It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (17 page)

U.S. soldiers detain an Iraqi found on a compound near Balad during the early morning hours of June 29, 2003. American intelligence indicated that the man belonged to the Baathist party, whose members were supporters of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. U.S. troops across the Fourth Infantry Division acted as part of a massive series of night raids and patrols as a way of showing their force and retaliating against a spate of Iraqi attacks. The raids targeted the area north of Baghdad as far as Tikrit, along the Tigris, where there were presumed to be Baathist strongholds and deep-rooted support for Saddam.

An Iraqi man leans against the wall as he walks along rows of remains of bodies discovered in a mass grave south of Baghdad, May 29, 2003. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, thousands of bodies were pulled from mass grave sites around Iraq, evidence of the brutal, bloody regime of the former dictator.

I was unable to photograph. I had no idea where to start. I tried to imagine what they were feeling. The wailing women were dramatic but a cliché I had seen from mass graves before; as still images they could never convey the depth of what I was witnessing. Could the anguish of seeing a loved one after more than a decade—decayed in a plastic bag, with nothing more than strands of fabric for identification—ever translate into a single frame? My mentor Bebeto’s words rang in my ears: Observe, be patient. My dangling cameras beat against my stomach, and I walked clumsily through the dust, waiting for the right moment to capture the women’s grief. I had been shooting for almost ninety days without a break. This day proved it was worth it. All the doubts I had about the war were temporarily quelled. I suspected the American government was lying to us, but on that particular day I didn’t care.

 • • • 

I
N THE MONTHS AFTER
Saddam was deposed, Iraq fell apart. A population that had been silenced for decades was suddenly able to express itself any way it wanted. Throngs of Iraqis lined up for hours outside banks to withdraw their money, screaming with frustration as they struggled to get through the doors. American soldiers shot off their weapons above the crowds, sometimes punching the very men they were there to “liberate.” Fires raged as looters prowled the streets pirating electrical wires. Checkpoints began popping up around the city.

Nothing made sense. American troops allowed the looting of the National Museum but protected the caged lions at the house of Sad-dam’s son Uday. To the media, the troops proudly displayed the Hussein brothers’ sex dens—decorated with heart-shaped love seats and littered with pornography—while basic services like water, gas, and electricity failed to materialize. The superpower couldn’t provide for a basic quality of life. Then the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, disbanded the entire Iraqi army, leaving thousands of trained soldiers angry, jobless, and unable to feed their families.

One morning I came upon crowds of Iraqis agitating under the scalding sun, waiting to get their propane tanks filled for cooking. They had been in line for hours and were losing their patience. The American troops were gassing them with a strange, bright-green gas. I photographed the mayhem: ladies in black
abaya
s shoving one another and clanging against American tanks; men in line, exasperated, behind barbed wire; American soldiers screaming at the crowds until the veins along their necks popped out.

Suddenly one of the Iraqi men jumped out of line. A group of American soldiers picked him up and threw him to the ground. One had his knee on the guy’s chest; another started punching him in the face. Iraqis screamed in protest.

I kneeled about eight feet from the scene and photographed, shocked by what I was witnessing. What happened to “liberating the Iraqis”? I was waiting for one of the soldiers to step in and stop the madness when I noticed an old woman in an
abaya
in the right corner of my frame. She was about sixty years old. She raised a propane tank over her head and smashed it on a crouching soldier’s neck. I kept shooting. No one even noticed me.

The Americans didn’t understand the value of honor and respect in an Arab culture. Young American soldiers, many of whom had never traveled abroad before, much less to a Muslim country, didn’t realize that a basic familiarity with Arab culture might help their cause. During night patrols, fresh-faced Americans in their late teens and early twenties would stop cars jam-packed with Iraqi family members—men, women, and children—shine their flashlights into the cars, and scream, “Get the fuck out of the car!” Armed to the teeth, they busted into private homes late in the night, pushing the men to the floor, screaming in their faces in English, and zip-tying their wrists while questioning them—often without interpreters and while the children stood, terrified, in the doorway. They would shine their flashlights on women in nightgowns, unveiled, track their dirty boots through people’s homes, soil their carpets and their dignity. For an Arab man, foreigners seeing his wife uncovered brought shame and dishonor to the family, and it merited revenge.

 • • • 

B
Y
M
AY
I was used to life on the front, and it was the world outside that had begun to feel unfamiliar. I received an e-mail from Vineta, my college roommate. She was still living in New York, like so many of my old friends. Her e-mail began: “I was sitting at the boat pond in Central Park today reading the paper . . .”

I stopped. People really did spend their days relaxing in a park, reading an actual copy of the newspaper. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a morning like that, where I didn’t wake up and run to the roof to look for smoke from that morning’s bombs, or wasn’t following some desperately sad woman looking through tethered plastic bags for the remains of her son. I couldn’t remember the last time I had even held or seen a real newspaper, for that matter.

