It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (28 page)

But the hostile chatter and the activity continued in the house across the valley, like a little bees’ nest. Before dawn a B-1 bomber swooped in and dropped two two-thousand-pound bombs on Yaka China. I lay on my back, listening to the guttural sounds of combat, the bombs, the smashing and crackling, the roar of a jet engine. I was so frustrated by my inability to work, my inability to photograph in the blackness of night, I decided to go back to sleep.

By daybreak Lieutenant Piosa, who was in charge of Second Platoon, radioed from the village that there were civilian casualties. And there I was, stuck with the overwatch team clear across an impassible valley, unable to document the human cost of war. I was there to bear witness but not witnessing anything at all. I envisioned my colleagues Tim and Balazs documenting the bodies of the civilians, the destruction of the houses, the terrified women and children, while I sat on the side of a mountain freezing my ass off, photographing the overwatch team and their ancient forest-green equipment.

I begged Kearney to get me across the valley.
Couldn’t we just patrol across?
I was so physically strong from weeks of hoisting thirty, forty, fifty pounds on my back and walking up and down mountains for hours a day that I was sure I could endure anything but the prospect of missing
the
photo. Kearney refused: It was completely hostile territory, and there was a vertical drop we couldn’t pass. I was twitching with anxiety. The day inched on, and the Taliban intercepts continued: They were watching us, they were getting closer to our positions, and they were going to spray us with machine-gun fire from across the valley.

Kearney, a new father, was gutted by the news of civilian deaths and trying to figure out what to do next. In his normal area of operation, he met regularly with the village elders and worked hard to gain their trust and explain their mission. Yaka China was an openly hostile village that his men had never before entered, and now he had to contend with having killed and injured women and children the night before. I couldn’t imagine how he handled the weight of these decisions, how he was responsible for both the lives of his troops and Afghan civilians, at the tender age of twenty-six. Aware that Elizabeth had years of experience in Afghanistan and a solid understanding of the culture, he turned to her for advice. Elizabeth talked through options with Dan and recommended that they fly into the very village they had bombed the night before and explain to the village elders why they attacked. Captain Kearney and Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund decided to heed Elizabeth’s advice. The plan was to explain to the Afghans why they had attacked and to apologize for the casualties. They were going to work on winning the hearts-and-minds-of-the-Afghans part of the war.

Our helicopter landed on the dung roof of a Yaka China home, spraying villagers’ hay and fodder and crops around like a tornado. Everyone gathered in a residential courtyard surrounded by homemade clay walls—Afghan men with craggy faces, Lieutenant Piosa, and his men from Second Platoon. I linked up with Tim and Balazs, who looked as if they had been through hell and back but were happy with their work.

“How was yesterday?” I asked.

“It was pretty bad.” Balazs was a man of few words.

Tim explained that all the men’s bodies had been removed before they arrived, but injured women and children were laid out for them to see.

I felt like a failure and sensed the limitations of my gender. Capturing civilian casualties of war was a fundamental angle of the story I hadn’t yet been able to illustrate. A good photographic essay, and a truly lasting historical work of documentation, would have images of the entirety of what happened in the Korengal, from the American soldiers to the Afghan villagers. Afghans dying was an enormous part of that reality, and I was just failing to witness it. I knew that had I been stronger—had I not been a woman with finite physical limitations and with a partner who was almost six months pregnant—I might have opted to go with First or Second Platoon and attempted to scale the vertical terrain with my gear alongside my male colleagues. A writer and I functioned as a team, and when I was with a partner who encouraged me to challenge myself beyond my natural capabilities, I often went along, and relied on him for occasional support. But when I was coupled with someone whose physical condition I was worried about, I didn’t feel empowered to take on the challenge, even though Elizabeth would never ask me to compromise my work on her account. We went into the embed as a team, and I felt we needed to stick together, even if it meant I couldn’t make the dramatic images that Tim and Balazs had made.

Tim and Balazs were careful not to rub it in. Unlike most male photographers who covered conflict, they were thoughtful and sensitive, not arrogant or brash. Balazs and I had met previously in Afghanistan, but Tim and I met for the first time there in the Korengal. Several times over the course of the almost two-month embed, in between patrols and shooting scenes on the base, we found ourselves immersed in some philosophical conversation about the effectiveness of photojournalism, or our similar desires to broaden our work beyond still photography. As still photographers, we covered the same scenes over and over again, and it was a challenge to repeatedly engage the viewer. Balazs shot powerful, painterly images, mostly in black-and-white. Tim had been innovative with mediums and subject matter, often experimenting with slower, more cumbersome medium-format cameras in war zones or combining still images with sound or working in a totally different medium, like video. I had recently seen a series of his simple, poignant portraits from Liberia and admired his ability to step back from the chaos and find beauty in simpler things. Unlike breaking-news photographers, who simply reacted to the action in front of them, he was able to capture original, intimate stories when nothing was happening at all. With every conversation, we learned how much we had in common, especially in terms of our personal desire to be thinking photographers rather than reactive ones. My impulse to write Tim off as just another thrill-chasing war photographer was proved wrong.

That night we were airlifted to the Abas Ghar ridgeline—another cold, lonely, pine-filled stretch of land in the mountains. We trekked uphill in search of a place for Kearney and the overwatch team to set up. In the few months that we were with Battle Company, we had grown accustomed to seeing the world through night-vision goggles and could navigate the awkward depth of field and jagged rocks and shrubs as seen through the goggles’ green haze. The walk up the mountain seemed interminable, but we were stronger and more agile than when we first arrived. Everyone was so exhausted, underrested, and stressed at this point that each soldier worried primarily for himself.

Elizabeth was still going strong, and I helped her carry some of her gear when she wasn’t too proud to let me. No one uttered a word as we trudged along—we always assumed the enemy could be lurking nearby. The silence was broken by the whining sobs of a private first class. He was weak, pale, and pudgy when he arrived and was continually hazed and insulted by fellow troops who had long endured the miserable conditions and rigorous patrols in the Korengal. He must have been carrying a hundred pounds’ worth of ammunition rounds. Something in him snapped. Through the fuzz of my goggles I could see his large black silhouette fall out of the patrol line and drop to his knees. He began weeping aloud.

“I can’t do it anymore. I can’t walk anymore. I give up.”

I pitied him, but in the darkness I was secretly relieved it wasn’t us—the
girls
—who’d broken down first.

The soldiers surrounded the soldier and kicked him, screaming at him for his weakness. They dragged him back to his feet. I thought it was pretty stupid to jeopardize our safety by whimpering loud enough for the Taliban to hear, but then the soldiers started reprimanding him, further jeopardizing our safety. He continued sobbing, saying he couldn’t go on, and the other soldiers continued pushing him to move forward. The Taliban would have gotten a laugh out of that scene.

The terrain felt more navigable than in Yaka China, and the distance between where we were and Second Platoon was an easy thirty minutes away. On a crisp, sunny day Captain Kearney sent us on a patrol down to meet frontline soldiers, and we were relieved to finally be with them. The platoon was spread out, relaxing after several strenuous days, trading Skittles and M&M’s. The communication devices whirred with Taliban voices, including one the soldiers nicknamed “the whisperer,” who repeated in a hushed voice that “he was getting closer” and that “he saw hair,” which we assumed was either Elizabeth or I. We knew it was only a matter of time before the Taliban attacked.

The ridgeline where the soldiers had gathered ran along a steep mountain face at roughly a seventy-five-degree angle. The angle made it almost impossible to find a place to pee, which I had been holding off on doing all morning. I took off my helmet, placed my cameras next to Elizabeth, and climbed up the mountain on all fours. About forty feet up, a monstrous tree had fallen among the sinewy pines, creating the perfect place to go to the bathroom. I jumped over the log, and before I’d even unbuttoned my pants I heard the familiar snap of AK-47 rounds—the gun of choice for the Taliban.

