A Letter from Baghdad
Written - 7/22/2003
I left my wife, Theresa, and our son Makai standing in the middle of a “pack shed” for paratroopers early one February morning at Ft. Bragg, NC, and boarded a C5A transport plane. I turned to look at them as I crossed the tarmac about midway to the airplane but could not see them any longer through the dense fog. As I continued to walk carrying all my military equipment, M-16 and camera bag staring at the lights in the aircraft, I kept thinking I would not be gone long. This really isn’t going to happen I kept thinking to myself. After 24 hours on the plane and a three-hour stopover in Spain we landed in Kuwait. Even in February, the desert heat blasted us as we stepped off the plane.
We spent a couple of hours downloading all of our vehicles and other equipment from the plan. Another hour on the road to Camp Arifjan, four days of inprocessing followed by an eight-hour trip north into the dessert where we spent most of March waiting. Most of our time was spent planning, rehearing, and still more waiting. All the while wondering what was in store for us, the soldiers around us, and the American people if we really did “go over the berm.”
Twilight-6(Civil Affairs Team-1/422CA Battalion; The first CA unit in Baghdad) From left: Spc. Quinton Brown; Sgt. Larry Deal; Free Iraqi Forces Dalshad David (our translator); (Me), Cpt. William E. Thompson (team leader); Sgt. Keith Mitchell; SSG. Matt Harshman (team NCOIC); Spc. Duke Calfas; and Spc. Yancy Christopher. This photo was taken in April after the war, at the main electrical distribution center where we lived for more than a month.[/quote]
As a photojournalism instructor and part-time soldier, the decisions to take photographs to be published, and take pictures to just be remembered during combat is sometimes blurred between two communities, the public back home and the families of the soldiers on my Civil Affairs team. My decision to pursue a military career and still be a working journalist and teacher while maintaining objectivity in an international, history-making event has presented several problems when it comes to my publishing photographs during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
For myself and the soldiers on my team, not only were we adjusting to our new environment, but also we were getting readjusted to a new way of life, the Army way. As a Reservist, deployments are something that are only supposed to happen once or so in our military careers. But for most of us on the team this was our second trip to “the sand” or some other god-forsaken part of the world. Being called up meant I would not be able to finish my semester of teaching photojournalism at Randolph Community College in Asheboro North Carolina.
Most of my students visited me in my office before I left saying that they would miss me and “would I be back in time for their graduation.” Like most of the answers I have given for the past six months, I could only say “I don’t know.” One student, who was not in my class but wanted to be in the photojournalism program in the fall, wanted to interview me. She said she was shy about the interview because she didn’t have any journalism experience, but I found myself answering some very though questions anyway.
It was obvious that she had thought through her questions and she was genuinely concerned with our country’s involvement in Iraq. These were also questions I was asking myself before I left. I had only shared my concerns with my wife and I was still not able to put my finger on why it was that the United States was really going to war and why it was that I would be involved. I managed to answer her questions basically saying that “it is on our country’s best interest and that I am fulfilling my duties as a reserve soldier.” This was the same line of reasoning I used to convince myself. She thanked me and wished me luck. I may have even convinced her to hold off on making her sign for the next anti-war protest.
The journalists here are mainly concerned with the big picture, the overall state of the country and the terrorist attacks on the military. My team is concerned with the small problems of everyday life for the population. I consider myself to be a community journalist and I feel this helps when dealing with people on an individual level.
As a journalist, I would have loved to cover this war. The daily stories have been both dramatic and interesting involving everything from the military units engaged in combat to the implications of what it means for Iraq to be free in an international community again.
As a Civil Affairs soldier I am ready to come home. My job here consists of fixing problems, the problem that are only in my control to fix. So far we have managed to do quite a lot and some of it has been very interesting and satisfying, some has not. Tomorrow my team will begin a project to remove 45 looted and destroyed hulk vehicles from a municipal building in downtown Baghdad.
But the majority of our projects end up being frustrating. The payment of 18,000 teachers turned into a riot, as did the payment of employees from the Youth and Sports Ministry. The initial feelings of satisfaction that we are actually getting something done inevitably turns into the disheartenment of trying to control an angry crowd. This has been how most of our progress has been made so far.
As a photographer, I thought I would be shooting photographs everyday, but after being here for this long I have become accustom to, if not desensitized to, the state of this community and these people.
