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

by Addario, Lynsey

  “Hey, Rice,” I said, approaching him with my camera slightly raised in front of my chest, as if asking for permission without words. “Is it cool if I take your picture? Is it OK?”

  “Yes.” He nodded as he continued walking toward me.

  I walked with them for a while, photographing as we walked, when Rice paused.

  “Hey,” he asked, “do you think you could e-mail me some of these photos?”

  I laughed out loud. “Yeah, Rice. Of course I can e-mail you some of these photographs. It’s the least I can do. What’s your e-mail address?” I asked, having learned that it’s much harder to try to get these things after the fact. Rice spelled out his address for me as we lumbered toward Vandenberge ahead.

  As we neared the medevac point, I saw Captain Kearney running at top speed down the mountain toward us from his overwatch position. His gun was slung over his shoulder, and tears streamed down his face. “Rice!” Kearney wrapped his arms around him, and they all stood there and wept, soaking up the incredibleness of the ambush.

  I photographed Rice and Vandenberge walking across the bleak terrain, covered in blood, arm in arm with their comrades. It was the first time I felt as if I were as much a part of the story as I was bearing witness while covering a war. But I was so consumed by adrenaline, I wasn’t even processing my emotions. Rice and Vandenberge were loaded onto the Black Hawk, and I watched them take off into the dust kicked up by the propellers.

  Seconds later I heard, “We have to go get the KIA.”

  The KIA? I asked myself. The KIA. The. Killed. In. Action. Fuck. “Wildcat”—Rougle—had been hit, and he was still missing. Rougle, who had just been telling Elizabeth and me that he was going to propose to his girlfriend when he went home on leave, who had survived almost six tours since September 11, 2001.

  Operation Rock Avalanche. The Korengal Valley, October 18–23, 2007.

  Other members of the scout team, Sergeant John Clinard and Specialist Franklin Eckrode, emerged carrying Rougle’s body in a body bag. I couldn’t believe Rougle—so vibrant and alive just an hour before—was now dead, in a thick, black, rubbery bag, being carried to the first of so many stops along the way home to his final resting place. Clinard and Eckrode were openly crying as they walked toward me, the limp body dangling between them. A bunch of young Americans who should have been out drinking beers at bars back home and living up their early twenties were instead carrying the lifeless body of their dearest friend through the lonely mountains of Afghanistan—a place that no one would care about twenty years from now. I wondered what we were doing there when so many others had failed to occupy Afghanistan in the past. Were we trying to influence and change a culture that was hundreds of years old? We were in what seemed like the most desolate place on earth, with no people around, neither Afghans nor Americans, and I wondered why we were there, fighting in a forest in the name of democracy. We were giving our lives for a policy that wasn’t working—something completely intangible.

  I raised my camera in a gesture to ask permission to photograph. I felt horrible asking, but we had been with them for two months, and I knew it was important to document Rougle’s death. They all said yes as they knelt down momentarily and paused for a rest. What would it feel like to carry your best friend in a bag? Did they question the war the way I did? The four scouts who carried Rougle’s body each bowed their heads and cried. I photographed through my own tears, sitting nearby. The hum of the second medical evacuation helicopter approached to collect “Wildcat.”

  The minute Rougle’s body flew away from the Abas Ghar ridgeline, I knew I had to get out of there. I was spooked, convinced we were about to get ambushed again and not confident I would survive. Every time I walked over toward the team translating the Taliban intercepts on the radio, my sense of urgency grew. Kearney and the commanders of the 173rd Airborne back at Camp Blessing retaliated for Rougle’s death with a series of two-thousand-pound bombs on the villages surrounding our position. Everyone was ready to kill, to avenge Rougle’s death and Rice’s and Vandenberge’s injuries. It was only going to get bloodier.

  “Kearney? Is there any way to get me out of here?” I cringed as I asked him to also deal with me: a freaked-out girl who was pleading to be extracted from the middle of a hostile ridgeline, where every Black Hawk flight in risked getting shot down by an insurgent on the mountain.

