How has your perception of war changed as a journalist?
Elliott Woods:“The most important way that my perspective on war has changed after becoming a journalist as opposed to when I was a soldier is that now I’m forced to really try hard to look at the engagement from as neutral a perspective as possible. Which means that even when I’m standing alongside U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, I have to try as hard as I can to understand why the Taliban are doing what they’re doing. To not get myself locked into an enemy vs. friendly mindset.
Everybody on all sides of this is motivated by something, and everybody has a story. That makes it really hard sometimes to deal with what happens in a place like Afghanistan where I’ve witnessed innocent civilians killed by American helicopters… where I’ve witnessed children killed by Taliban suicide bombs… It becomes very difficult not to just be filled with total disgust and rage at all parties in the conflict.
It also, I think, opens the door to a greater level of compassion and empathy, which I think is the highest form of neutrality. I think true empathy is the most neutral position. I’m very fortunate as someone who reports on war, and specifically on American military personnel at war, because I’m a veteran. I’ve walked in their boots. I understand where they come from. I understand the fear, the anxiety, the testosterone. I get all of that on a visceral level. When I’m with them sometimes, it feels like I’m with my old unit. You make friends so fast. You become part of the group so fast. I feel really lucky to have special access to them and I think once they find out I’m a veteran, they open up to me in a way they might not open up to another journalist without that experience.”
What separates a great photo from one you can’t use?
EW:“The more and more I look at my photographs, the less I think I have anything great in my archive. I guess that’s common to all creative people and all photographers. You get more demanding about your own work. Which has a lot to do with why the way that I shoot in a place like Afghanistan has changed over the years.
When I first started covering Afghanistan, I was a pretty new photographer. I had only been shooting seriously for a little over a year and suddenly I was shooting the most serious subject on earth and that requires a pretty steep learning curve.
I was still shooting on a very technical level then. I was looking for proper frames and I was trying to put subjects in the right place and always consider my background and adhere to the rule of the thirds and all of these juxtapositions and really thinking about light a lot.
As I’ve progressed as a photographer, I look more and more to shoot on the sensual level and on the emotional level. I’m really looking more for expressions and really powerful juxtapositions and I’m shooting less. I shoot way fewer frames than I did when I was starting out because I don’t gain anything or say anything new by shooting yet another picture of a Marine staring down the barrel of his rifle. No matter how technically perfect or beautiful that photograph is, it doesn’t say anything new. In fact, a photograph like that can become a recruiting tool. It can become too neutral of a statement. It doesn’t say there’s anything wrong with this situation.”
Does your photography from Afghanistan have a particular message, then?
EW:“I guess, at the risk of sounding like I go into these situations with a bias now, when I’ve been on recent trips to Afghanistan, particularly on my last embed with the U.S. Marines in Sangan District of Helmand Province in 2011, I was really shooting from the perspective of someone who’s come to the conclusion that we were losing the war, or at least that there was nothing to win.
Maybe we were technically still overpowering the enemy, but there was nothing to win there. I wanted to shift my focus from shooting documentary photos of counterinsurgency operations, to shooting photos of these raw, vulnerable young boys who are out there putting their lives on the line every day and living in miserable conditions for a war that everybody had forgotten.
If that’s too politicized a stance to have as a journalist or as a photographer, or if that’s shooting from a position of too much bias or personal interest, then I’ll take that criticism. Because it wasn’t worth me risking my life over there to produce photographs that could be read in a neutral way.
It’s interesting to hear you say that. Your photography of Third Squad feels so honest. Almost stripped down and naked. What work went into creating that feel? How much of that was just staring at you the whole time?
EW: I think I always knew that those faces and those bodies were the real story. And those simple voices of Marines and soldiers were the real story. I’d taken stabs at it previously. Ever since I first picked up a camera, my favorite photos have been portraits and that works well as an editorial photographer with the responsibility to shoot portraits of my subjects for my stories.
I always knew that, but I was as distracted as anyone else by the romance of the counterinsurgency narrative from the photographic perspective and from the writing perspective. You have these really exotic photographs of men in turbans and salwar kameez tunics and baggy pants in this pastoral, almost medieval setting next to the world’s most technologically sophisticated warriors who look like terminators walking around with ballistic sunglasses and kevlar helmets with night vision devices and hundred-pound flak vests and ammunition and these crazy looking weapons.
From a photographer’s perspective that’s as content-saturated as it gets, so it’s really hard to ignore that stuff in favor of a black and white portrait of a guy with no shirt on surrounded by darkness in his room. But I was very frustrated on my last embed in Sangan… It’s a really dangerous place. Sangan had the highest casualty rate among the British forces from whom the Marines took over of any place in Afghanistan and has been one of the bloodiest districts throughout the war. The unit that I was with had taken massive casualties over the four months since they’d been there. A dozen traumatic amputations from their platoon of 40 or so guys. Two guys killed before I got there and another guy killed after I left. I was coming thinking about the severity and seriousness of all this and coming home every day from these patrols where we were finding IEDs and catching Taliban spotters and all this kind of stuff.
