Ben Brody’s Photo Blog

A couple days at the MOD, Iraq’s ministry of defense, a giant military compound in north Baghdad right on the river.  Imagine the Pentagon, but with an entire light infantry division of third world troops garrisoned there and spotty electricity.

I went on one humanitarian aid drop and one predawn hate raid, both led by the Iraqi Army, so I think morally I broke about even for the trip.  I wasn’t photographing very well given the gravity of both scenes - it’s time for me to take a break from this place.  68 days left, by the latest count.  It feels like it’s almost over.  I’m going on fewer missions on purpose, I’ve seen enough combat for this year and I’d like to survive long enough to take a small vacation at the end of this chapter of my participation in the Great Crusade.

Wild Bill, the man who was a big part of my military trajectory died today, just south of here.  He was my battalion commander in boot camp, I remember him crawling next to me through the sand and concertina wire and sweat and gnawing fear of brand new soldiers as three big machineguns rattled over our heads, tracers twisting wildly in the cold winter wind.  Wild Bill they called him.  He came to Spartan BCT at the same time I did, did a double take after walking into a smelly tent in a Louisiana swamp and see Wild Bill standing there looking like he just bit a rattlesnake’s head off.  Infantry for 18 years always looking for combat and never found it once until a five pound hunk of molten copper came crashing through Wild Bill’s door at seven thousand feet per second.  This place is weird, sometimes that’s all the combat you see in ten months, but that’s all it takes.

I ran tonight, despite no sleep for two days at the MOD, until there was nothing left, till my lungs felt like raisins and my blood felt like gasoline and I could feel the little capillaries opening up turning electric in my fingertips and everything but my brain screamed for me to stop and I kept running and it got dark and the stars came out through the red shiny mackerel skin clouds and the smoke on the horizon and the painful thought of Wild Bill being gone forever drifted away.
The next two years will almost certainly bring another tour in Iraq or Afghanistan, or some other nation of oil-producing non-whites that’s ripe for our brand of freedom.  That’s fine with me, as long as I’m not in Baghdad again.  An interesting city, to be sure, but not so much that I want to do this tour all over again.
The worst problem with Baghdad is one of statistics.  Approximately one percent of soldiers who do daily patrols for a year in Baghdad die.  It’s been true for every unit that’s operated here.  So when the number of missions you’ve been on climbs past 100, past 120, up around 140 for me now, it wears on you terribly that you’ve been lucky, and might be beating some odds that don’t abide being beaten.
With four weeks left I’m not going out much, just packing up and getting ready to fly to Georgia and rent a doublewide on three acres of land in the endless pine forest and swipe some old humvee tires and grow some garlic and basil in em.
So hopefully I won’t have any more tales of madness and chaos to mass-email about for the rest of the year.  Thanks to everyone for writing me, it’s great, it’s the best, if you know anyone else far from home in some strange land write to them, even the very intrepid need letters from home.  Thanks.

Ah, Baghdad is finally back to its normal violent noisy fatalistic self, after 36 hours of spooky quiet as the constitutional referendum came and went.  People seemed excited to vote, and spoke of a strong sense of civic duty to participate.  One guy gushed about how he voted twice, beaming at how good a citizen he felt he was.  Turnout at the places I went to, both Shia and Sunni neighborhoods, was significantly higher than you could expect anywhere in the US.

The Shia ghetto of Sadr City was a challenge, lots of rocks in the air and my gunner got hit with a little bottle of used motor oil, covering his heavy vest with black goo and glass, glittering in the sun.  Adhamiya, the heart of Sunni-dom in Iraq, was much less chaotic, but much more heavily policed.  We were supposed to keep a low profile while people voted, but I found myself traveling in a huge armored column, and passing tanks all over Baghdad.

A day later, the stacatto cracking of automatic rifle fire cuts the hours into pieces, the only ticks on the clock that have any real meaning here.  The hours breed paranoia when you can’t hear and feel the pulse of the war.  A finger stiffly on that pulse is how you stay safe here.

