Oregon Humanities

The Only Blame

Last month, Sweden-based wikileaks.org published a classified US Army helicopter gun-camera video on youtube, and my inbox immediately filled with friends and acquaintances and people I didn’t even know asking me what I thought about it. The video showed an American helicopter attack in the “Sadr City” neighborhood of Baghdad. I was sought for comment because I had covered Iraq as a photojournalist in the early years of the war.

Like tens of millions of other people who saw scenes from this video on youtube or on television (the full version can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/wikileakssadrcity) I was horrified as I watched innocent Iraqis torn to pieces in bursts of gunfire punctuated with a disturbing stream of radio chatter that seemed as much at home in a video arcade as a live-fire war zone. Indeed it’s almost impossible not to imagine the whole video as a first-person shooter game. But, surprisingly, doing so doesn’t make it easier to watch; that cheapening of human life makes it all the more disturbing.

Perhaps these scenes struck me particularly hard because I could so easily imagine myself among the dead. Two of the twelve Iraqis killed that day were photojournalists for Reuters, Saeed Chmangh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. Seeing them walk the streets of Sadr City in the moments before their violent death was like having an out-of-body experience. How easily I could imagine myself in their shoes.

I recognize the characteristic posture of manufactured confidence these journalists assume as they walk through a growing crowd of local men, some apparently armed. It’s not uncommon to find armed men in Sadr City, and they’re not necessarily insurgents. They could be out-of-uniform police, or bodyguards, or a neighborhood watch, or just protective home-owners. But no matter who they are, we as outsider photojournalists want to make them as comfortable as possible and we do this by modeling confidence. I see it in the way these Reuters journalists never pause, the way they take a fearless lead as they walk to and peer around a dangerous corner, the way they sling their cameras around their bodies like weapons. All of these are subtle techniques to put the armed men among them at ease, and when I see these journalists working the crowd it’s like looking in a mirror.

How many times had I come close to a similar fate during the years I covered Iraq as an unembedded photojournalist? How many times was I the one leading a group of armed men I’d just met to a front line? How many times was I unwittingly in the eye of a helicopter gun camera? It is hard for me not to take the wikileaks video personally.

However, I could also see myself in the seat of the helicopter. One of my most intense experiences as a photojournalist was embedding for a few weeks with a helicopter-borne US Army medevac team as they darted in and out of the lawless valleys and hot zone front lines in Eastern Afghanistan. Their mission was to evacuate and treat both Afghans and Americans wounded in the ongoing fighting along the Pakistani border. They rescued both friend and foe. I watched these brave men and women risk their own lives to save the lives of others, and I made friendships with some of them that still continue, three years later. The radio chatter between our Blackhawks and the Apache gun ships that escorted us was officious but sometimes juvenile, often cocky and laced with black humor. It was not unlike the radio chatter in the wikileaks video, but under the stresses of the time I spent with the medevac crew I grew accustomed to it and it even began to take on a comforting tone.

After the release of the wikileaks video the Army responded, saying that the helicopter gunner was convinced the innocent men on the ground were armed insurgents and posed a threat to an American patrol several blocks away. I can’t confirm all the details of this explanation, but there is a germ of plausibility in it. I can imagine a helicopter gunner requesting permission to fire and a commanding officer granting that permission because they think they are doing all they can to protect the lives of their fellow soldiers nearby on the ground. See, that’s the most insidious thing about war: it can twist our best intentions and wring out the worst in us.

Who can I blame? Who is responsible for the deaths of those journalists, those innocent men; for the gunning down of heroic passers-by who stopped to rescue one of the journalists while he was still crawling, alive; for the maiming of the two children in the front seat of the would-be rescuers’ van? From this video evidence alone I honestly can’t pin the blame on any one actor. Not the journalists, not the armed men who wander the streets of Sadr City, not the helicopter gunner, not the commanding officer who gives permission to open fire, nor the group of insurgent fighters the Army insists was massed nearby. But I can fault the war. And that means the responsibility is on our shoulders for allowing this war to come to pass.

About Thorne Anderson

Thorne Anderson is a photojournalist, assistant professor of photojournalism at the University of North Texas, and co-author/photographer of the book and traveling exhibition Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq. He led a discussion about photography and war at Think & Drink in Portland on May 26.

01 June 2010 | Posted by Thorne Anderson in Inside O. Hm.
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