This photo is of an Iraqi soldier in the throes of an agonizingly painful death during a 1991 military action known as “Desert Storm” in which U.S. troops drove the Iraqi army from Kuwait. The caption for the August 2014 Atlantic magazine story accompanying the photo reads, “When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War. But the Media wouldn’t run the picture.” The author of the accompanying article describes the scene depicted: “The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body….In [the] photograph taken soon after, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield… He stares without eyes.” (1). In commenting on why the photo remained unpublished in the United States for so many years, the author asserts, “It’s hard to calculate the consequences of a photograph’s absence. But sanitized images of warfare….make it ‘easier…to accept bloodless language’ such as 1991 references to ‘surgical strikes’ or modern day language like ‘kinetic warfare.” (2) The author adds, “In the case of the charred Iraqi soldier, the hypnotizing and awful photograph ran against the popular myth of the Gulf War as a ‘video-game war’-a conflict made humane through precision bombing and night-vision equipment. By deciding not to publish it, Time magazine and the Associated Press denied the public the opportunity to confront this unknown enemy and consider his excruciating final moments.” (2-3).
The photo brings home the unflinching true war story faced by many veterans, namely, the reality and pain that comes from having intentionally killed someone. When a soldier kills his nameless, identity-less alleged enemy, he must find a way to cope with having taken a human life. In O’Brien’s chapter titled, “The man I killed,” he describes tossing a grenade from his hiding spot at a soldier who was walking down a path wearing a gray ammunition belt. O’Brien writes of the aftermath: “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star shaped hole…his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was the wound that had killed him….His chest was sunken and poorly muscled-a scholar maybe. (118). In addition to this devastating visual reminder of the enormity of O’Brien’s actions, the contemplation of who this young man had been and hoped to become is equally unbearable. O’Brien writes, “He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village of My Khe near the central coastline of Quang Ngai Province, where his parents farmed and where his family had lived for several centuries, and where, during the time of the french, his father and two uncles and many neighbors had joined in the struggle for independence. He was not a communist. He was a citizen and a soldier. In the village of My Khe, as in all Quang Ngai, patriotic resistance had the force of tradition, which was partly the force of legend, and from his earliest boyhood the man I killed would have listened to stories about the heroic Trung sisters and Tran Hung Dao’s famous rout of the Mongols….He would have been taught that to defend the land was a man’s highest duty and privilege. He had accepted this. It was never open to question. Secretly, though, it also frightened him. He was not a fighter….He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics.” (118-19) By humanizing the man he believes he has played a role in killing, O’Brien pierces the inescapable heart of war. It is not just mourning for the loss of one’s comrades. It is mourning for the death of the individuals whose lives one has extinguished. This would be mathematics teacher will never step to the front of a classroom or share stories with his children. Whether reading O’Brien’s true war story or observing Jarecke’s true war photo, the understanding that there are so many veterans who have to cope with the enormity of having been so personally and undeniably responsible for another’s horrific and untimely death becomes central to understanding the true nature of war. When one is forced to look into the burned out sockets of the Iraqi soldier one cannot avoid the knowledge that he too had a family, dreams and a proud ancestry, all of which had been destroyed in a scorching, burning, screaming, inhuman, crescendo of violence, pain, unimaginable fear and finally nothing. Just as O’Brien and his surviving platoon mates have to encounter these images every day of their lives so too do the veterans of Desert Storm and all other wars – past and present.
Bibliography
Flickr. Yahoo!, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.
Klay, Phil, and Phil Klay. Redeployment. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2016
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction. New York: Broadway, 1998. Print.
Yeats, W. B. The Wild Swans at Coole. New York: The Macmillan company, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999
I think that the reason why the US media didn't run the photo is because it would make the opposing side seem vulnerable, showing how these people are not evil, but instead they are innocent people who are being killed in some of the worst ways possible. Connecting back to how O'Brien would not look at the people who he and his fellow soldiers killed, posting this photo in the media will cause the bystanders of the war to see what the soldiers have to deal with on an everyday basis, that they had to kill someone who also had a family to care for.
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