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War Stories

Soldiers' snapshots - from vacation-type photos to images of deepest loss - tell the story of Iraq with piercing directness.

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published April 2, 2006

The Iraq War is our first digital war, and every soldier there is a photographer.

When Devin Friedman first had that thought, he was embedded with a National Guard unit out of Florida, reporting on the war for GQ, where he is a senior editor. Friedman imagined "files and files of beautiful, honest, intimate, hilarious, harrowing pictures that exist on the hard drives and Memory Sticks of a nation of soldiers, a collective memory of the war in Iraq."

As a journalist, the irony wasn't lost on him. "While media outlets around the world were spending millions of dollars to ship scruffy men in safari vests to Iraq with thousand-dollar cameras," he muses, "more than 140,000 American servicemen were compiling the most extensive documentation of a war that's ever existed."

A part of that documentation is now gathered in This is Our War, edited by Friedman and with a foreword by Gen. Wesley Clark. It is a portrait of the war literally seen through the eyes of those who are fighting it. We see what they think is significant. What they want to remember. What, in some cases, surely they want to forget.

Some pictures look like typical shots from an exotic holiday: camels, women draped in black, buddies posing in front of a ruin or a monument to a dictator whose visage has been replaced by a smiley face. But these playful photographs (included in a chapter entitled "Tourists in Iraq") quickly give way to more gruesome scenes: unearthed bodies of Shiites massacred by Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War, a man pinched with grief during a memorial service for a friend of 17 years who was killed in an ambush, bodies of two Iraqi national guardsmen killed by a checkpoint explosion, blood-splattered boots hanging from an electric wire.

Even a photograph of a man carrying a white flag suddenly becomes more ominous when you read the comment accompanying it: "This was a pretty common procedure," says Brent McKinney, who contributed the photograph, "though it wasn't out of the ordinary for guys carrying white flags to drop 'em and open fire."

This Is Our War (Artisan, $29.95, 256 photos, 224 pp) includes snapshots of desert hygiene (women soldiers combing out their hair; men shaving their heads); Iraqi detainees, hooded and blindfolded; and soldiers relaxing (playing cards, watching television, even tanning). There is no shortage of photographs devoted to battlefield scenes, including shots of a blood-stained pavement, battered and bloody soldiers, even dying servicemen.

How are these different from the war shots beamed back to us by professional photographers? Often they are not as expertly executed (although Sgt. Brian Mockenhaupt's photograph of his shadow cast against a graffiti-covered wall in an abandoned building is as artful as I've seen), but they do strike me as more immediate, less second-hand than the shots of the pro. Some, after all, were taken by men and women now dead.

Of course, some professional photographers also have lost their lives in Iraq, but for soldiers - whose job it is to kill the enemy, not take his picture - that grim prospect is unarguably a more direct threat. The last chapter of This Is Our War features the photographs of 14 men and women: They are the last taken of these U.S. soldiers. Like the more than 2,000 other American military casualties of the Iraq War, none of them made it home.

[Last modified April 1, 2006, 16:10:05]