I was looking at all these photos and saying to myself that the middle of nowhere aspect of all of this, the remoteness of this place, the irrelevance of this place to the larger scheme of the Afghan War and to the larger scheme of American foreign policy is nowhere in these photos that I’m taking out on patrol. What was hitting me like a brickbat every day was the naivete in some of these Marines’ stories, their alienation, their fears of what civilians would think of them when they got home, their fears about how they were going to interact with their families when they got home having had this totally life altering experience that they’re really is no coming home from.
Once that was clear to me, a light went off in my head and I said, ‘Oh, this is so easy. What I need to do is take portraits of all of these guys and show the juxtaposition of them clad in all this armor and weaponry looking tough as nails and then without all that stuff just in their combat shirts or shirtless with their skinny, emaciated arms and their pale skin and their haunting eyes and let them tell their own stories.’
I just wanted to force people to stare into their eyes and try to reconcile those two images while listening to these boys’ voices, uncorrupted, unmolested by the distractions of video or a fast-clip audio slideshow. I think the simplicity was the strongest asset in that project and it wasn’t a hard decision once that idea came to me.”
You did a story for Granta for the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, traveling around the country and asking Americans how the country had changed since the wars began. What did you find out?
EW:“That decade was a whirlwind for me and my life has changed dramatically and from my perspective the country and the world have changed dramatically in that decade. I was expecting that most Americans would have something to say about it. The astonishing thing was that most people with whom I spoke had little or nothing to say…
I guess the number one answer was probably that the economy was a lot worse. Which was encouraging to me in a way, because I think a lot of people are starting to tie our economic problems to our war spending and I think the two are highly related.
But when it came to the sacrifices of the soldiers who were caught up in this or the veteran suicide rate or the unemployment rate or just what was asked of all of us in the name of something really dubious, and I’m speaking about Iraq here more than Afghanistan, people really didn’t have anything to say at all. When it came to the polarization of our politics and the development of a political discourse in this country that is really shameful, people didn’t have a whole lot to say. And that was really alienating for me.”
There’s been a lot of talk about the different civilian attitude towards returning veterans from these wars compared to the Vietnam War. What do you think of that?
EW: “You often hear from Vietnam-era veterans that they got spat on when they came home and they got called baby-killers. That’s kind of the one line you’ll hear over and over again. Even from civilians who weren’t part of the Vietnam War. It’s engrained in everyone’s head. The Civil Rights movement was going on during Vietnam. There was a huge student protest movement. There was a draft that made almost everyone vulnerable after a lot of the draft deferments were revoked. There was a tax surcharge. And the casualty rate was so much higher.
The nation was caught up in the Vietnam War in a way that it wasn’t caught up in Iraq. Everybody was worried about their son or their neighbor getting sent over and killed. Everybody had something at stake. Whereas in Iraq and Afghanistan, there hasn’t been much at stake for the average American outside of military families and military families represent a tiny, tiny fraction of the population.
I think America has been very quiet with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan and I would suggest that while it is nice to know we’re not coming home to spit and names like “baby-killer” that it’s almost as alienating to come home to a country that is so quiet with regard to the wars, that is so far removed from the wars and the sacrifices that’s demanded in those wars, that it seems like they’re almost not even aware they’re going on…
Afghanistan is just 2 percent of coverage in the media right now. It’s hard to place a story about Afghanistan with a major magazine right now because the public doesn’t want to read about it and the media is really market driven so they don’t want to produce things that the public isn’t interested in reading about. It is a different environment. I think a lot of people learned from Vietnam. They learned that you have to distinguish between soldiers and government policy, that soldiers sign up to serve apolitically and will go to war for a Democrat or a Republican president. At the same time, I think there’s a lot of lip service. At the risk of sounding mean, I sometimes find the yellow ribbon bumper stickers offensive, because it just seems so pat. It’s really trite and too easy. I think the best way that people could support the troops would be by paying attention to American foreign policy and by paying attention to the wars and demanding more coverage from the media and more discourse in Congress and that hasn’t happened.”
In some ways, you’ve benefitted from your experience at war. You took advantage of your education. You have a platform as a journalist. What are you going to do with it?
EW: “Over the last couple of years I’ve done a wide range of reporting internationally from Burma to Gaza to Iraq and Afghanistan and back home. I’ve taken a couple of adventure assignments over the last year and tried to expand my repertoire as a writer and a photographer, more into conventional travel writing outside of the context of conflict. It’s been great. It’s been really educational to try to tell these stories that don’t revolve around life and death, that revolve around something like fun, that I really had to learn to write about.