  “I’ll see what I can do, Addario,” Kearney said. “There isn’t much air willing to come in here. It’s hot.”

  That night I lay awake, my heart pounding, my eyes wide open through the night as I listened for any sound of an ambush. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was undeterred. She was determined to stay until the end of the mission in order to see the story through, to see the soldiers arrive back at the KOP safely. She was not interested in flying out with me on any helicopter.

  As a photographer in a war zone, I didn’t have a weapon. I needed to get as close as I could to the action in order to get the photographs, but I also needed to stay alive. And the only thing that had kept me alive during Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Congo, and Darfur was my inner voice that told me when I had reached my personal limit of fear. It told me when I needed to pull back to preserve my sanity, and possibly my life. Elizabeth and I as a team were often willing to take the same risks, and this symbiotic relationship was a fundamental part of a successful partnership in war zones. But I was definitely the conservative one, perhaps because of her many years of experience or perhaps because she was braver. Her fearlessness, her commitment to the story, and her boundless energy to take notes every waking second were only some of the things that made her such an incredible journalist. I couldn’t bear to listen to the whisperer saying they were going to attack again.

  Rougle’s pack and I ended up coasting over the desiccated landscape toward Camp Blessing the next day.

  When I arrived at Camp Blessing, I went into the TOC, the command center where Elizabeth and I had begun our journey into the Korengal almost two months before, feeling the weight and sadness of war. For six days I hadn’t taken my jeans off my body, combed my long, scraggly hair, washed my face, looked in a mirror, slept on anything other than the side of a mountain. I greeted the clean, coiffed men navigating the maps, screens, and drone feeds in the control room, and they all stopped and stared at me when I entered. Perhaps it was the sight of my face, blackened with dirt and streamed with tears, or maybe they were slightly shocked that Elizabeth and I were able to hold our own during such an intense mission. Whatever it was, I felt as if we had finally gained their respect with our experience in Rock Avalanche.

  I dumped my pack in a tidy, lonely room with a bed at Blessing and went directly for a shower. The hot water ran long over my naked body for some time, breaking all the rules of limiting water use on the base, and I watched the dirt make dark little rivulets around my feet into the drain. I went back to the room, which seemed like paradise compared to the Abas Ghar ridgeline, and began the long process of downloading my discs. I had hours of work ahead, hours of downloading, editing hundreds of images, and combing through my notes to write captions. It would take me a few days to prepare the images from the Korengal Valley, but I wasn’t in the mental space to give them more than a cursory glance that night before falling asleep.

  I eventually made my way back to Jalalabad, Bagram Airfield, and then Kabul, where I sat in the airport waiting for my flight to Turkey. I was physically shattered, emotionally fragile, and thoroughly exhilarated to have survived my time in the Korengal. Coming so close to the edge of death and pushing myself to my own physical and mental limits helped me appreciate the beauty of daily life. In my late teens I had made a promise to myself that every day I would push myself to do something I didn’t want to do. I was convinced it would ultimately make me become a better person. The philosophy extended to work: I allowed myself to enjoy life only if I worked hard, if I tested my limits, if I created a lasting body of work.

  I wondered where Elizabeth was in the Kor
engal Valley as I boarded my flight with Ariana Afghan Airlines, the rickety national airline I flew only in times of sheer desperation. I was seated in an exit row, and as I stretched out my legs, pleased not to have anyone sitting too close to me, a male Afghan flight attendant came over and stirred me from my solitude: “Madam. You cannot sit here. This is an exit row.”

  “So?”

  “Women cannot sit by the exit door. If there is a flight emergency, a woman wouldn’t be capable of opening the exit door.”

  I got up, and as I moved to my new seat I watched the attendant usher over a frail old man with a white beard, hunched with osteoporosis, to sit by the exit door.

  • • •

  WHEN I GOT HOME to Istanbul, Paul’s lifelong mentor, Peter, was in town visiting with his wife. Usually when I arrived home from an assignment, I was able to switch from the life of drinking electrolyte-filled water in a refugee camp to sipping pinot noir in our apartment with a Bosporus view. They came over before dinner. I was excited to meet someone who had shaped Paul’s life, but much to my surprise, I was struggling to speak.

