It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (15 page)

Elizabeth, I quickly learned, worked from morning until long after midnight—until our interpreter and driver cried for mercy. To Elizabeth, our fixers were extensions of us, a fundamental part of the team. We went through what seemed like a dozen drivers and interpreters in our first month in Kurdistan. An interpreter was good but he showed up late for work. A driver was good but his car was unreliable. An interpreter was good but he didn’t get along with the driver. One evening we were reporting in a remote village and got a flat tire on the way back to the city. Our driver didn’t know how to change the tire. We sat in pitch darkness on the side of a road weeks before the Americans first attacked Iraq, waiting for our driver to learn how to change a tire. We had to fire him.

Eventually we ended up with Dashti and Salim. Dashti, our interpreter, spoke Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, and English. He even learned some Spanish in a few weeks on the Internet because he would hear me talking to Uxval on the phone and was frustrated he didn’t understand the language. Salim was a funny Kurdish boy who wore a mischievous smile and talked incessantly about finding love. Elizabeth talked through the story with Dashti while I gave Salim advice on romance, and they made our jobs possible. I formed an attachment to them that would last for years.

Kurdish
peshmerga
fire rockets at Ansar al-Islam territory near Halabja, northern Iraq, March 30, 2003.

During the day we went looking for signs of U.S. military presence in northern Iraq. We kept our eyes out for Special Forces who might be wearing beards and local clothes, trying to fade into the background. I photographed the training of the
peshmerga
, Kurdish fighters ready to ally with the Americans. And we went in search of the Sunni fundamentalist group Ansar al-Islam that was hiding in villages across the mountains. The Bush administration alleged the group was linked to both Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, thus bolstering the case for war.

 • • • 

T
HE INVASION
began on March 19. American Special Operations troops parachuted in across northern Iraq in the dead of night. The U.S. military there wasn’t looking for WMDs or Saddam; it was looking for terrorists, specifically Ansar al-Islam. The Americans rained cruise missiles on many of the villages and military sites throughout the region, causing thousands of Kurdish families to flee the area. We traveled almost daily to the area around Halabja, where Ansar al-Islam was holed up.

I didn’t know the language of war. I didn’t know about cruise missiles (which could be fired on a precise target from a navy ship stationed within range) or mortars (bombs shot out of tubes propped up on the ground) or rocket-propelled grenades (small exploding rockets that can be shot from the shoulder). If the sound came from an RPG, that meant we journalists were being targeted; if a cruise missile was dropped, it was most likely from the Americans. I needed to know these things. I needed to know who had what weapons and how they were fired off, and where they were going to land.

One morning a group of about eight journalists woke early to investigate civilian casualties and collateral damage from the Americans’ attack the night before. Our massive white Land Cruisers—representing the
New York Times
, the
New York Times Magazine
, the
Washington Post
,
the
Los Angeles Times
, and several television and radio channels—snaked along the road that led through the lush green foothills of snowcapped mountains toward the hostile area. Our vehicles were clearly marked with the initials T.V., for “television.” The area was not pro-American. The road ahead into Khurmal, a conservative Islamic town infiltrated with Ansar al-Islam, was actually too dangerous for Westerners to traverse; the terrorists could easily target journalists from their perch in the mountains or on the roads. Dozens of civilians were fleeing in flatbed trucks, overstuffed cars, anything with wheels, their belongings strung flimsily to the roof, faces pinned to the windows as they zipped past us on the side of the road. I thought of Lucian Perkins’s 1995 prizewinning photo from Chechnya, which had been etched in my mind: the hands of a young refugee pinned against the rear window of a van as families fled the fighting.

We parked our cars along the road near a checkpoint as we tried to get information about the situation in Khurmal from the civilians and to photograph their fear. Local villagers screamed at us to leave the area, to keep our flak jackets on. But there was a calm hanging around this chaos: The shooting and mortar fire between the Western-allied Kurdish
peshmerga
and Ansar al-Islam had stopped. We decided to heed the locals’ advice and leave. As I headed toward our car I paused.
Had I gotten everything I needed?
I ran back for some final images.

A pickup truck full of Kurdish
peshmerga
, posing with their guns, headed toward me. I photographed them as I stood alongside a tall, trim television cameraman who held his giant camera steady on his shoulder. I suddenly felt my stomach burn, an urge to flee. I ran back to our vehicle, where Elizabeth sat waiting and pulled at my car door. It slammed, and then
boom
.

Civilians and fellow Kurdish
peshmerga
soldiers carry the body of a severely wounded soldier minutes after a car bombing by the Ansar al-Islam terrorist organization at a checkpoint near Halabja, northern Iraq, March 22, 2003.

A massive explosion behind us blew our car forward. Smoke and debris clouded the windows. A mortar round? Our driver immediately hit the gas, springing us away from the scene. Behind us, all I could see was black smoke, a charcoal sandstorm billowing toward us.

“Go! Go! Go! Get out of here! Go go go go!” Elizabeth screamed.

Yes, yes, yes, go, go, go!
It didn’t occur to me to stay at the scene and continue photographing. An experienced conflict photographer would know to stay, to shoot the wreckage, injured, and dead, but I was young. This was my first bomb.

A few miles down the road we pulled over as cars zoomed past us. A carcass of a pickup truck riding on three melted wheels careened past, the dismembered remains of a body in the back. We followed the truck to a marketplace, where the limp body, miraculously still alive, was passed from one car to another. Brains poured out of a gash in the head. The man was one of the
peshmerga
fighters I had been photographing before I ran away. It was my first casualty in Iraq.