There is so much destruction here and the people themselves have done most of it. The sewage system in Baghdad does not work because the people looted all of the machinery. The electricity does not work because people are stripping the power lines from the poles and selling the copper on the streets. There is no security because there are so many retribution killings, car hijacking, smuggling, and the looting still continues.
As a journalist I feel I could make a difference here by telling these stories and exposing the world to all that is wrong here. But as a civil affairs soldier I have become more concerned with the safety of the soldiers on my team and getting them through the rest of our tour alive.
There are so many stories here. The 15-year-old girl who used to clean the floor of the university dormitory where we live, was killed because she disgraced her family by not wearing her traditional Muslim abaia while she worked around the Americans. She was shot three times in the chest and once in the face at close range outside the gate. Her killer got away. Who will tell her story?
A school headmaster was shot three times in the back while crossing the road. My seven-man team was the first on the scene. I checked for the man’s pulse while my soldiers tried to secure the area. I could not tell if the pulse I was feeling was his or mine. His dilated eyes told me he was dead. There were no witnesses to the crime on the crowded street. Who will tell his story?
When I crossed the berm on May 21, during the initial attack on Iraq, I remember thinking how exciting it was to be in the front seat of history. I photographed an engineer who had spent all night digging through the berm between Kuwait and Iraq with his unit. When we passed him, he was waiving a large America flag as all the combat units passed through the lane. I later found out he continued to waive the flag for the rest of the day as combat and combat support units continued to flood into the country. I was able to publish the photograph in the Providence Journal. One of the embedded journalists traveling with the infantry unit we were with sent the photo back with one of his stories on his InMarsat system. It turned out that the soldier’s mother saw the photograph in the newspaper and asked for a copy. She said she was very proud to see her son on the cover of the paper. I later met the soldier and he also thanked me for the picture and told me how happy his mother was.
After 14 days of fighting heading North toward Baghdad, we finally arrived at the city. My team was attached to Task Force 2-7 Infantry Battalion. Driving all night, the battalion was the first to enter Baghdad stopping at an overpass at the entrance of Saddam International Airport. I photographed the sign to the airport when we passed it. I photographed burning debris along the road. When we stopped under the overpass this is when the fireworks really started. We were taking continuous sniper fire along with artillery bursts every few seconds. The infantry soldiers destroyed two T-72 Iraqi tanks just a few hundred yards away and one of their Bradley Fighting vehicles was hit by an enemy tank while crossing the overpass we were under.
One of the unit’s soldiers who was killed during the fighting has been put in for a Medal of Honor for fending off more than 200 Iraqi soldiers single handedly.
During the battle I photographed my driver taking cover from a sniper behind a HUMWV tire. The photograph was one of my better ones. Although I thought about trying to publish the picture, I decided I did not want to worry his wife if she saw the picture, a decision I made as a soldier and leader. The decision totally went against my views as a journalist. Three months later, my driver will sometimes comes to my room and looks at the picture on the computer screen. He once said “thank you for not letting my wife see this picture in print that day.” Soldiers have their own community. I feel I made the right decision.
The engineer soldier’s family and his community was very proud of him the day he stood waiving the American flag for the invading U.S. Army. I know my family and community are also proud of me. My school raised enough money in one day to purchase a bulletproof vest for me. There was enough money left over for the school to have a concert honoring the school’s deployed soldiers and to purchase phone cards for them. I know I am now a bigger part of my community and my school family. Our country deeply cares about its soldiers.
When we return to our homes and the families and the jobs we left behind, I am hoping I will be able to tell some of the stories of the Iraqi people I met here. I will also have plenty of material for my teaching. Perhaps I will even be able to put together a book of photographs and text describing this war and the subsequent rebuilding of a nation. I am sure the book will provide some insight of what it was like to serve here but I am afraid the book will only be a collection of images documenting life during and after a war. I feel I will still be left with the same question asked of me by the first year photography student: “Why are we going to Iraq?” only now it will be “Why did we go to Iraq?” Perhaps I will come away with the feeling that we, my team, were able to accomplish something and we had a hand in the rebuilding of this country. But after almost six months here I am still not able to answer the questions I had before leaving. I am still telling myself it was in our country’s best interest. I hope my photographs of Iraq and its people can be the beginnings of the sign I plan to make.