one of those days that seemed like it was a scene in some movie glorifying war, you know, the kind that doesn’t show soldiers pissing in bottles and burning their shit in the rain, the kind where they play opera music during the worst of the fighting.  the light was rich and red out in the desert wastes south of the city.  there’s really no violence out there, just a few farmers growing tubers and endless dust and wind.  people seem curious about us down there, like they know they’re on the fringes of something big, but they never really see it.  tall wispy trees, little canals, so so quiet - it’s where i would want to live if i had to live in iraq.  we were observing mortar fire, crouched in an old bombed out concrete bunker - four bombs hit it, three exploded - leaving the hulk of a 250 pound aviation bomb in our midst.  the mortars hit about 300 meters away with a satisfying crunch and a low blast wave like a little kid punching you in the gut.  as they fell we radioed the mortar crews and guided them to the target they were practicing on, to calibrate their systems for the next combat mission.  huge black and white vultures circled the black and white clouds thrown up by the mortars, diving into the blowing dust then soaring up over it, diving again.  driving back into the city, the sun burned cool and low, huge against the power plants and the smokestacks belching fire in the distance.  the time changed today and it gets dark early, the night is obscuring the black smoke around us always, stars punching through implacable like the farmers pulling turnips from the desert south of the doomstruck city.

We’re coming toward the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum, where Iraqis will be given a choice which will only serve to define which side of the inevitable civil war they’ll be on.

We’re seeing the dam holding the Shias from attacking the Sunnis grow thinner every day.  At the moment, one man holds it in place, the elderly scholar Sistani.

We’re hearing of anti war protests in the states, where people are always rallying for and against things they don’t understand.

A woman in the Atlanta airport spoke to me as I shuffled by, smelling like an alligator in rumpled desert fatigues.  She said, “Why can’t we just use the A-bomb?”
Typical American, wants to push a button and make it all go away.

I came here to see for myself, to try and understand that side of my beloved country that is at once desperately optimistic and incurably violent, and the more clearly I see it, the joke seems too inhumane to bear.

My pictures are getting quieter, fuzzier photographs of clearer ideas, methinks.

I feel like I swallowed an icepick, and have for three days, but it was so worth it.  It all started when this Iraqi paramilitary police bunch of crazies put on a demonstration for some of us, lots of smoke and noise, most were firing blanks, but a few shots had that distinctive echo of live ammo.

Afterward like thirty of us went upstairs in their bombed out headquarters to feast.  A 20 foot long table, piled high with huge baked river fish, lamb, every possible variation of chick peas, the best damn hummus I’ve ever had, and lots of other stuff I couldn’t indentify or even really describe.   We crowded round, standing, and ate with our hands.  I was in heaven.

I knew there were people with typhus in the building, that there was raw sewage outside and in the cellar, that Iraqis don’t share western concepts of personal hygiene, but it was too good to miss.  And now I pay dearly for it, digestively speaking.

The next day, before the consequences of my gluttony were showing, I wound up at the Martyr’s Monument, an enormous turquoise onion-shaped dome, split down the middle and offset a bit, like two 150 foot tall half-onions, built to honor all the Iraqis who died fighting Iran.   It’s gorgeous, and it looks like the kind of thing that will endure.

Across a system of ponds, an amusement park was in full swing, heathens screaming on rickety roller coasters, young couples riding the sky trams, the smell of falafel carts or whatever the hell Iraqis would eat at baseball games.  Watching the ferris wheel turn slowly, hypnotically, when a huge column of smoke and fire rose in the distance behind it, followed by a low, insistent concussion, the kind only the really huge bombs make, the kind that smashes glass for a mile and causes instant reverence and wonder.

We stayed at the monument for a few minutes longer, took some pictures of the ferris wheel and the angry black cloud behind it, and moved out to the site of the explosion.  It wasn’t hard to find, lots of people on foot were on their way there, and the buildings were low enough to follow the smoke.

There were hundreds of people milling about seven incinerated cars, the upside down carcass of a shuttle bus, smashed buildings, smashed asphalt, smashed people.  Twelve of us in four vehicles, we got out, minus the four gunners, and strode up to the crater.   Smoldering cars hissed and steamed as firefighters sprayed them down and the soapy, oily water mixed with blood to form a deep black puddle in the crater.

I was trying to photograph the city’s emergency services in action, they seemed to have things on the way to being under control, doing a good thing for their country, and I wanted to try and highlight that for my fishwrapper of a newsrag.  Photographed a young man in shock, the thousand yard stare, palms outstretched near a overturned car, as an increasingly violent mob swirled around him.

People jumped on the twisted cars, screaming at us, throwing asphalt, waving posters of Muqtada al-Sadr that appeared from thin air - in seconds they were chanting some kind of threat at incredible volume, closing around us quickly.

You can learn a lot about yourself, and the people around you, when your small party is the focal point for a huge mob’s violent rage.  A thousand ideas, possibilities, maneuvers flashed through my mind - keeping a mob at bay can be done, but it requires one to think fifty moves in advance and do absolutely whatever it takes to keep them from organizing.