But doing more fun stories has reminded me that my native environment is really serious reporting about really immediate issues and that’s where I feel most at home, at least for now. I’m going to be spending the next couple of months working on a book proposal that I’ve been meaning to write for several years now. The book is going to be about veterans and their perspectives on how the country has changed over 10 years and what the last 10 years of American history portends for the future.
We probably don’t know what the Vietnam War did to our country’s social fabric. You can’t measure that kind of thing and a lot of veterans come home ready to put that stuff away. How are you going to address the question? How do you get veterans to talk about this? What stories do you think will emerge?
EW: Going into this project, ready to talk to as many veterans as I possibly can, I won’t make the mistake of expecting that all of those veterans will be angry and bitter and resentful in the way that I am. I learned that on my first magazine story where I found out that one of the guys from my unit who was very badly wounded in a suicide bombing that killed these other two guys in my unit had a pretty positive memory of his experience in Iraq and wasn’t conflicted at least not then, about the politics of the war.
I think the way to avoid giving people the feeling that I’m try to co-opt them or force them into some kind of direction in telling their story is just to assure them that I want them to tell their story to me. That I’m not giving them a story to tell or asking them to tell a certain kind of story. I’m just trying to serve as the middleman between them and the American public as much as I can. I think if I cast the net really far and wide, and talk to as many different people as Studs Terkel did in his really incredible oral history of the Second World War, The Good War, then I’ll avoid putting anyone into a trap.
I think when you do that, lots of [narratives] rise to the fore, just like with Third Squad. You had 12 guys from all different parts of the country, mostly young guys from age 19 to age 25, and they all had different perspectives of why they were in Afghanistan and of the violence they endured and of what they expected of civilian life back home, but some dominant themes rose to the fore. They were all scared. They were all worried about what it was going to be like when they got home. And they were all confused. We’ll see. One thing I’ve learned over and over again is that if you go into any story with over-determined expectations about what your subjects are going to tell you, you’re going to continually be surprised. And that’s good. I love that. I really look forward to that.
I look forward to talking to civilians as much as I do to talking to the veterans. We have to come to terms with what’s happened over the last decade as a country if we’re going to move forward. If we’re going to put this behind us we have to acknowledge it. We have to stare the thing in the face before we can put it behind us.”
Why do civilians have to stare the wars in the face? Why can’t they just leave them behind?
EW: “That’s easy. Civilians have to look honestly at what’s happened over the last decade, because if we don’t investigate the policies that led us into Iraq and Afghanistan, and if we don’t listen to stories of the people who were there and the families that were affected, then we risk developing future policies in America that can be even more disastrous.
We have to incorporate this into our national memory in a truthful way. And if we remember Iraq as an invasion that could have been planned better and prepared for better, but that ultimately didn’t have a profound effect on America one way or another then it’s going to be that much easier for a future leader to co-opt the American public after another national trauma and send us gallivanting off into another catastrophic foreign policy mistake.”
What about the civilian who says, ‘Well, that’s kind of how all these wars come about and anyone who joins the military is a sucker’?
EW: (Sigh. Chuckle.) “Well, yeah. I don’t know. Maybe the people who think that anyone who joins the military is a sucker are a lost cause. Maybe they’re not going to listen. I don’t think people on the extremes ever listen much. I’m aiming for the huge majority of people who are in the middle of the extremes. Right now I think people are really beginning to question what’s been happening over the last 10 or 12 years in the United States.
I can’t tell them everything that’s happened over the last decade. I can’t get at the financial stuff. I can’t get at the health care debate. But what I can get at is the experience of veterans and the real ramifications of the war policies on the personal lives and on the physical and mental health of the people who served.”
Was there a story in Third Squad that got to you more than others?
EW: “The portrait pair of Corporal Michael Dutcher who was 22 years old from Asheville, North Carolina is the one that makes me the most sad when I look at it, because Corporal Dutcher was killed several weeks after that portrait was taken. I really enjoyed talking to him during my embed.
He was a soft-spoken, quiet kid but a rock solid Marine who at a young age had a lot of responsibility as a corporal and never complained and never had a harsh thing to say to any of his comrades but was quietly respected. He just kind of had this slow, easy North Carolina mountain accent and it was really strange because I shot all those portraits on film and I had to send the film away to get developed, which took about a month because there was a lot of it.
When I finally got it back and I was scanning it, I was monitoring my Twitter feed which follows a lot of Afghanistan feeds and I saw this little tweet that said a Marine had been killed in Helmand Province and right when I was scanning in Michael Dutcher’s portraits I pulled up the press release that said he’d been killed. So there was a very eerie coincidence involved in that story.
When I was going through his audio it was just so tragic to think somebody had been through all of that and only wanted to go back and do something as simple and quiet as follow in his mom’s footsteps and be a school teacher.”
To see more of Elliott Woods’ work for VQR in Afghanistan and to listen to the voices of U.S. soldiers on the front line, visit assignmentafghanistan.org. To learn more about the journalist, visit elliottwoods.com.