- William E. Thompson
I left my wife, Theresa, and our son Makai standing in the middle of a “pack shed” for paratroopers early one February morning at Ft. Bragg, NC, and boarded a C5A transport plane. I turned to look at them as I crossed the tarmac about midway to the airplane but could not see them any longer through the dense fog. As I continued to walk carrying all my military equipment, M-16 and camera bag staring at the lights in the aircraft, I kept thinking I would not be gone long. This really isn’t going to happen I kept thinking to myself. After 24 hours on the plane and a three-hour stopover in Spain we landed in Kuwait. Even in February, the desert heat blasted us as we stepped off the plane.
We spent a couple of hours downloading all of our vehicles and other equipment from the plan. Another hour on the road to Camp Arifjan, four days of inprocessing followed by an eight-hour trip north into the dessert where we spent most of March waiting. Most of our time was spent planning, rehearing, and still more waiting. All the while wondering what was in store for us, the soldiers around us, and the American people if we really did “go over the berm.”
Twilight-6(Civil Affairs Team-1/422CA Battalion; The first CA unit in Baghdad) From left: Spc. Quinton Brown; Sgt. Larry Deal; Free Iraqi Forces Dalshad David (our translator); (Me), Cpt. William E. Thompson (team leader); Sgt. Keith Mitchell; SSG. Matt Harshman (team NCOIC); Spc. Duke Calfas; and Spc. Yancy Christopher. This photo was taken in April after the war, at the main electrical distribution center where we lived for more than a month.[/quote]
As a photojournalism instructor and part-time soldier, the decisions to take photographs to be published, and take pictures to just be remembered during combat is sometimes blurred between two communities, the public back home and the families of the soldiers on my Civil Affairs team. My decision to pursue a military career and still be a working journalist and teacher while maintaining objectivity in an international, history-making event has presented several problems when it comes to my publishing photographs during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
For myself and the soldiers on my team, not only were we adjusting to our new environment, but also we were getting readjusted to a new way of life, the Army way. As a Reservist, deployments are something that are only supposed to happen once or so in our military careers. But for most of us on the team this was our second trip to “the sand” or some other god-forsaken part of the world. Being called up meant I would not be able to finish my semester of teaching photojournalism at Randolph Community College in Asheboro North Carolina.
Most of my students visited me in my office before I left saying that they would miss me and “would I be back in time for their graduation.” Like most of the answers I have given for the past six months, I could only say “I don’t know.” One student, who was not in my class but wanted to be in the photojournalism program in the fall, wanted to interview me. She said she was shy about the interview because she didn’t have any journalism experience, but I found myself answering some very though questions anyway.
It was obvious that she had thought through her questions and she was genuinely concerned with our country’s involvement in Iraq. These were also questions I was asking myself before I left. I had only shared my concerns with my wife and I was still not able to put my finger on why it was that the United States was really going to war and why it was that I would be involved. I managed to answer her questions basically saying that “it is on our country’s best interest and that I am fulfilling my duties as a reserve soldier.” This was the same line of reasoning I used to convince myself. She thanked me and wished me luck. I may have even convinced her to hold off on making her sign for the next anti-war protest.
The journalists here are mainly concerned with the big picture, the overall state of the country and the terrorist attacks on the military. My team is concerned with the small problems of everyday life for the population. I consider myself to be a community journalist and I feel this helps when dealing with people on an individual level.
As a journalist, I would have loved to cover this war. The daily stories have been both dramatic and interesting involving everything from the military units engaged in combat to the implications of what it means for Iraq to be free in an international community again.
As a Civil Affairs soldier I am ready to come home. My job here consists of fixing problems, the problem that are only in my control to fix. So far we have managed to do quite a lot and some of it has been very interesting and satisfying, some has not. Tomorrow my team will begin a project to remove 45 looted and destroyed hulk vehicles from a municipal building in downtown Baghdad.
But the majority of our projects end up being frustrating. The payment of 18,000 teachers turned into a riot, as did the payment of employees from the Youth and Sports Ministry. The initial feelings of satisfaction that we are actually getting something done inevitably turns into the disheartenment of trying to control an angry crowd. This has been how most of our progress has been made so far.
As a photographer, I thought I would be shooting photographs everyday, but after being here for this long I have become accustom to, if not desensitized to, the state of this community and these people.