At the hospital, bystanders, nurses, and relatives unloaded bodies into a room with gym mats on the ground. Blood covered the floors and splashed the walls. Supplies were minimal. The injured kept coming through the doors. We heard people say the explosion had been a car bomb; I was wrong, it wasn’t a mortar. I still didn’t know the difference. A car bomb—a vehicle laden with explosives, sent to detonate near a specific target—could have been aiming for our line of Land Cruisers, carefully marked with the letters T.V.

I was queasy. I held my camera tight against my face like a shield and kept shooting. An interpreter who had been working with my friend Ivan arrived with his leather jacket melted onto his arms and back and blood spattered on his face and chest. I panicked, thinking something might have happened to Ivan.

“Where’s Ivan?” I asked.

“I was not with Ivan.” He could barely speak.

I walked out to the front of the hospital to find Elizabeth. She was standing beside Eric, an Australian TV reporter, his face and glasses smudged with blood. He, too, was in shock.

“Does anyone have a satellite phone?” he asked in monotone, to the air, as if expecting no response.

“What happened? Is everyone you were with OK?” we asked, prying, as he passed in and out of waves of consciousness, trying to gather himself. He put his hands out in front of him and gestured like a conductor—waving his hands slowly back and forth, silencing us.

“One minute,” he said. “One minute . . .” His hands were still raised before him. “My cameraman is dead. Paul is dead.”

I knew Paul was the cameraman who had been next to me when I fled. He had continued shooting, and died.

Eric held Elizabeth’s phone, then looked at us. “Could you dial some numbers for me?”

I stood back a bit, fearing that Eric might sense my weakness. His shock was still acting as a sort of buffer; I didn’t want the look on my face to shatter his calm and thrust him into the agony of loss.

A Kurdish taxi driver pulled up to the entrance of the hospital and jumped out.

“Is anyone here a journalist?”

I needed an excuse to walk away from Eric and the phone call he was about to make.

“Is anyone here a journalist?” the driver repeated. “I have the body of a journalist in the trunk of my car and don’t know what to do with it.”

I definitely couldn’t handle that. I walked back over to Eric and Elizabeth. Eric rattled off a phone number, and Elizabeth dialed and handed the phone back to him. It was a number for the wife of his dead colleague, and the answering machine picked up. He hung up. Eric uttered another number, and someone picked up. It was his office in Australia.

“Hi. This is Eric. Paul is dead.”

Just like that.

I ran around to the back of the hospital and put my face in my hands. That phone call could have been for me, for Ivan, for Elizabeth. I didn’t even have any phone numbers for Elizabeth’s family. We were all there minutes before the car bomb detonated. Now there was some random taxi driver with the body of a colleague folded and dismembered in his trunk, asking what to do with it. How did one transfer the body of a friend out of a country we all snuck into illegally, when there were no functioning embassies, no police, no diplomats, and the only open border accessible from northern Iraq was with Iran? It seemed so obvious, but I didn’t know war meant death—that journalists might also get killed in the war. I hid behind the hospital, ashamed of my weakness, my tears, and my fear, wondering if I had the strength for this job, and wept inconsolably.

The war had begun.

 • • • 

O
NE DAY
in early April I was lying on my bed, eyes closed, in a rare moment of rest. Suddenly car horns and yelling rang through the hotel windows. I figured it was a wedding and dug myself deeper under the sheets. The commotion kept going. I walked across the hall to my colleague’s room and looked out from his balcony. The entire city of Sulaymaniyah had gathered along the main avenue beneath our hotel.

We turned on CNN. A bold banner scrolled along the bottom of the screen. Baghdad had fallen. Saddam Hussein was gone. I threw on my work clothes, grabbed my cameras and lens pouches, and ran downstairs.

Outside, American flags flapped in the breeze, Iraqi Kurds kissed photographs of President Bush, and kids danced under massive cardboard replicas of B-52 bombers painted in the colors of the American flag.

“We love Amreeekaa! We love George Bush!”

I had been opposed to the invasion, but for a few moments I felt proud to be American. It seemed impossible that the war could be nearing its final stages so quickly! I wondered how much longer I would stay in Iraq.

In the aftermath we raced to get to Mosul, Kirkuk, and Tikrit, the three major cities between northern Iraq and Baghdad. The landscape shifted from green and mountainous to sun bleached and sand colored. The best reporting often happened in the fragile days after a government fell and the country opened up to the media. We scrambled to work before restrictions on media access shut us out. We trekked from the prisons to the intelligence offices, from abandoned factories to Saddam’s palaces—looking for classified documents, traces of weaponry, signs of chemical warfare, and any information on the regime’s secrets. We all wanted to be the one to unearth the magical evidence. We all wanted to find the WMDs, even if we’d never thought they existed in the first place.

In Kirkuk, Kurds had faces painted with red, white, and blue. American troops rode through the city, hanging out of open Humvees, bathing in rose petals and kisses. The municipal office in Kirkuk became a temporary hangout for the U.S. Army. Soldiers sat in the main reception area beneath a giant, already defaced portrait of Saddam. When I arrived, only his eyes were scratched out; by evening Kurds were gouging out his cheeks, his teeth; by morning the face was gone.