  My head was fixated on the Abas Ghar ridge, the Korengal Outpost, the villages of Aliabad and Donga, Camp Vegas, Rougle laughing, Rougle in a body bag.

  “Lynsey is a really famous war photographer!” Paul exclaimed proudly. Hearing his description of me made me wince slightly. I wasn’t sure when I had become a war photographer.

  “Shut up, baby,” I joked. “I am not famous, and I am not a war photographer.”

  “So tell me about your last assignment,” Peter prodded.

  “I was in the Korengal Valley with the 173rd Airborne, living at one of their remote bases on and off for a few months.”

  “Really? Was it dangerous? Have you ever almost died?”

  It was a question I had received often since I started covering war. Everyone wanted to reduce my entire career down to the one or two moments when I might have lost my life.

  “Yeah. Um. I guess. It was really intense. We were getting shot at almost every day and then we went on this big mission, where we got ambushed by the Taliban.”

  And suddenly I felt as if words were completely inadequate to describe what we had just endured. How could I describe the disconnect between the soldier’s mission in Afghanistan and the Afghan’s desire to be left alone? How could I describe the terror I felt when I was crouching behind the tipped-over log, with bullets skimming the top of my head; the sadness of seeing Rougle’s body in a bag, of seeing these strapping American boys in their twenties reduced to tears and horror after being overrun by an enemy they never saw? How could I describe that feeling of freedom and exhilaration I had when I was living in the dirt in a place like Camp Vegas, where life’s utter necessities, like water, food, sleep, and staying alive, were all that mattered? How could I describe how I was still trembling from the trauma of the ambush, and still regretting flying out ahead of Elizabeth, and chastising myself for being an inadequate journalist? How could I describe how important I thought it was to be there, with the troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq, to document my generation’s War on Terror without sounding lofty and self-important?

  “It was great!” I said. “Yeah, we lived on the side of a mountain and got ambushed at the end.”

  I could feel my chest tightening and my body getting hot. It was an unfamiliar feeling, being overcome with emotion in the middle of drinks with friends.

  “Please excuse me for a second,” I said. “I have to go to the restroom.”

  I walked back to our bedroom in the rear of the apartment, closed the door behind me, and collapsed into tears. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Elizabeth’s number.

  “Elizabeth?” I said, my voice wavering.

  “I can’t stop crying,” she said.

  “Me neither. Oh, God. And Paul has company here. I am locked in the bathroom and can’t stop crying.”

  “You will be OK. You will be OK.”

  We stayed on the phone until I stopped crying, and eventually I went back to my guests, finished my glass of wine, and left for dinner along the Bosporus.

  • • •

  THREE MONTHS LATER I was in Khartoum, Sudan, preparing to go into Darfur, when Kathy Ryan, the director of photography at the New York Times Magazine, emailed to tell me that Elizabeth had finally submitted her story from the Korengal Valley; the piece would close in the next two weeks. Elizabeth was nine months pregnant. The editors were polishing her piece; the fact-checkers were checking the facts. My picture of Khalid, the boy with shrapnel wounds smattering his face, was being considered as a cover. It was a stark, powerful image that spoke to the ambiguity of war and the inevitability of civilian casualties.

  Five days before the piece went to press, I got a frantic call from a deputy photo editor at the magazine, asking me to go through my notebooks from the Korengal and produce every shred of evidence I could about Khalid.

  There was a question back in New York about how Khalid had sustained his injuries. My captions for the images of Khalid were inconsistent with what Captain Kearney, Elizabeth, and I believed to be the truth—that Khalid was most likely injured by NATO bombs the night before we flew into the Korengal Valley. But almost five months before, when I was downloading my pictures in a bunker at the KOP, I naively entered into the file information of the digital image a rough summary from one of the medics—“ … medics with the 173rd treat local afghans who claim they were injured by american bombs, though their wounds were NOT consistent with the timing of us attacks ion villages near their homes …”—intending to flesh out the information with a more factual account of the events later. I felt that the medic’s remarks were an obvious attempt to protect the U.S. military from a journalist’s scrutiny of civilian casualties from American bombings, but that, as a journalist, I needed to include his opinion. By the time I filed the images from September and October in the Korengal, we had been through weeks of intense experiences, including Operation Rock Avalanche, and I mistakenly submitted photos without updating the captions, instilling doubt in the mind of the editor in chief. The editors at the magazine proceeded to fact-check the issue with one of the public affairs officers with the 173rd Airborne, who very predictably said that the military couldn’t verify 100 percent that Khalid had been wounded in a NATO bombing. The magazine was questioning whether to even run the photo at all.

