It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (27 page)

I knew from previous experience that the soldiers went on these patrols almost every day looking for the “enemy” and establishing a presence in the area; sometimes they went geared up for a firefight. Several times a week, they walked into potentially hostile places like the villages of Aliabad and Donga, a series of houses made of thin stone slabs and stacked one above another from the bottom of the valley up the mountain. The patrols sometimes lasted seven hours. The terrain was practically vertical.

For the first few weeks Elizabeth didn’t seem hindered by her pregnancy, aside from the fact that she had to stop to pee several times during the course of each patrol. After years of trying to get soldiers to overlook our gender on embeds, I cringed each time we had to ask the platoon leader, Lieutenent Matt Piosa, to hold up an entire string of troops in unfriendly villages while Elizabeth scampered off into an abandoned house or behind a tree to empty her bladder. We were also both weak and not accustomed to climbing directly uphill, especially in the thin mountain air. At home I ran almost six miles a day, and I still had a hard time scaling the slopes. I couldn’t fathom doing it with a baby growing inside me.

One day we set out for Firebase Vimoto, another army outpost that served as a strategic overwatch point. It was named after an army soldier who had been shot and killed on one of his first patrols. We set out in the morning and walked straight uphill until we got to the base, which was little more than a few firing positions and a ditch for sleeping, surrounded by sandbags. It seemed a miserable place to spend a few months. On the way back daylight faded into darkness, and we, unlike the soldiers, didn’t have night-vision goggles. Less than fifty yards from the base, Elizabeth let out a yelp, and I heard the crackle of bushes beneath her feet. She tumbled head over heels straight down the mountain.

I was close to panic. I knew nothing about pregnancy, but I guessed that any abdominal impact could be dangerous.

“Are you OK? Did you hit your stomach?” I gasped, fearing the answer.

She barely answered. We were already so nervous about merely getting home alive. The fact that Elizabeth was also pregnant was so absurd that we didn’t even know how to react.

But Elizabeth took things in stride. Sometimes she would complain that the iron plates in her flak jacket put too much pressure on her chest and belly, so I switched my lightweight ceramic plates with her outdated steel ones. And we set off on patrols as usual—she weighted down by the growing baby, I by my cameras and her cheap steel plates.

After several weeks, I left for a stint at home to spend time with Paul. Elizabeth stayed in the Korengal Outpost and continued reporting. While I was gone, she sent regular dispatches of the happenings there, careful not to reveal any tactical information, and I felt a constant, gnawing guilt for having left her alone on the embed while I regrouped and decompressed with my boyfriend. One night Elizabeth called to say that she had gone on an overnight patrol and gotten so dehydrated that she needed two IVs on her return. I knew it was time to go back. I packed a bag full of winter gear for both of us, extra protein bars, and maternity jeans for Elizabeth.

 • • • 

W
HEN
I
RETURNED,
we traveled to the even more remote Firebase Vegas, which sat vulnerably on a ledge cut into the mountain and faced a wide, stunning valley. Vegas was the humble home of First Platoon. There was a roofless plywood church, some sandbags, a wooden table, and an outhouse with a very crusty copy of
Maxim
magazine strategically placed next to the hole in the ground that was the toilet. A few months before we arrived, the platoon sergeant had been shot in the head and killed in the space between the toilet and the living quarters. Every trek to the toilet was an ominous sprint. There was nothing to do at Vegas but eat military meals out of envelopes—MREs, or meals ready to eat—gossip, play cards, sleep, and patrol.

One day, we talked with the troops about their personal lives, why they had enlisted, what they were doing before they ended up in the middle of nowhere, in the Korengal Valley.

“This is my sixth tour between Iraq and Afghanistan since September 11, 2001,” Staff Sergeant Larry Rougle, or Wildcat, told us. Rougle was one of my favorites. He had dark brown hair that grew into a bowl around his big brown eyes the longer he stayed at the remote Camp Vegas. His chest ballooned to form his beefy frame, and his arms were tattooed from wrist to shoulder. He was thoughtful and articulate and spoke with an ominous wistfulness, as if he feared his sixth tour might be tempting fate too much. He had once been part of a gang in South Jersey. When he shot someone and ended up in juvenile detention, he spent his time learning Russian and reading. When he got out, he joined the army. He had a girlfriend he wanted to marry. He always spoke about his mother.

