It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (26 page)

In August Elizabeth Rubin—my old partner from Iraq who had become a close friend—and I were searching for the perfect embed with American troops, one that would involve combat and explain why so many Afghan civilians were being killed despite the Americans’ advanced and supposedly precise weaponry. We talked almost nightly, going over the options.

Elizabeth suggested that we go to the battle-ridden Korengal Valley, which was near the border with Pakistan and one of the most dangerous places in the country. Korengalis were renowned for their toughness; the area was called the “cradle of jihad” because they were among the first to revolt against the Soviets in the 1980s. “I want to figure out why so many civilians are dying,” she said. “Did you know 70 percent of bombs in Afghanistan are dropped in the Korengal?”

I was eager to dive into a good story with Elizabeth, and I was familiar enough with her work to know that anything she produced from the field would be brilliant and have journalistic impact. By 2007 I had done more than a dozen embeds; I was comfortable traveling with the military and prepared for battle conditions. We wanted to find an embed where we could stay longer than a week or two, unlike my previous stints with the military, to get a sense of the rhythms of war.

The embed permission was approved in mid-August. I went ahead to the Kandahar Airfield, a NATO and American base, to begin shooting troops with the medevac teams, and waited for Elizabeth to arrive. Elizabeth and I checked in regularly while I was at KAF, and she was still in New York.

“When are you getting in?” I asked, quietly hoping my persistence might push up her arrival date. She was already late, and I feared any further delay might wreak havoc on my carefully crafted assignment schedule.

“I’m sick,” she said. “Probably another week.”

“You’re sick? What kind of sick?

“I have a flu,” she said. “And I’m three months pregnant.”

“What? Pregnant? Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. I just need a little more time here, and I will be fine.”

Pregnancy was always a terrifying idea to me. In our line of work few women got married, much less had children. Only college friends back home, people with “normal” jobs, were pregnant. I had no idea how babies grew, even less about the stages of pregnancy, what women felt like, how they looked.

“Do you look pregnant?” I asked. “How are you going to hide it?”

As far as I knew, there was no rule that a pregnant journalist couldn’t go on an embed, but most likely the military had never been faced with such a proposition. She assured me that it was too early for the pregnancy to be detectable, that she was comfortable with the risks, and that physically, she felt great. I assumed that the military would never allow our embed to last more than a month and that we would leave Afghanistan before Elizabeth would be far along. My philosophy had always been that people must make their own decisions, and I wasn’t about to judge what Elizabeth was doing with her life and with her body. She was one of the most dedicated journalists I had ever worked with. Though the pressures, endless travel, and risks of our jobs made raising a child nearly impossible, I knew she was getting older, and wondered if she didn’t want to miss this opportunity to have a baby. I was sworn to secrecy.

Elizabeth looked the same as she always did when she joined me in Afghanistan in early September and we made our way to a base in the city of Jalalabad, from which journalists were sent off to military bases across eastern Afghanistan. We met with the public affairs officer in charge in a mobile trailer media office, which was set up amid tents and a mess hall. Everyone gave us that familiar look that male soldiers try to conceal without success: Ugh, girls.

The public affairs officer clearly didn’t want us to go to the Korengal because, as he argued weakly, the sleeping quarters and bathrooms weren’t fit for women. Elizabeth told him we could handle whatever the men could. He looked dubious, but a few days later we were given permission to make our way to the Korengal.

Our first stop on our way was Camp Blessing, a small base in the stunning Pech River valley, where stone buildings crawled up lush mountains at impossibly steep angles. Blessing was the battalion headquarters of the 173rd Airborne. There were buildings, rather than tents, for lodging—unusually luxurious for a remote base—as well as a small gym, male and female toilets and showers, a mess hall that vaguely reminded me of a Vermont lodge, and an area for the mortar team to fire off mortars across the valley. The more accessible bases had some sort of “bird,” or helicopter, arriving from Kabul or Jalalabad every day; Camp Blessing was a remote base and saw a bird every three days if they were lucky.

We were at the heart of the war in Afghanistan and immediately got to work. The officers allowed us into the Tactical Operations Command center (the TOC), where an entire wall of screens provided real-time feeds of hostile activity all over the battalion’s area of operation. On infrared drone-feed screens, the commanders were able to distinguish between living and nonliving things based on their heat signatures. The TOC was also equipped to receive feeds from AC-130 gunships, the attack aircraft flying above the fighting, as well as from Apache helicopters, which maneuvered better than planes. Classified maps were pasted and tacked to almost every available wall space. Bundles of Ethernet cables, laptop chargers, hard drives, and telephone wires were taped down on desks and strung up to the walls, snaking up and down columns from floor to ceiling. White paper printouts of phone numbers, extensions, and codes were taped alongside the maps. A massive sheet with acronyms and initials decipherable to only a few lined the wall at the back of the room. A group of high-level soldiers gathered in the TOC, watching their troops in action on the ground through video feeds, while other soldiers on the phones fielded calls from remote bases as well as from the joint terminal attack controllers, or JTACs, soldiers of the air force who served in army units so they could liaise between the troops on the ground and the aircraft flying above. When combat becomes too intense, the army often needs a plane to come in and blow up everything in the area. The JTACs make the call.

It seemed impossible that we couldn’t win the war with the Taliban, an enemy who had little technology—or electricity—and who ran around the mountains in flip-flops, wielding rusty Kalashnikovs and makeshift mortar tubes. But they were formidable fighters and had a lifetime of knowledge of the terrain. At almost any given time in the fall of 2007, there was a fight going on somewhere in the valley, lighting up the screens in the TOC like Rockefeller Center at Christmas.

