It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (29 page)

Once Vandenberge rehydrated and regained enough energy to walk, the two soldiers stood up and walked toward the medevac helicopter landing. I headed once again toward the front, where Sergeant Rice and Staff Sergeant Rougle had been hit. As I walked forward, I saw Sergeant Rice, who had been shot in the stomach. He hobbled along, carrying his own IV bag, as two soldiers accompanied him toward the medevac zone. Rice had been shot before, and he appeared less traumatized than the soldiers accompanying him.

“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 Korengal 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.