35-year-old, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he was 'shocked' as 'it's not every day you find yourself in propaganda.'

Titled 'No Respice', the video was produced by one of ISIS's top media branches, al-Hayat Media Center. They produce many of the top high definition films with slow motion features and animations.
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Story Behind Desert Storm Famous Photo Continues

Strangers linked by iconic Desert Storm photo finally meet 24 years later
Buffalo News
By Tim Graham
News Sports
Reporter
May 30, 2015

Veteran whose face came to symbolize Desert Storm meets comrade’s widow 24 years after tragedy that forever binds them

The face of war: Sgt. Ken Kozakiewicz, left, wails with grief after learning that the soldier in the body bag is fellow crewman Pvt. Andy Alaniz, in this February 1991 file photo. The widely published photo came to define the Persian Gulf War for many.

UNIONTOWN, Pa. – Twenty-four slow, burning years have passed since Sgt. Ken Kozakiewicz got wrecked to his soul.

Raw from a battle that ended moments before, dazed from the two missiles that smoked his Bradley Fighting Vehicle and weary from traversing an ungodly expanse of Iraq desert, Kozakiewicz did what any man would.

He read the name on the dead soldier’s identification card, looked away from the bloody body bag and wailed.

Kozakiewicz’s helpless, primal howl became the signature image of Operation Desert Storm. The picture, taken by David Turnley, showed war’s wicked truth and is considered one of military history’s most provocative photos.

Kozakiewicz, his broken left hand in a sling, had been guided into a medical evacuation helicopter after the Jalibah Airfield rout Feb. 27, 1991. The battle was among the final objectives of a dominant campaign to expel Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein’s army from neighboring Kuwait.

Kozakiewicz and Cpl. Mike Tsangarakis were about to be whisked away. Then a body bag was loaded onto the helicopter floor. Kozakiewicz demanded the dead soldier’s name.

A medic reluctantly handed Kozakiewicz the ID for 20-year-old Pvt. Andy Alaniz. In the center of the photo, Tsangarakis lifted his head bandages to glimpse the sack at his feet.
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War photographer Jason Howe's battle with PTSD

Jason Howe's photograph of Private Stephen Bainbridge stepping on an IED in Afghanistan set in motion a traumatic chain of events for the photographer himself

A cropped version of Jason Howe's 2011 photograph for the Telegraph of Pte Stephen Bainbridge. It was the first image of a wounded soldier on a battlefield in 30 years  Photo: Jason P Howe

The Telegraph
Jessica Salter
November 8, 2014

After a few ‘tough months’, gradually his new life seemed to be helping him. He forged a simple structure to his day: feed the chickens, take the dogs for a walk, tend the vegetables in his garden. He avoided coffee and cigarettes, and stopped reading the news or watching films about war – triggers for his symptoms. The problems were still there, as were the nightmares and depression, but he said he had been managing it.

Despite Howe’s best efforts over the past two years, in a recent email he told me that he is currently suffering a relapse of PTSD. The main debilitating issue is depression. ‘I have a very dark view of the world where, whatever I do, it doesn’t change,’ he said. But it is compounded by problems concentrating and hyper-vigilance – he exhaustively imagines the worst outcomes of every situation.

^{After Howe’s traumatic experiences caused him to give up front-line photography, he retreated to a farmhouse in Andalusia, where he now leads a simple life, walking his dogs and tending his vegetables.} 

^{PHOTO: James Arthur Allen}

He also feels anger. And at times he feels abandoned by the media industry, but ‘then I feel I have nothing to complain about since it was my choice to go to war, and I have to deal with the consequences myself’. Because he has not been able to work, Howe is now facing eviction from his farmhouse. He is planning a road trip around Europe, photographing people who seek a simpler, more sustainable way to live than modern life offers.

He plans to trade website photography for campsites and meals.

‘I am a very positive person, a fighter and a survivor,’ he said at the end of his email. ‘But it is a hard battle and one that I do not always foresee there being the energy available to fight.’

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Vietnam Veteran "redefined gratitude" for Corpsman

Semper fi: Vietnam veteran salutes corpsman who saved his life
High Point Enterprise
Jimmy Tomlin
Aug. 02, 2014
ARCHDALE

For Welch, though he may not have realized it at the time, a new journey was just beginning. The day he was injured — Jan. 25, 1968 — redefined his life.

And that newspaper photo, which ran the next day, redefined his sense of gratitude.

One day in late January 1968, the High Point Enterprise published a somewhat grisly, front-page photograph of a wounded U.S. Marine, lying flat on his back at a first-aid station in South Vietnam.

The young soldier’s gritty face reflected the anguish he was in as a medical corpsman tended to his left ear, which had nearly been ripped from the Marine’s face by enemy rocket and mortar rounds.

“Shocked And Wounded,” the caption read, explaining that the corpsman was talking quietly to the injured Marine to calm him.

For most readers, it was just another grainy, black-and-white war photo — an Associated Press dispatch from a divisive conflict being staged some 9,000 miles from North Carolina.

For one High Point family, though, the photo hit close to home. The injured soldier, though not identified in the caption, was their son — Lance Cpl. William Michael “Mike” Welch.

LAURA GREENE | HPE
Marine Corps veteran Mike Welch, of Archdale, tracked down the corpsman who saved his life in Vietnam more than 45 years ago.

“Yeah, my dad saw it in the paper and recognized me, but he didn’t show it to my mother until about a week after I got wounded,” says Welch, now 65 and living in Archdale. “He was afraid my mom would flip out and have a heart attack or something.”

Joseph Grayson Welch tried desperately to find out what had happened to his son — and whether he was even still alive — all the while keeping the newspaper from his wife, Mildred, and hoping nobody else would recognize their son in the photo and call it to her attention.

One day, finally, a cab pulled into the Welches’ driveway on Brentwood Street — a universally understood sign that they were about to receive a telegram from the military about their son. To their great relief, Welch had not died, but the telegram reported he had sustained “fragmentation wounds to the left ear, neck, both hands, back and both buttocks, with an open fracture of the left arm.” Hostile mortar fire, the telegram said. His condition was listed as “serious,” his prognosis “guarded.”

Subsequent telegrams provided medical updates — and some measure of comfort — for Welch’s parents, who are now deceased.
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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.
click post title for the rest

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