Ben Brody’s Photo Blog

This day is much like I pictured it would be, five years ago. Hot and dusty, my blood still boiling from the countless threats and fights and little triumphs and little defeats, as the war slides into nameless hostile oblivion like little wars so often do.

My mind reaches back to my original purposes for becoming a soldier, which was to learn something of the forces that continually shape our world. I’ve learned a great deal about guerilla warfare, small-unit tactics and the nature of fighting men, though I clearly still have much to learn about the larger cycles of war and peace in a bewilderingly complex world.

Photography has ever been a means to an end for me, driving me toward a continuous stream of fascinating events and forcing me to pay close attention. In my mind, if I’m not out photographing, I’m not living. And though I feel I’ve reached the practical limit of the living I can do in the army, I’m grateful for the many opportunities I’ve had to get out where the air is heavy with lead, operate on my own terms and learn on an unforgiving road. Though my motivation has often been for my own education, I certainly hope I’ve done right by the soldiers on the burning streets, in the deadly alleys, in the trackless desert, in the soggy stinking marshes.

The sheikhs run the Sons of Iraq, the program where the US military pays local men a monthly salary to set up traffic checkpoints and generally make life difficult for foreign fighters and the militias.

It’s been very successful against the foreign-led al-Qaeda in Iraq, less so against the homegrown militias.  Many of the SoI volunteers and leaders are militia members themselves.  But as long as their neighborhoods are reasonably safe, no one cares what membership cards they have in their wallets.

This harmony was upset in Abu Jassim recently when sophisticated IEDs started appearing on the streets.  Several soldiers were wounded by them.  One was pulled off life support last night.  So the SoIs aren’t doing their jobs so well.  But with the Shiite bloodbath only five miles away, it’s not a good idea to scrap the tiny village’s only semblance of a security force.

So we came, we yelled, we cut their pay, we arrested a couple of the militia-affiliated ones who probably had a hand in the bombings.  There were a lot of kids around watching this weird scene.  What a way to learn about the world.

Prisoner release - US-run prisons in Iraq let prisoners go when they determine there’s no more useful information that can be beaten out of them.  The people let go today had been locked up for between one and four years and now return to a totally reshaped area of Iraq under the supervision of a sheikh they’ve never heard of.  There’s not a lot of opportunity for them to commit major crimes in Jurf as Sahkr, especially with a brutal sonofabitch like Sheikh Sabah al-Janabi keeping tabs on them, but a couple of them look pretty determined to try.

Shiites continue to kill each other with great zeal down the road a bit.  We’re regularly rolling out main battle tanks again, for the first time in months.  It’s been two years since I was a gun loader/photoguy on a tank crew, and I’m really, really looking forward to doing it again.  The sensation of riding in a 70-ton M1A1 Abrams is not of movement upon the earth, but that of the earth rotating to meet you.

Setting up a new patrol base in the ruins of a destroyed Iraqi air force installation.  The place is totally abandoned - only the odd Bedouin passes through occasionally, with a dozen goats in tow.

A lot of building materials got trucked in, but the air force decided to airdrop 40 giant pallets of barrier kits, food and plywood.  So in addition to unloading the trucks, we retrieved thousands of pounds of this crap, strewn across the desert and tangled in parachute cord and chicken wire.  So efficient.  When the parachutes started dropping in, like great mutant jellyfish, I saw the goat herder jumping up and down, shouting at the sky.

The dark photos were taken by moonlight at an observation point on top of a bunker at midnight, two km from the patrol base.  Quarter moon, twenty seconds at f/5.6, ISO 1600.

The only other machine of this scale I’ve seen up close was in Kuwait - an oil refinery the size of Manhattan and lit up twice as bright.  In Iskandariyah, sixty percent of Iraq’s electricity is churned into existence at the Korean power plant, a complex of thundering smokestacks and shrieking rusted pipes 25 miles south of Baghdad along the Euphrates River.

Built in the 1980s, bombed to rubble in 1991, rebuilt 10 years later and still limping along like the old Hyundai motor that it is.  Though it will burn pretty much anything you feed it, the plant currently burns raw crude, pumped straight out of the country’s south and trucked up in bullet-riddled tankers to the monster’s gaping maw.

In the control room, a galaxy of blinking, bleeping meters relay information to the blue-suited Iraqi technicians, but very little can actually be controlled from this room.  To make any substantial adjustments to the creature’s temperament takes wrenches and ropes, fire and oil and surely blood.  They say the steam can leak out of the pipes so hot you can’t see it, and so fast it will slice you apart like a light saber.

Outside, the unrefined oil is thick on the ground, built up along the curbs and covering every door handle and light switch.  The lazy green river cools the great screaming turbines, and the carp and catfish gather above the warm outflow pipes.

In Musayyib on a Friday listening to the fiery sermons belting at machinegun pace from the loudspeakers atop the Hussaniyah Mosque.  Flags of the Jaysh al-Mehdi, the Mehdi Army, fly above the lieutenant in the dark alley taking notes on the sermon’s content.  It’s a virulently anti-U.S. and anti-Iraqi government message flooding the crowded markets at 110 decibels, but the people on the street couldn’t have been friendlier.  I am utterly filled with falafel and dolmeh.

I started reading this book called In the Land of the Ayatollahs, Tupac Shakur is King.  It’s a great travel diary from a Persian-Brit who goes to the Middle East for the first time.  A lot of insights into the weird causes and often hilarious realities of religious extremism, which the book’s title alludes to.

Sixteen rockets fell all around me this afternoon, the first one shook me out of bed, the last one I felt from a tiny concrete bunker packed with half-dressed soldiers who work the night shift.

Going from sleeping soundly to abject terror in a tenth of a second is tough on the brains.  It’s easier when I know it’s coming.

Like last month, right before a savage air assault, I felt really sick from all the spicy food I’d been eating.  Throwing up repeatedly in a portajohn in a foreign country at 3 a.m. makes me feel less than capable of engaging a determined enemy in a lethal contest of wits and cool.

But as the helicopters dropped in to pick us up, I decided to just get on and see what happened.  As soon as we were in the air, with the pounding vibrations and churning wind and deafening noise, I felt like a mutant warrior at the top of my game, somewhat sorry for the overmatched holy warriors out there waiting for us.

When there are people out there to fight, you can figure out, logically, why you do what you do: at best, taking a long-suffering village back from fifty murderous psychopaths; at worst, blind bloody revenge for things like rocket attacks on the trailer parks where we sleep.

But those damn rockets are so random and impersonal and impossible to defend against that you start to understand why there are so few atheists in the foxholes.

I can picture the cloaked Iraqi men on the roof of a Baghdad elementary school, screaming Allahu Akhbar as the blazing rockets shrink into the west, and the soldiers in their beds bargaining with Jesus to let them land down the street a bit.   God is the name for that which we can’t control, but can still churn us into scraps if we’re not afraid enough.

Sometimes people ask me after a shoot if I think the pictures will come out. It’s been a long time since I had to wonder about that. I just make them how I want them and that’s the end of it. Maybe I could benefit from loosening my grip on that vision, but that’s beside the point.

When some of my colleagues fire their rifles, there’s no need to ask if they hit what they were aiming at.They hit what they want to and that’s the end of it. They don’t beseech a God for his righteous fury to guide their tungsten-carbide slug, they point an infrared laser and smite. That’s how the atheist in the foxhole wins battles. It remains to be seen if that atheist can win a war.