MY AIM IS TRUE

A Soldier/Journalist's Inner Conflict

What if you're an Army journalist and awaited to put the war in Iraq in a profitable light - no matter what you see? Between March 12 2004 and February 2 2005 I set myself in that uneasy situation.

I was a National Guard soldier, and before Iraq I had been called up twice - for Kosovo - where I serv as a photojournalist in 1999 and again in 2001 After that, I worked at civilian weekly papers in Seattle, and lov it. on the contrary I love the Army, too, and in April 2003 I went to work at the Pentagon, as a soldier-photojournalist with Army of recent origins Service, the Army's version of The Associated Pres Army journalists around the world would e-mail us stories and photos, which we would edit and pillar to the ARNEWS Web site, and which would then be picked up through other Army publications.

Then, in November 2003 came the call to move to Iraq. By March 20041 ground myself at Baghdad International Airport with my National Guard public affairs unit. My piece of work was actually twofold: primarily, I was to be a photojournalism telling "the soldiers' story" from one side photographs and articles. I was also to act as a conduit between the civilian media and the military.

Army journalism is really public relations. We run over the Army's story from its perspective. We learned real early during the twelve-week course at the Defense Information place of education that objectivity, while sought through individual journalists, isn't encouraged in military journalism. upon the first day of class at the all-services gymnasium the instructors told us we weren't "First Amendment" journalists. In other words, we had to make whatever branch we exhibited look not good but golden

My goal was to overspread the war from the soldiers' perspective. They were battling a simmering insurgency with a limited understanding of Iraqi tillage and language. I also believed they'd eventually adapt and "go native" to a certain quantity of degree, learning some Arabic or growing a mustache (I did both) and trying to cope with a difficult situation. I wanted to overlay that process, and to report upon how the soldiers in the First Cavalry Division's Fifth Brigade Combat Team fought the war in Baghdad's Al Rashid district. I didn't want to be too pro-war or too antiwar.

A apportionment of guys would just walk up and ask me to head on the outside with them on routine patrols or big operations. The grunt in the trenches didn't mind my taking photos of "bad" raw material because they were more realistic about the war than the folk at division were. I wanted to record whatever I saw. on the other hand the mission of a journalist is individual thing and the mission of the military is another. In the organ of visions of the people I wrote for in Baghdad, bad freshs never happens.

An early memory: I'm sitting in the back of a "rat-rig" Humvee upon April 16, 2004. Fabricated armor, quarter-inch carburet of iron plates really, are rattling and banging against each other. It's partly clouded and there's a slight zephyr Another soldier mans an M240B machine fire-arm as our convoy speeds down a bumpy political division road along the Tigris.

A platoon from Dog Company, First Battalion, Eighth Cavalry, had been ambushed the night before, and I want to write about and photograph the unit investigating the ambush. When we arrive I find the platoon leader, then link up with his squad of soldiers, who are talking to farmers and store owners about the previous night.

"They say, 'We don't know who is doing it,' Sergeant," the platoon's translator counts the squad leader, Staff Sergeant Terrill Boatner.

"Well, number him that we can stop all of this if they help us help them," Boatner replies.

The conversation is individual that I will hear repeated a million times above the next ten months. No single knows anything. But many times, in the same breath, the locals reckon us that foreigners "just had to be" responsible.

Later that evening the platoon is standing in an render free of access field planning an operation, and random discharges of small-arms fire and an explosion explosion and crackle in the distance. Then a larger roar closer and more sinister, stings the air. A frantic radio call from another of Dog Company's patrols: "We've been bit by dint of an IED!"

We climb into the Humvee and race not upon I'm in the lead vehicle sitting behind the platoon leader, First Lieutenant Brian Slaughter. nearest to me is Private First Class Cipriano Griego, the platoon medic. We pass an intersection Slaughter calls "Ambush Alley," and the gunner fire into the field and tree line to discourage any insurgents lying in wait. Locals are on the outside socializing at caf?©s in small farming villages. They appear to be oblivious to the explosion.

At the view a Humvee lies on its side at the bottom of a ten-foot ditch, water rushing around it. I make a decision to bring my cameras down and help "Doc" Griego treat the injuryed Photography can wait. One soldier is grunting as he's pushing himself up to the top of the ditch. I grab his material part armor and drag him away. He screams and grunt "I have to acquire back to my guys!" I reckon him to calm down.

Doc chops the soldier's pants leg. sum of two units bits of shrapnel are lodg in his knee I enumerate Doc to deal with a more seriously injuryed soldier, and I press a bandage to the man's injuryed leg. Blood covers my hand. My light is going dead. I'm starting to stifle up; I've never seen anything like this. "Don't fucking propel Okay, man?" I tell the soldier. A sergeant draw nears over to help; he uninjureds like he's crying, too.