It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

by Addario, Lynsey

  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.

  • • •

  ONE 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.

  Iraqis descended on every building like ants, stripping each of them of its possessions. Men rode down the street with mass
ive air-conditioning units—under Saddam, owned by only the wealthiest Iraqis—on their bicycles. Furniture was piled high on people’s heads. Chairs, couches, beds, and tables all appeared to be walking around the streets. Young men swam in the artificial lakes surrounding Saddam’s massive marble palaces while families picnicked on the lush grounds and toured the stately palace atriums.

  We headed to Mosul to meet with General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which had set up a major base in one of Saddam’s palaces. Security was lax. Many Iraqis loved the Americans then, and Americans loved Iraqis then, too. I was so homesick for conversation not filtered through an interpreter that I spent the afternoon flirting with the strapping and dirty eighteen-year-old soldiers, regressing to my high school vocabulary and demeanor and paging through well-read copies of Maxim magazine. A cafeteria with hot food was erected in the rose garden. Dozens of high-level officers sat behind computer screens and satellite feeds running off generators. It was an incredible display of technology in a country that had little running water and unreliable electricity since the invasion. It was also a symbol of victory: hundreds of U.S. troops operating out of one of Saddam’s homes.

  Kurdish peshmerga soldiers deface a poster of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the Kirkuk Governorate building in Kirkuk hours after it fell from the Iraqi central government’s rule, April 10, 2003.

  I was set up with a cot alongside about thirty soldiers in a giant room. It opened up to a grand terrace overlooking the city. I stepped out to the balcony to work under the stars and enjoy the cool breeze. I had a good day of shooting behind me and another one ahead of me. I just smiled out there, alone on the balcony, and knew that this feeling could sustain me forever.

  • • •

  UNLIKE THE REST of the press corps that descended on Baghdad, in addition to my assignment with Elizabeth I had been asked by Time magazine to stick around and work in the north in the weeks immediately following the fall of Saddam. Salim, who stayed on as my interpreter, was forced to live vicariously through the sensuous, alluring dispatches from his best friend, Dashti, who had traveled to Baghdad to continue as interpreter for Elizabeth. For many young Kurds, Baghdad was a chance to experience big-city life, despite the fact that most stores were still closed, the electricity was still cut, and Arabs and Kurds didn’t always love each other. The prostitutes of Baghdad were an irresistible temptation for Dashti and Salim, whose sexual experiences were limited to fleeting moments of soft porn on satellite TV.

  “Can we please go to Baghdad already?” Salim pleaded day after day. “Dashti is there, and he says there are so many beautiful women!”

  “Salim, I am on assignment, and they want me in Mosul. As soon as this assignment ends, we can go.” I wasn’t about to compromise my work so my interpreter could lose his virginity. But this experience with interpreters, I was learning, was a typical one: We were living with them day in and day out, and they became close friends, often like family. There were few other people I spent such extended periods of time with, day and night, and I worried about their desires, hardships, and needs as much as they did mine.

  Dashti called several times a day. “A friend has arranged four sisters in this brothel … I have met all of them … I will make sure they are ready for you.”

  Soon enough I was off to Baghdad to shoot another story with Elizabeth. Salim began preparing himself, squirming in the passenger seat with excitement. As we drove along endless stretches of barren desert highway my satellite phone rang relentlessly with Dashti on the other end: “The sisters are ready for Salim!”

  Dashti, the ultimate fixer, had done the necessary groundwork for his best friend’s deflowering, as if he were arranging just another interview.

  I felt some sense of responsibility. I had spent the last two months consumed with anything but the normalcy of life: arranging drivers, preparing vehicles with spare tires and extra containers of gas, looking for hotel rooms with south-facing windows for satellite reception, trying to wake up early enough on three hours of sleep to take advantage of the soft morning light and its long shadows. As we approached Baghdad, my thoughts, my responsibilities, shifted to Salim and the loss of his virginity.

  Where the hell did one start explaining the birds and the bees to a twenty-three-year-old Iraqi Kurdish boy who has never kissed a woman? I started with condoms and AIDS.

  “There’s no AIDS in Iraq,” he said.

  Children swim in an artificial lake surrounding former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s palace in Mosul, April 29, 2003.

  U.S. Marines take a break to shave in front of one of Saddam’s presidential palaces the day Tikrit fell from Republican Guard rule in Iraq, April 14, 2003.

  “Well, OK, but do you know what to do?” My voice trailed off. I couldn’t explain foreplay to a Muslim man when I was unmarried and allegedly a virgin. I let it go. I just hoped Salim would make it to work the next day in time for the early morning light.

  • • •

  I HAD BEEN ANTICIPATING arriving in Baghdad for many months, but by the time I pulled into the Hamra Hotel, where many of the foreign journalists were staying, I barely had the energy to familiarize myself with a new city. Baghdad was relatively prosperous in 2003. Under Saddam it had a proper infrastructure, with roads, electricity, and water; green spaces and private clubs; and riverside fish restaurants along the Tigris. Compared with Afghanistan’s, Iraq’s population was well educated. Arabs had traveled from across the Middle East to attend the university in Baghdad. Those first few weeks life went on in a surprisingly routine way. The city didn’t feel particularly dangerous. Civilians were out; shops were open; there were cars on the streets. Electricity and water functioned in select neighborhoods.

  Elizabeth and I stayed at a rented apartment across from the Hamra, in a residential neighborhood named Al-Jadriya. In the beginning the social life of most journalists revolved around the Hamra pool, drinking beer and wine and watching the muscular correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, Scott Peterson, do pull-ups from the fire escape in a teeny-weeny black Speedo. A few times a month a vivacious, blond California native named Marla Ruzicka, the founder of an organization that counted civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, arranged salsa parties for all the journalists and aid workers who didn’t have security restrictions. The BBC radio correspondent Quil and I would dance for hours on end until it was time to return to our respective rooms.

  During one of the first summer parties, a correspondent asked, “Who has gotten separated since the start of the war?” and almost everyone in the room raised their hand. There were so many divorces after the fall of the Taliban, many more after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Our partners got tired of waiting, and rightly so. Many accused us of cheating, but more often than not we were cheating with our work. No other period in our careers would ever compare with the importance of those post-9/11 years. But some were also taking advantage of the double lives we led as journalists, and Baghdad, especially, became a laboratory for reckless romance. Home was a sort of parallel existence: our ever-present real life versus this exhilarating temporary one.

  When I got back to my room, I always called Uxval. I recounted scenes from the day and tried to keep him involved in my life from a distance. But while my heart missed him, my passion had shifted to Baghdad. I was too busy, too absorbed by the rapidly evolving news, too enthralled with Iraq to devote much time to something or someone beyond my immediate grasp.

  In fact, the hardest part of those early days was deciding what to cover first. A dictatorship’s secrets had been spilled into the streets of Baghdad. We needed to document the truth.

  At a mass grave called al-Mahawil, sixty miles south of Baghdad, men and women weaved aimlessly around the open ditches where dozens of bodies had been dug up. Laid neatly in rows were plastic bags containing the remnants of each body, its tattered clothes, its strands of hair. Some had identification cards, some did not. Women in bl
ack abayas, the floor-length, curtainlike scarves worn by conservative women all over the Middle East, shuffled from grave to grave weeping, screaming, arms thrust into the air. They were the widows and mothers of the disappeared men that Saddam’s loyalists executed during the Shiite uprising of 1991.

  Soldiers with the Fourth Infantry Division, Third Brigade, from the First Batallion, 68th Armored Regiment, momentarily detain and search Iraqi men during a night patrol north of Baghdad near the Balad Air Base in Iraq, June 27, 2003. Minutes after this image was shot, an Iraqi civilian crossed over what was possibly a remotely detonated explosive device that had been set in a road and intended for the U.S. troops. The blast severely injured the man.

  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.