There is so much destruction here and the people themselves have done most of it. The sewage system in Baghdad does not work because the people looted all of the machinery. The electricity does not work because people are stripping the power lines from the poles and selling the copper on the streets. There is no security because there are so many retribution killings, car hijacking, smuggling, and the looting still continues.
As a journalist I feel I could make a difference here by telling these stories and exposing the world to all that is wrong here. But as a civil affairs soldier I have become more concerned with the safety of the soldiers on my team and getting them through the rest of our tour alive.
There are so many stories here. The 15-year-old girl who used to clean the floor of the university dormitory where we live, was killed because she disgraced her family by not wearing her traditional Muslim abaia while she worked around the Americans. She was shot three times in the chest and once in the face at close range outside the gate. Her killer got away. Who will tell her story?
A school headmaster was shot three times in the back while crossing the road. My seven-man team was the first on the scene. I checked for the man’s pulse while my soldiers tried to secure the area. I could not tell if the pulse I was feeling was his or mine. His dilated eyes told me he was dead. There were no witnesses to the crime on the crowded street. Who will tell his story?
When I crossed the berm on May 21, during the initial attack on Iraq, I remember thinking how exciting it was to be in the front seat of history. I photographed an engineer who had spent all night digging through the berm between Kuwait and Iraq with his unit. When we passed him, he was waiving a large America flag as all the combat units passed through the lane. I later found out he continued to waive the flag for the rest of the day as combat and combat support units continued to flood into the country. I was able to publish the photograph in the Providence Journal. One of the embedded journalists traveling with the infantry unit we were with sent the photo back with one of his stories on his InMarsat system. It turned out that the soldier’s mother saw the photograph in the newspaper and asked for a copy. She said she was very proud to see her son on the cover of the paper. I later met the soldier and he also thanked me for the picture and told me how happy his mother was.
After 14 days of fighting heading North toward Baghdad, we finally arrived at the city. My team was attached to Task Force 2-7 Infantry Battalion. Driving all night, the battalion was the first to enter Baghdad stopping at an overpass at the entrance of Saddam International Airport. I photographed the sign to the airport when we passed it. I photographed burning debris along the road. When we stopped under the overpass this is when the fireworks really started. We were taking continuous sniper fire along with artillery bursts every few seconds. The infantry soldiers destroyed two T-72 Iraqi tanks just a few hundred yards away and one of their Bradley Fighting vehicles was hit by an enemy tank while crossing the overpass we were under.
One of the unit’s soldiers who was killed during the fighting has been put in for a Medal of Honor for fending off more than 200 Iraqi soldiers single handedly.
During the battle I photographed my driver taking cover from a sniper behind a HUMWV tire. The photograph was one of my better ones. Although I thought about trying to publish the picture, I decided I did not want to worry his wife if she saw the picture, a decision I made as a soldier and leader. The decision totally went against my views as a journalist. Three months later, my driver will sometimes comes to my room and looks at the picture on the computer screen. He once said “thank you for not letting my wife see this picture in print that day.” Soldiers have their own community. I feel I made the right decision.
The engineer soldier’s family and his community was very proud of him the day he stood waiving the American flag for the invading U.S. Army. I know my family and community are also proud of me. My school raised enough money in one day to purchase a bulletproof vest for me. There was enough money left over for the school to have a concert honoring the school’s deployed soldiers and to purchase phone cards for them. I know I am now a bigger part of my community and my school family. Our country deeply cares about its soldiers.
When we return to our homes and the families and the jobs we left behind, I am hoping I will be able to tell some of the stories of the Iraqi people I met here. I will also have plenty of material for my teaching. Perhaps I will even be able to put together a book of photographs and text describing this war and the subsequent rebuilding of a nation. I am sure the book will provide some insight of what it was like to serve here but I am afraid the book will only be a collection of images documenting life during and after a war. I feel I will still be left with the same question asked of me by the first year photography student: “Why are we going to Iraq?” only now it will be “Why did we go to Iraq?” Perhaps I will come away with the feeling that we, my team, were able to accomplish something and we had a hand in the rebuilding of this country. But after almost six months here I am still not able to answer the questions I had before leaving. I am still telling myself it was in our country’s best interest. I hope my photographs of Iraq and its people can be the beginnings of the sign I plan to make.
- William E. Thompson
posted by Capt_T @ 11:08 PM
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