Some of the guys played games and wrote e-mails on their laptops. Many read old magazines and recycled books. It wasn’t long before I finished the reading material I had lugged along, and in those pre-Kindle days I ended up reading a miniature copy of the New Testament I found lying around on the base.

And every morning, day after day, in the early-light dawn we went on the patrols. We first all gathered around for a briefing from the platoon leader, the soft-spoken and painfully shy Lieutenant Brad Winn. Then we loaded our day packs with water, protein bars, MRE snacks, and our headlamps, and I checked my camera gear to make sure I had spare batteries and as many flash cards as I owned, just in case we got locked into hostile activity overnight.

We would walk single file along a goat path through the tall cedar trees, making our way from hostile village to hostile village. The platoon leader generally put Elizabeth and me together between two soldiers, and I pestered Elizabeth constantly about whether she was drinking enough water as we trudged dutifully along the narrow paths. Our directive was to stay roughly twenty feet behind the person in front of us—allowing space between soldiers would lower the number of casualties in an ambush or land mine explosion. If attacked, we were to do whatever the soldier “assigned” to us told us to do. This was usually “Get down!” or “Run!” A part of me always quietly hoped for a brief gun battle; there were only so many pictures I could take of troops standing guard with their guns and talking with villagers. But when the bullets started flying, I prayed only for the battle to end.

During the weeks we spent hiking through the valleys, laden with flak jackets, helmets, water, and food, Elizabeth and I grew strong and determined. Our gear totaled forty pounds—mine even more with camera equipment—but we kept up with the six-hour patrols on the demanding mountains of the Korengal Valley. We grew accustomed to the incoming whistle and crash of mortar rounds directed at the base, which often landed off-target in the middle of nowhere. We scrambled for cover in a cinder-block shelter or behind massive sand-filled Hesco barriers without fanfare. Incoming rounds from Kalashnikovs or Russian-made machine guns, called Dushkas, became routine. The racing heart that at first accompanied the sound of bullets subsided into something as regular as the sound of roosters at dawn anywhere in the world.

Elizabeth’s belly grew as the month passed, but in tandem with the temperature dropping; her layers of clothing increased with the size of her belly, hiding any trace of the baby. With what seemed like every cramp or headache, I got out my Thuraya satellite phone and called my sister Lisa in Los Angeles, careful that none of the soldiers could hear us.

“Lee, what does it mean when Elizabeth has cramps?” I asked. “Is it OK if she walks for hours a day? Will the weight of a flak jacket be a problem for the baby?”

My sister, accustomed to years of her little sister on the front line, and somewhat resigned to not imposing her judgment on me and my colleagues, didn’t respond with a lecture about the dangers of being pregnant in a war zone or on a military embed. She was an ever pragmatic mother of two and assured us repeatedly of babies’ resilience.

“Just tell her to drink a lot of water,” she said. “The worst thing you can do is allow yourself to get dehydrated.”

 • • • 

T
HAT AUTUMN
in the Korengal, Battle Company had been gearing up for Operation Rock Avalanche, another battalion-wide mission to root out senior Taliban fighters. By mid-October the preparation was in full swing. We knew Rock Avalanche was going to be dangerous. The soldiers were hoping to lure the Taliban out of hiding to fight.

This time, two more journalists, the photographers Tim Hetherington and Balazs Gardi, were coming along on the operation. Captain Kearney gave each of the four of us the choice of which platoon we wanted to accompany for the mission. Kearney would hang back from the fighting with what was called the overwatch team, but First and Second Platoons were going to be on the front line. They would enter the villages, search the homes, and be on the offensive if attacked. The first destination, the village of Yaka China, was almost vertical in layout. If we were to accompany them, we would be walking at night, with all our gear, straight up through steps of irrigated land at a seventy-degree angle. We would be responsible for carrying our own food, water, sleeping gear, work equipment, clothing—everything we would need for a week of patrolling, camping, and trekking in the mountains—while hunting and being hunted by the Taliban.