  After months in the Korengal, the image of Khalid was one of the few instances of a civilian injury caused by a NATO bombing that I witnessed with my own eyes. There was no question that these kinds of injuries were happening all around us, but we weren’t able to access the villages or the victims because of security or timing. I missed the opportunity that day on the side of the mountain overlooking Yaka China, and I felt unconditionally that the image of Khalid’s innocent, blood-spattered face both aesthetically and narratively was crucial to our story.

  But after all that we had endured in the Korengal, our testimony did not seem to matter. Elizabeth and I had watched the events unfold on the screens in the Tactical Operations Command center, had witnessed the insurgents shooting mortars at troops on the ground, had watched the United States drop five-hundred-pound bombs on the compounds, and had been present the next morning when the boy and his family came to the Korengal Outpost for medical treatment. Most of us who had been in the medical tent and at the base that morning had assumed that Khalid was injured in the bombing the night before. Captain Kearney even expressed this to the editor in chief on our behalf, and the debate went on for days. But because of my incomplete caption, the editor trusted the U.S. military public affairs officer—whose main responsibility was to polish the image of the U.S. military to the greater public—over us.

  To make matters worse, from the time we set off to document the story in the Korengal to the final two weeks of the story’s closing, the angle of Elizabeth’s article shifted from the original idea of civilian casualties in war, to Operation Rock Avalanche, to a profile of Captai
n Kearney. In the eyes of the editor in chief, the image of Khalid as an illustration of civilian casualties was no longer relevant. And he was so resolute that the picture would be too controversial without tangible evidence of the cause of the boy’s injury that he decided to strike the image from the story altogether. He then declared he would refuse to run a slide show of images to accompany the piece online. In a time when the space allotted to photographs in magazines was shrinking, a slide show was the consolation prize; images that didn’t fit into the print edition were at least viewed by the public online. I was desperate. I spent almost two months traipsing around the mountains of one of the world’s most dangerous places, and as the piece went to press, my reporting was being questioned, some of my strongest images were being removed from the layout, and the editor in chief decided uncharacteristically that he would not run a slide show. From my perspective, it seemed that he was fed up with our story. Perhaps the reason was the length of time it had taken Elizabeth to write it, or that Vanity Fair had recently published a multipage piece focusing on the Korengal Valley, or simply that we were challenging his editorial judgment while he was being bombarded with doubt by the military public affairs office.

  Elizabeth helped plead my case: She tried to persuade him to at least permit a slide show of my images to accompany her story. Almost until she gave birth, she helped compose e-mails to him, pleading with the editor to honor our reporting.

  The photo department stood by my work, but ultimately the editor in chief had final say. I sat heartbroken in my dismal room at the Acropole Hotel in Khartoum, steeling myself for yet another war, feeling utterly defeated. Kathy, the director of photography and one of the most important women in the business, had by then become a close friend and mentor. By 2008 I had worked on probably five cover stories and several smaller stories with her, and we had developed a deep professional trust in each other. There is a bond between some photographers and their editors, in part because their relationships are so symbiotic. Photographers depend on editors to sponsor and publish their images; editors rely on those images to create powerful visual stories. Our success depended on each other. I seldom faced issues of censorship or questions about the authenticity of my photographs, but when these issues arose, I relied on the photo editor to go to bat for me. With Kathy’s permission and Elizabeth’s edits, I wrote the following e-mail to the editor in chief—something that many would view as overstepping my role as a freelance photographer: