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

by Addario, Lynsey

  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.

  • • •

  IN THE KORENGAL VALLEY 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.

  • • •

  CAPTAIN DAN KEARNEY 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.

  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.

  • • •

  WHEN 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.”

  • • •

  THAT 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. Eli
zabeth 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.