I dropped to the ground and lay flat behind the cover of the log. I was straight up above the troops along the ridgeline, out of their sight and all alone. I tried to dig myself as deep as possible into the ground—to get as much cover from all sides. Bullets
whooshed
past, over the cover of the tree, from several different directions. In the midst of an ambush it was always nearly impossible for me to tell what direction the bullets were coming from, or which deductions I made stemmed from reason and which from fear. Bullets snapped all around my head, that miserable sound of them slicing through the air:
Bizoom, bizzzzoooom, bizoom . . .
I could tell that the Taliban was shooting from nearby.

I felt the rise of panic from the pit of my stomach into my chest: What if the whisperer came from over the top of the mountain and stumbled upon me first? Would he take me prisoner? I was alone, and as far as I knew, none of the soldiers below had any idea that I had run off to pee. I started saying my Hail Marys in an attempt to redeem myself as a good Catholic. I pleaded with God to keep me safe, making all sorts of promises I knew I would never keep.

Or what if my fellow Americans shot up at me in a friendly fire incident? They could have easily started shooting in my direction if the Taliban were behind me. I continued praying. I knew I had to get down to the ridgeline, where Elizabeth, Tim, Balazs, and the Second Platoon were taking cover.

“Lieutenant Piosa!” I screamed. The rules of an embed are that journalists obey the commanding officer or whoever is assigned to track us; if all hell is breaking loose, however, we are no one’s responsibility.

“Elizabeth!!” I screamed thinly into the bullet-ridden air. I couldn’t even hear my own voice. I burrowed myself in the space behind the log, knowing I had to muster the courage to reach the others. Agonizing minutes passed until there was a brief lull in the shooting. I jumped over the log and lay prostrate on the ground, stretching my arms above my head like an Olympic diver, and rolled all the way down the mountain to where the others were. I first reached Sergeant Tanner Stichter, who was standing beside another soldier.

“
Get behind cover!
” Stichter screamed as bullets continued all around me. “
Find a tree!
”

“I need my cameras! And my helmet . . .”

I spotted Elizabeth, crouched behind several other soldiers in the forest below, hiding behind the baby pines, each with trunk diameters of no more than six to eight inches. The Taliban, ever professional fighters and masters of their terrain, were ambushing us from three sides. I cowered behind Elizabeth, once again forgetting to photograph, and looked around to get my bearings. To my right and a few feet away, Tim was filming the scene: He was perched up against a slender pine, holding his video camera steady, a picture of calm amid the panic.

Then a terrified voice came over the radio: “Man down! 2-4 is hit!”

Everyone had a call sign, and Sergeant Kevin Rice was 2-4. Piosa gave steady directives over the radio, trying to get a sense of the situation unfolding.

The panicked voice came over the radio again: “Wildcat has been hit!”

Piosa made his way forward. Elizabeth, Balazs, Tim, and I, the medic, and a few other soldiers followed behind. The sustained fire had abated.

We came upon Specialist Carl Vandenberge, who had been shot in the arm. His chest and thighs were covered in blood. As he lay in the brush semiconscious, Sergeant Stichter stood over him, pouring a bag of fluid into his mouth while warming Vandenberge’s body with an instant chemical heating pack to try to prevent him from going into shock. I stopped. I sat down next to them, surrounded by a blanket of vast forest and tall pines. The others continued pushing forward.

“Hey . . . sorry . . . ,” I said, my voice hushed in case the Taliban still lingered nearby. Stichter looked over at me briefly and continued tending to Vandenberge, who was on his back in the brush.

“Do you mind if I photograph?”

“Yeah, no problem,” Stichter answered for both of them. He was calm, focused, as if a battle hadn’t just taken place.

“You’re gonna be fine.” Stichter was talking to Vandenberge, who had lost massive amounts of blood through the artery in his arm. “Tell me about the car you’re going to buy when you get home. What color is the car?”

“Am I gonna make it?” Vandenberge asked. “Am I going to live?”

Stichter was standing over Vandenberge, straddling him, emptying the final drops of the IV envelope into his buddy’s mouth.

“What color is the interior of your car?” Stichter asked.

I wondered if Vandenberge’s last thoughts were going to be on the color of the interior of the new car he was going to buy back in the States. I sat with them in silence, photographing, relieved to be in the illusion of a safe place, away from the hysteria. I didn’t want to get up.