Elizabeth suggested that we stick with Captain Kearney and the overwatch team, and Captain Kearney encouraged us to do the same—to hang back. I wanted to go with Second Platoon, on the front line, but wasn’t sure we could keep up. Elizabeth decided to run the debate by Balazs, telling him what she needed for her story and also that she was pregnant. He seemed slightly taken aback, and his response was firm: We should definitely stay back with Captain Kearney and the overwatch team, who would position themselves behind the platoons’ fighting in order to monitor and command the operation. We decided to stick with Captain Kearney.

I thought about Paul and was grateful he wasn’t aware of what I was about to do. Though we were talking over my satellite phone almost every day, I was prohibited by embed rules from mentioning any tactical or strategic information in case an insurgent was listening. Our conversations were relegated mostly to what protein bars and MREs I ate that day and what was happening back in Istanbul with his work and our friends.

 • • • 

T
HE EVENING OF
O
CTOBER
19 we piled onto Black Hawks bound for the mountains overlooking Yaka China. I was terrified. Foreign troops hadn’t attempted to enter the area in years. The Black Hawk hovered above the rugged mountainside, and we were prompted to jump into the blackness, several feet above the rough terrain. I leaped out of the helicopter, struggling to keep my cameras from smashing into the ground, and landed amid a contorted mess of soldiers. We lay there momentarily, a disheveled pile of humans and gear, as the Black Hawk flew off into the darkness, spraying us with weeds and dirt. I hoped my cameras didn’t break in the fall and wondered whether Elizabeth and the little one were OK.

I had no idea what we were supposed to do next. Captain Kearney had lent us night-vision goggles, and I struggled to reposition mine on my helmet in front of my eyes. Within minutes Kearney got word from the TOC at Blessing that a small group of armed men was making its way toward us. The Black Hawk had given away our location. Kearney spoke to the JTAC, who then communicated with the air force to send over an AC-130. Soon we heard the sounds of planes above, the thunder of ammunition nearby, and knew the insurgents had been reduced to dust.

On the side of the mountain overlooking Yaka China, the overwatch team unpacked cumbersome machines that looked as if they had been airlifted in from Vietnam. My adrenaline, which usually kicked in at this point, was mysteriously gone. We were thousands of feet up into the October air, and the chill had sunken into my bones. There were no tents, no walls, no roof above our heads, just some brush and trees with gnarly roots and patches of dirt on the side of a mountain for us to sleep on under the stars. I unpacked my sleeping bag while Kearney and the JTACs communicated with airpower, and I fell asleep in the middle of another battle, my Nikons sitting faithfully next to my head.

Sometime later Kearney woke me up, excited: “Addario! Check out the sparkling!”

Through my goggles the JTAC soldier stood silhouetted in a green, night-vision glow as he beamed a giant laser from a flashlightlike device down onto the village below. An AC-130 circled overhead. The JTAC was helping guide the attack aircraft onto the target by “sparkling” the target. It was like a mile-long light saber out of
Star Wars
. There was a constant hum of communication among Kearney, the JTAC, the overwatch team, the Taliban intercepts, and the men in the command center at Camp Blessing.

I picked up my camera, put my night-vision goggles in front of my lens, and shot from my horizontal position, trying desperately not to fall back to sleep. I drifted in and out of slumber with my goggles on and my camera in hand. The next morning, when I awoke in a haze, they were where I had left them, still working. I wondered if anyone else had slept. In the quiet moments I soaked up the sun, trying to warm my shivering body, as the Taliban continued talking over the intercept to each other.

“We have the Dushka ready.” An interpreter was speaking the Taliban’s words. “We see them across the valley.”

They were talking about us, the overwatch team, and they had a giant Russian machine gun poised with .50 caliber bullets ready to fire on us. I started looking around for a place to hide if our position got sprayed with bullets that could effortlessly slice through a brick wall. There was nothing but bushes, barely even a ditch deep enough to conceal us. We were wide open.

As day turned to dusk, Kearney focused his attention on the activity in and out of a house in the valley below. The overwatch team could see it with their night-vision goggles; they were also being fed information through drone feeds. Attack aircraft—Apaches and AC-130s flying overhead—waited for directives on what to shoot. Insurgent chatter was continuously spewing from the radio. Kearney’s commander back at the TOC, Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund, radioed him the go-ahead to attack. Minutes later the sky rumbled with firepower.