We tightened into a small, pointy object bent on holding our ground for the twenty seconds it would take for our gunners to bring the trucks in and get us.  When it became clear they weren’t coming, we pushed through the crowd, slowly, deliberately, trying to conceal our vulnerability with cool and control, then dashed the last five feet into the gun trucks and sped off, rocks flying in the air, people running after us, trying to head us off at the next block and there it was, huge, taking up the whole windshield, an Abrams battle tank, 70 tons of Law and Order thundering past us, toward the mob, firing a heavy machine gun in the air, scattering everyone, and I thought to myself, breathing deeply - America. Fuck yeah.

I saw it on the news later that night, apparently the camera guy was on the roof and caught a lot of it.  God, I’d love a copy of that tape.  It was funny, because on our way to the Martyr’s Monument, I’d joked that our little sightseeing trip would probably wind up causing some kind of international incident.

Ben

I think I quit smoking. For a while, anyway.  Haven’t been writing much, yeah I been busy but it’s not just that, I feel distant, from everyone.  I stand on the streets here crowds surging around me, brimming with malice and desperation and it feels like when I’m alone on some big cold mountain.  I stand like a statue in the chaos and it feels right like when I’m alone on some big cold mountain.  It’s like tapping into something primal, being so close to all the violence and mayhem, bullets whisper in the air around me, speaking in mad tongues. hissing women in black robes push and claw each other. kids encircle me, shrieking my name. men named death leap out from low archways.

Foot patrols through sad dusty streets lined with trash and dead animals, sewage everywhere.  Mobs of kids follow us as we weave through alleys, begging for chocolate, band aids, pens, sunglasses, anything really.  Some can speak enough English to converse a little.  They ask my name, and I tell them with a bellow, “rrrrrRaoul!”  Then I’ve got them, following us down the street shouting, “rrrRaoul!”  Then we emerge from the narrow passages into the street, our gun trucks roar up, and we climb into them, cursing the heat and cursing the stench, throwing a little candy to kids from the turret.  The kids love us, their parents tell us they love us but then they shoot rockets at the places we sleep.

Five days on the road, moving between units separated by hot dangerous roads, the little bases 2 miles apart might as well be a hundred miles apart since you’ve got to amass a terrifying display of force to travel between them.  Big trucks, big guns, rehearsals, the works.

Saturday was Operation Sheep Drop.  A bunch of Iraqi Army guys and a few of our guys brought sixty live baa-aa-ing sheep to just distribute randomly in downtown Baghdad, the part that looks kind of like Boston’s theater district with more mosques and barbed wire.  Twelve US soldiers and twenty-three Iraqi soldiers attempted to convince 500 livestock-crazed locals that sixty sheep weren’t worth rioting over.  Results were mixed.  Men in business suits ran into office buildings, each with a kicking sheep under an arm.

Continuing to refine a style, photographically.  Chaos is absolutely everywhere, and I think part of making a good journalistic photo involves blending some with that chaos, or void, or whatever the monks are calling it now.  Objectivity has not factored into this style as of yet.  It’s hard to blend gracefully with anything with 90 pounds of gear on, but I’m working at it, always.

Ever since Anderson died, I’ve been dreaming vividly, dreams I remember for days.  It opened my eyes wider, put me more in the here and now, like a deep breath on a cold morning in a strange place.
I went on a patrol Feb. 27, 2005 with a company that split into three teams - each team set up a checkpoint on a road in southeast Baghdad, a loosely populated, quasi-industrial part of the city.  At night, the roads were almost empty. The teams stopped cars, searched them for bombs and guns, asked some questions, and sent them on their way.
After an hour of this, we picked up and moved to another road, a lonely dirt strip with a shit river on one side, a junkyard on the other.  A small dog, chained up in a deep shadow on the side of the road, howled at us with anger and pain.  All of our lights were out; a line of armored Humvees, a tank-like creature (a FASV for the militarily inclined) and thirty soldiers waited in the dark, except for the guy standing in the middle of the road with a flashlight to wave cars down.  Three distinct species of noisy frog competed with the dog for our ears’ attention while we peered into the darkness, watching.
A pair of headlights and the sound of an overworked engine came to us from the road leading to the city, coming fast.
The flashlight was not getting their attention so warning shots went off, gleaming tracers that arc and twist and dive through the air - a beautiful thing to watch when they’re yours.  Screeching tires, four doors pop open hands in the air, driver shouts proudly, “Meesta, I am drrrink!”
The drunk Muslim men weaved slowly away after the encounter, still seeming happy to be alive and wasted in Baghdad.
At the same time, two miles away, another team was in the same position - a speeding car coming toward them in the dark.  Shots came from everywhere, and Anderson fell, shot through the stomach from one side to the other.  A huge machine gun on the FASV ended the exchange, obliterated the car and everything in it.  It shuddered to a halt and they tried to piece together what happened, as the medics tried to stop the river from his aorta.
No one knows for sure what happened, whether the Iraqi shot him, or whether he moved into the line of fire or what.
The sound of confusion and anguish coming from the little green box made the dog and the frogs and the crickets and the clanking of our iron weapons disappear.
I photographed in the moonlight, no flash allowed, and quietly conducted interviews, scribbling with a red lens penlight in my teeth.
There are questions from the man and questions from me.
The teams linked together again and drove back to the base. The deafening rattle in the belly of the FASV made conversation impossible, faraway stares on men’s faces, lit by dim green light.
Your perception of meaningless noise and your tolerance of the inane comes back slowly, through the days, the stare fades and your level of awareness does too.  I understand why people are drawn to this terrible work, and I’m sure there will always be a supply of those willing to go to war for rulers to manipulate.
This month’s magazine is almost ready to go to print - I think it looks pretty good.  We print about 3500 of them, distribute 2500 here, send the rest to the families back at Fort Stewart.  Won the Army photojournalism contest again this year for covering a four-day Civil War reenactment in Florida, dressed as a Georgia reb and carrying my Nikon D2H in a tarred canvas haversack.  Good times.
Thanks to everyone for writing me.  Things are good.
Your Correspondent in Baghdad,
Ben

Two hours aboard a C-130 up to Baghdad International, an ancient hulk of a plane that flies low and slow, and noisy and cramped and cold.  Looking out the windows was facilitated by raising my digicam over the back of my head, shooting, and viewing the image on the little monitor.  It appears we passed over endless miles of emptiness as the sun set.  After a night in a little canvas tent, we boarded a Chinook, those schoolbus-sized helicopters that have two rotors.  My spine still aches from the 300 meter walk out to the bird - all told, carrying about 140 pounds of stuff on my back.  We dropped our gear in the middle, sat along the sides facing inward, shut off all the lights and rose into foggy dark, the stink of Malice all around, stronger than I’ve ever known it.  I sat at the very back of the Chinook, by the tail gunner, who sits on the open cargo door, legs dangling out, watching for The Enemy.  The lights of Baghdad neighborhoods looked just like any other city from the air, except for some areas that were completely dark.  Bitterly cold wind swirled all around us, and all of a sudden blinding red light, a swoosh and the smell of cordite flashed through the rear door, as our anti-missile flare system decided someone was launching a stinger at us.  I still don’t know if there was a threat or the system just went off.  It’s pretty rare they shoot at birds at night, which is why we flew then.  We landed in the quietest place I’ve seen in a month, somewhere in the Green Zone, and soldiers argued about whether or not it was ok to smoke there, on a strip of concrete surrounded by palm trees.  Ugh, Americans.

Saw the stars well for the first time out here, which had a profoundly grounding effect after the are-they-shooting-rockets-at-us incident.  Another night in a canvas tent, in what looked like the remote reaches of a massive midwestern warehouse/loading yard.  Today we drove to where we’re gonna be, Camp Loyalty.  I was in the back of an armored personnel carrier so I didn’t see much of anything along the way.  Camp Loyalty is a sprawling Iraqi military complex, bombed to hell then cordoned off with 20 foot walls all around it.  We live in the buildings that didn’t get leveled by US Bombs - they resemble my basic training barracks.  There is rubble everywhere, huge half-standing buildings that will make for wonderful postcard photography once I get my stuff situated.  The chow hall is incredible.  In this place that looks like a vision of the apocalypse, the last and greatest failure of civilization, the servers wear bow ties and pinstriped vests, and the food is great.  If there was a sub joint in Boston that could make me a grilled chicken and mozzerella sandwich like the one I had for lunch, I’d practically live there.  The 1st Cavalry Division is here now and things will be cramped until they start leaving in about two weeks.  They are really happy to see us - 3ID is their ticket home.
Thanks to everyone for writing me so much.  It’s great.  Just don’t thank me for fighting for freedom, liberty, or our rotten president.  None of that is going on here.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

Ben