It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (30 page)

 • • • 

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME
to Istanbul, Paul’s lifelong mentor, Peter, was in town visiting with his wife. Usually when I arrived home from an assignment, I was able to switch from the life of drinking electrolyte-filled water in a refugee camp to sipping pinot noir in our apartment with a Bosporus view. They came over before dinner. I was excited to meet someone who had shaped Paul’s life, but much to my surprise, I was struggling to speak.

My head was fixated on the Abas Ghar ridge, the Korengal Outpost, the villages of Aliabad and Donga, Camp Vegas, Rougle laughing, Rougle in a body bag.

“Lynsey is a really famous war photographer!” Paul exclaimed proudly. Hearing his description of me made me wince slightly. I wasn’t sure when I had become a war photographer.

“Shut up, baby,” I joked. “I am not famous, and I am not a war photographer.”

“So tell me about your last assignment,” Peter prodded.

“I was in the Korengal Valley with the 173rd Airborne, living at one of their remote bases on and off for a few months.”

“Really? Was it dangerous? Have you ever almost died?”

It was a question I had received often since I started covering war. Everyone wanted to reduce my entire career down to the one or two moments when I might have lost my life.

“Yeah. Um. I guess. It was really intense. We were getting shot at almost every day and then we went on this big mission, where we got ambushed by the Taliban.”

And suddenly I felt as if words were completely inadequate to describe what we had just endured. How could I describe the disconnect between the soldier’s mission in Afghanistan and the Afghan’s desire to be left alone? How could I describe the terror I felt when I was crouching behind the tipped-over log, with bullets skimming the top of my head; the sadness of seeing Rougle’s body in a bag, of seeing these strapping American boys in their twenties reduced to tears and horror after being overrun by an enemy they never saw? How could I describe that feeling of freedom and exhilaration I had when I was living in the dirt in a place like Camp Vegas, where life’s utter necessities, like water, food, sleep, and staying alive, were all that mattered? How could I describe how I was still trembling from the trauma of the ambush, and still regretting flying out ahead of Elizabeth, and chastising myself for being an inadequate journalist? How could I describe how important I thought it was to be there, with the troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq, to document my generation’s War on Terror without sounding lofty and self-important?

“It was great!” I said. “Yeah, we lived on the side of a mountain and got ambushed at the end.”

I could feel my chest tightening and my body getting hot. It was an unfamiliar feeling, being overcome with emotion in the middle of drinks with friends.

“Please excuse me for a second,” I said. “I have to go to the restroom.”

I walked back to our bedroom in the rear of the apartment, closed the door behind me, and collapsed into tears. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Elizabeth’s number.

“Elizabeth?” I said, my voice wavering.

“I can’t stop crying,” she said.

“Me neither. Oh, God. And Paul has company here. I am locked in the bathroom and can’t stop crying.”

“You will be OK. You will be OK.”

We stayed on the phone until I stopped crying, and eventually I went back to my guests, finished my glass of wine, and left for dinner along the Bosporus.

 • • • 

T
HREE MONTHS LATER
I was in Khartoum, Sudan, preparing to go into Darfur, when Kathy Ryan, the director of photography at the
New York Times Magazine
, e-mailed to tell me that Elizabeth had finally submitted her story from the Korengal Valley; the piece would close in the next two weeks. Elizabeth was nine months pregnant. The editors were polishing her piece; the fact-checkers were checking the facts. My picture of Khalid, the boy with shrapnel wounds smattering his face, was being considered as a cover. It was a stark, powerful image that spoke to the ambiguity of war and the inevitability of civilian casualties.

Five days before the piece went to press, I got a frantic call from a deputy photo editor at the magazine, asking me to go through my notebooks from the Korengal and produce every shred of evidence I could about Khalid.

There was a question back in New York about how Khalid had sustained his injuries. My captions for the images of Khalid were inconsistent with what Captain Kearney, Elizabeth, and I believed to be the truth—that Khalid was most likely injured by NATO bombs the night before we flew into the Korengal Valley. But almost five months before, when I was downloading my pictures in a bunker at the KOP, I naively entered into the file information of the digital image a rough summary from one of the medics—“ . . . medics with the 173rd treat local afghans who claim they were injured by american bombs, though their wounds were NOT consistent with the timing of us attacks ion villages near their homes . . .”—intending to flesh out the information with a more factual account of the events later. I felt that the medic’s remarks were an obvious attempt to protect the U.S. military from a journalist’s scrutiny of civilian casualties from American bombings, but that, as a journalist, I needed to include his opinion. By the time I filed the images from September and October in the Korengal, we had been through weeks of intense experiences, including Operation Rock Avalanche, and I mistakenly submitted photos without updating the captions, instilling doubt in the mind of the editor in chief. The editors at the magazine proceeded to fact-check the issue with one of the public affairs officers with the 173rd Airborne, who very predictably said that the military couldn’t verify 100 percent that Khalid had been wounded in a NATO bombing. The magazine was questioning whether to even run the photo at all.

After months in the Korengal, the image of Khalid was one of the few instances of a civilian injury caused by a NATO bombing that I witnessed with my own eyes. There was no question that these kinds of injuries were happening all around us, but we weren’t able to access the villages or the victims because of security or timing. I missed the opportunity that day on the side of the mountain overlooking Yaka China, and I felt unconditionally that the image of Khalid’s innocent, blood-spattered face both aesthetically and narratively was crucial to our story.