As a rule, photographing screens, maps, or documents with classified information was always a delicate matter because the images could end up in the hands of the “enemy,” that nebulous term the military used to refer to the Taliban and the anticoalition militants who wanted to eject the West from their country. I explained to the officers that there were ways I could photograph the room without revealing what was on the screens—by altering the focus or blurring an image or avoiding the screens altogether. I wanted to capture the intensity of that room. I was given permission on the condition that G2, or military intelligence, could look over my images from the TOC to ensure that I wasn’t transmitting highly sensitive info. It was almost unprecedented for the military to ask to look over my images, and I agreed on this occasion because they were giving me access to the kind of scene—a glorious blinking panorama of the West’s sophisticated technology—I had not yet seen in print.

After I finished shooting, the G2 officer and I sat in a side room, and as we scrolled through the photos of the TOC—soldiers in gym shorts watching the screens, fielding phone calls, and making split-second decisions about whether or not to drop five-hundred-pound bombs—he casually dropped the question “So how many months pregnant is your friend?”

I was shocked. How could he have known? We had both made phone calls the night before from our Thuraya satellite phones, and maybe Elizabeth had made some reference to her pregnancy while they surreptitiously monitored our calls.

“She’s not pregnant.” I kept my eyes trained on my computer screen. I had never been a good liar, but I had always been a loyal friend. Elizabeth reminded me several times a day that I could never utter a word about her pregnancy, and I obliged.

Soldiers with the 173rd Airborne, Battle Company, react as they receive incoming mortar rounds near the shelter at the Korengal Outpost.

The officer quickly dropped the question, but I remained worried that others would find out.

We didn’t stay long at Camp Blessing. The night before we flew out to the Korengal Outpost, we gathered in the TOC to watch U.S. troops pinned down as the Taliban fired mortars at them from a roof. The commanders considered dropping bombs from planes and discussed the potential “collateral damage”—civilian casualties—that five-hundred-pound bombs might cause. The fighting dragged on. The troops remained pinned down. And eventually Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund, the battalion commander sitting in the TOC, called in an aircraft bomber and dropped one of those five-hundred-pound bombs on the area. Taliban fighters disintegrated on the screens in front of us. The combat wasn’t different from what I had covered in the past, only this time I was watching it unfold on a screen, which oddly seemed more ominous than being on the ground. I noticed something else: In Iraq and in other parts of Afghanistan there were long lulls between battles. In the Korengal it was a constant barrage, day and night.

 • • • 

I
N THE
K
ORENGAL
V
ALLEY
the Americans had established several small bases, called forward operating bases (FOBs), and smaller combat outposts (COPs). They were dug into some of the most hostile territory in Afghanistan, in the heart of the insurgency as well as the heart of the country’s timber trade—which helped fund the insurgency. The Korengal Outpost, or KOP, was only six miles south of Camp Blessing, along a narrow mountain road littered with IEDs. It was an easy target for the Afghan fighters positioned high up in the surrounding mountains. We chose to fly in on a Chinook, a slow-moving boat of an aircraft that was a larger target and less agile than, say, a Black Hawk. I always feared we would be shot down.

The minute we touched ground we were escorted directly to the medic’s tent. The commander at the KOP, Captain Dan Kearney, greeted us, but our attention quickly shifted to the scene inside. Afghan boys had been brought to the base practically in shock, with superficial lacerations on their faces and bodies. Their families told the army medics that the wounds were from shrapnel from the evening before—presumably from the bombs we had watched explode on the screens at the TOC. We had flown into the very scene we had wanted to document: the effects of the war on civilians.

I spent most of my time photographing a young boy named Khalid, whose eyes were bloodshot and glassy, his fair skin spattered with scrapes and mud. Dirt had collected in the corners of his red lips, and he rarely blinked. As part of the counterinsurgency campaign to win the hearts and minds of the people, army medics often treated the injured Afghans. But they acted skeptical when the Afghans told them they had been injured by American bombs.

That night, we slept on cots in cavernous bunkers dug into the ground, lightbulbs strung up above us by precarious wires. There were fleas. Elizabeth’s torso became a patchwork of bumps and splotches; no part of her stomach was spared. The fleas—perhaps detecting her pregnancy hormones—feasted on her. (They didn’t seem interested in me at all.) Elizabeth went several times to the medic to get something to allay her misery, and each time he sent her away with ibuprofen and flea repellant, but there was little she could take that wouldn’t be harmful to her pregnancy. She writhed all night in discomfort.

 • • • 

C
APTAIN
D
AN
K
EARNEY
was only twenty-six years old, handsome and solidly built. Sometimes he was a gentleman, other times he was a hard-ass: autocratic and demanding of his troops. He was always gracious and helpful to us, ordering his troops to give up their cots for us or providing us with extra blankets as the late summer weather turned wintry. The troops weren’t thrilled to oblige Kearney’s requests.

I suspected that the soldiers rarely took us seriously and were entirely confused by why two women would voluntarily subject themselves to the hardship and the dangers of the Korengal Valley. I preempted their suspicion that we, the chicks, might hold them up in the field by being overly prepared, physically and mentally. I trained religiously for assignments, I made sure I had all the gadgets I’d need in my kit to be as self-sufficient as possible, and I tried not to show fear. As on any other assignment, I wanted to blend in here and be as inconspicuous as possible. There were some troops who struggled with the rigor of the daily six-hour patrols—primarily because they were carrying dozens of pounds of ammunition—and I was sure many doubted we would be able to hold our own alongside them.