A few days later I left Iraq. I needed a break, and I needed to see Uxval, who had been idling in Turkey, waiting for me to get back. I drove back up through Iraq, through Sulaymaniyah, and into eastern Turkey. Now going home felt like leaving home, too.

In Istanbul my mornings were languid. I slept as long as I could. I didn’t stress about morning light, shadows, alarm clocks, car bombs, or whether my driver would turn up on time. I made my own coffee. I listened to Billie Holiday and Nina Simone without worrying whether whoever I was sharing a room or a house with would mind the music.

Uxval and I made love in the afternoon but to a different rhythm. Uxval was the same, but I was more complicated. He was frolicking around in the Istanbul sunshine, and I was a caged animal, incredulous that life was proceeding as usual outside Iraq. I marveled at the women around me, Turkish and foreign, decked out in colorful clothes that revealed their bare arms, their legs, their cleavage.

Only a few days passed before I found pictures in a drawer of a blond woman with gold-rimmed sunglasses staring flirtatiously at the camera, bathed in soft sunlight. She was sitting on the red tram that rode up and down the street outside our apartment window. It was an intimate look I knew all too well.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Claudia,” he said dismissively. “She was in my Turkish class . . .” (I had assumed she was Turkish, but she was Mexican. Only Uxval could manage to find and conquer a Mexican woman in Turkey in three months.)

Turkish class that I paid for
, I thought. And probably in my apartment, and in my bed, and rolling around in my sheets. All on my dime. Uxval had moved to Istanbul for us to be together, and we both knew that his options for earning a real living there would be limited at best. I had wanted to make sure things were taken care of while I was away, so I paid the rent, the bills, and left spending money for him each time I left for Iraq. In return, he was there when I came home. That was our deal, and apparently it had consequences.

I put the photo down and looked at him. I didn’t have the energy to go through it again. “She’s attractive,” I said. He knew that I knew. And he and I both knew I no longer cared. The arrangement worked for us. As I began to understand the new rhythm of my life in Baghdad and on the road as one of permanence, I accepted my relationship with Uxval for what it was. I loved him, and I didn’t want to come home from long stretches away to an empty apartment. Though I knew he was dating other women while I was off for months at a time, I accepted his philandering as one of the compromises of the work and lifestyle I had chosen. We left for a romantic weekend on the Turkish coast the next morning, and three weeks later I was back in Iraq on assignment with Elizabeth, happy to be back to the world I understood. In Iraq I didn’t have to worry about finding pictures of strange women in my drawers or wonder why no one cared that a war was going on.

 • • • 

I
RETURNED TO FIND
that the war had changed. As the Americans became more aggressive, the Iraqis retaliated with more improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The first time I witnessed an IED attack against Americans, I was in the car with my Iraqi driver “cruising,” a term coined by my colleague the photographer João Silva. Cruising meant driving around aimlessly in search of street photos when news was slow. That day I saw a Humvee in flames under a bridge and asked my driver to pull over.

“
New York Times
 . . . photographer . . . I am American . . . journalist . . . ,” I yelled to the Americans from across the street. I didn’t attempt to take any photographs until they knew who I was. We had learned from the killing of a Reuters photographer on the balcony of the Palestine Hotel that a long lens could be mistaken for a rocket-propelled grenade.

I ran across the street toward the soldiers and said, “I am so sorry for your loss. Can I speak with the commanding officer? Who are you guys with?” I looked at the patch sewn onto his uniform and recognized the soldiers as part of the 82nd Airborne. I knew no one could authorize anything but the commanding officer, and I didn’t want to waste time. I flashed my press credential. I had finally acquired the proper U.S. military−issued press pass they required for access to any scene that involved the military. It was a simple press card with a photograph, issued by the Coalition Press Information Center, and ensured that the journalist had been screened by the Americans’ provisional government in Iraq.

The young man repeated the name of my organization with a sneer: “Oh, the
New York Times
.” They thought we were all lefties opposed to the war. The commanding officer arrived and authorized me to shoot. Three soldiers accompanied me as I ran back across the highway in order to photograph from a distance.

I raised my camera to shoot and framed the smoldering tank and the soldiers standing guard, including the same three soldiers who had watched me clear access with their commanding officer and had escorted me across the street. They suddenly looked at me as if they had never seen me before. Then they raised their guns and lowered their eyes to the scope. They were aiming at me. At me? I held my viewfinder to my eye, my entire body shaking. Would they really kill me, my own countrymen? Would they kill me because I was photographing a place where one of their men had been injured in an IED attack—one of
our
men? I held my eye to the frame and paused. Was this a game of chicken? I pressed the button three times.