But after all that we had endured in the Korengal, our testimony did not seem to matter. Elizabeth and I had watched the events unfold on the screens in the Tactical Operations Command center, had witnessed the insurgents shooting mortars at troops on the ground, had watched the United States drop five-hundred-pound bombs on the compounds, and had been present the next morning when the boy and his family came to the Korengal Outpost for medical treatment. Most of us who had been in the medical tent and at the base that morning had assumed that Khalid was injured in the bombing the night before. Captain Kearney even expressed this to the editor in chief on our behalf, and the debate went on for days. But because of my incomplete caption, the editor trusted the U.S. military public affairs officer—whose main responsibility was to polish the image of the U.S. military to the greater public—over us.

To make matters worse, from the time we set off to document the story in the Korengal to the final two weeks of the story’s closing, the angle of Elizabeth’s article shifted from the original idea of civilian casualties in war, to Operation Rock Avalanche, to a profile of Captain Kearney. In the eyes of the editor in chief, the image of Khalid as an illustration of civilian casualties was no longer relevant. And he was so resolute that the picture would be too controversial without tangible evidence of the cause of the boy’s injury that he decided to strike the image from the story altogether. He then declared he would refuse to run a slide show of images to accompany the piece online. In a time when the space allotted to photographs in magazines was shrinking, a slide show was the consolation prize; images that didn’t fit into the print edition were at least viewed by the public online. I was desperate. I spent almost two months traipsing around the mountains of one of the world’s most dangerous places, and as the piece went to press, my reporting was being questioned, some of my strongest images were being removed from the layout, and the editor in chief decided uncharacteristically that he would not run a slide show. From my perspective, it seemed that he was fed up with our story. Perhaps the reason was the length of time it had taken Elizabeth to write it, or that
Vanity Fair
had recently published a multipage piece focusing on the Korengal Valley, or simply that we were challenging his editorial judgment while he was being bombarded with doubt by the military public affairs office.

Elizabeth helped plead my case: She tried to persuade him to at least permit a slide show of my images to accompany her story. Almost until she gave birth, she helped compose e-mails to him, pleading with the editor to honor our reporting.

The photo department stood by my work, but ultimately the editor in chief had final say. I sat heartbroken in my dismal room at the Acropole Hotel in Khartoum, steeling myself for yet another war, feeling utterly defeated. Kathy, the director of photography and one of the most important women in the business, had by then become a close friend and mentor. By 2008 I had worked on probably five cover stories and several smaller stories with her, and we had developed a deep professional trust in each other. There is a bond between some photographers and their editors, in part because their relationships are so symbiotic. Photographers depend on editors to sponsor and publish their images; editors rely on those images to create powerful visual stories. Our success depended on each other. I seldom faced issues of censorship or questions about the authenticity of my photographs, but when these issues arose, I relied on the photo editor to go to bat for me. With Kathy’s permission and Elizabeth’s edits, I wrote the following e-mail to the editor in chief—something that many would view as overstepping my role as a freelance photographer:

As journalists, we risked our lives for two months, getting shot at and ambushed, walking through the mountains at 6,000 feet day after day in order to bring you first hand facts from the field. We do this only because we believe the New York Times will stand behind the material we get and fight to get it published. Not pull pictures at the last minute because of public relations guys with the US military saying they can’t confirm a victim of collateral damage was in the suspected compound. Dan [Captain Kearney] has all along been saying the boy was probably injured nearby by the shrapnel. The military PR on the other hand does not want a picture of a little boy covered in shrapnel wounds most probably from a bomb they were responsible for dropping printed in the NYT. I am so shocked and dismayed at how the word of the US military has more weight than my own, when they are so blatantly worried about salvaging their reputation with these emails, and I am presenting the facts to you to bring to the public. We were in the TOC when they dropped the bomb, and in the medical tent when the Afghan elders brought the boy in the next morning and claimed he was in the compound. Simple. This is war. There is ambiguity.

. . . After all I have done to get these images of war, up close, personal, soldiers and civilians, please stick your neck out in the most minimal way. To hear that you don’t want to “risk further scrutiny” after I risked my life for two months is the most offensive thing I have ever heard. We represent the New York Times. We have a responsibility to put out material we get, not cower and question ourselves and worry about military scrutiny.

. . . We owe it to the Afghans, the soldiers, everyone we spent time with and promised to show the TRUTH. Our readers deserve to see what’s happening over there.

The magazine ended up running a small slideshow of my images with the online piece. The photograph of Khalid never saw the light of day.

CHAPTER 10

Driver Expire

The boat skimmed over the turquoise waters toward our Bahamas bungalow, tucked amid a palm grove abutting the sea. It was New Year’s Eve 2007, two months after I flew out of the Korengal Valley, and Paul had taken me on vacation, a rare week of indulgence. Our eco-friendly, whitewashed room’s French doors opened to a private Jacuzzi. The resort had provided us with our own golf cart with a quaint straw basket affixed to the front to accommodate our beach gear. The weather was slightly overcast and chilly, but we didn’t care. We spent our days going for runs along the shore and lying in bed. At night we lingered over long, calorie-laden meals: butter-drenched lobster, bottles of white wine, crème brûlée or chocolate cake.

It was hard to reconcile the Korengal Valley with a paradise like the Bahamas, but by then I had learned to accept these strange incongruities of life. I turned off the trauma and sadness of my work in order to enjoy my happiness with Paul. Walking between worlds is one of the great privileges of the foreign correspondent. I never forgot what I had witnessed, and I talked often of my experiences, but I didn’t let them overwhelm my personal life. There is a somewhat accurate cliché of the ever-haunted war correspondent who can’t escape the darkness of what he has seen and drowns himself in drugs or sex or more war because he can’t face the ordinary or leaves the profession because he is finally broken by it. I didn’t want to be that person.