Baghdad ER

“We’ve got a Bird two minutes out.” That’s the cue…two doctors hop onto a small motorized cart called a Gator, while the rest of the on-duty staff waits pensively in the ER. This is the 28th Combat Support Hospital, also known as Baghdad ER, a place where the horrors of war are evident on a daily basis. I grab my cameras, the required eye and hearing protection, and run at full clip out to the landing zone. Two Medevac helicopters, known as “birds,” land in formation, then the wounded soldiers are carried off and placed onto the Gators.

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Jogging back from the landing zone I see a group of armored vehicles pull up. A frantic group of soldiers drenched in blood tug a limp body out of the back of one of their vehicles; others crawl out holding open wounds. Inside the ER, there is an odd mix of organization and chaos. All of these doctors and medics are well accustomed to this ritual, perhaps hardened by it. But in their eyes it is obvious they are not jaded; they know they have a person’s life in their hands, someone with a mother, a father, friends and fellow soldiers, and that it is a life they must keep from slowly slipping away.

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In what seems like an instant, every bed in the ER is filled. Doctors are rushing from bed to bed, trying to stabilize individuals while they can barely suppress their kicking and seizures. The room is filled with a cacophony of voices talking of “brain matter,” “rocket Roger Clemens propelled grenades” and “IED’s.” “Whatever it was it got him right in the face,” says one doctor, as he inspects a young man’s wounds.

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The pace in the room is at a fever pitch. Doctors run back and forth grabbing surgical equipment and attempting to diagnose and stabilize the condition of each individual patient. The light is either glaringly bright or terribly dim as the doctors move in and out, leaning over the patients. There is barely enough room to move from the corner I am in and the floor is slippery with blood. Every time I raise a camera to my face I am conscious of the life support tubes, which dangle dangerously close to my body and equipment.

My biggest concern is not getting in the way of the doctors. I have a Public Affairs Officer (PAO) assigned to monitor my every move in the hospital, making sure I follow the guidelines and do not break the contract I have signed, one which forbids me from photographing soldiers faces, name plates or any other identifying feature such as tattoos and birth marks without having a release from the patient.

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The soldier with the head injury has been rushed across the hall for a CAT scan and I watch as the doctors analyze the data that is output onto their computer screens. The mood seems to be encouraging…until the screen refreshes. There is no hope, the damage is too severe. The doctors look crushed and I hear one say to another: “He has a ring…” The young soldier is married. One of the doctors walks into the hallway where thee young man’s platoon is sitting on the floor in blood soaked uniforms. The soldiers begin to cry and hug each other. Then they kneel to the ground and pray for their friend. Minutes later he succumbs to his wounds.

This was only my first three hours embedded in the 28th CSH…Baghdad ER. It is hard to imagine what one would experience during an 18-month tour here.

Photographs taken in Baghdad ER and Baghdad field hospitals.



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Iraq Raids

It’s nighttime and I am lying on a cot in a room over stuffed with members of the platoon that I am embedded with, some of whom are sleeping, others are watching porn on a laptop and commenting on what they would do if they found themselves in the depicted situation. A blast shakes the building and instantly we are on our feet, scrambling for our body armor, helmets and eye protection.

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This is Baghdad during the summer of 2007. We are located in the Ghazaliya Neighborhood in the “Triangle of Death,” an area known for its extreme violence and still suffering from daily attacks and plagued by death squads, IED’s, sniper and rocket attacks and militias. We are in compound consisting of two Iraqi houses which the US army requisitioned, using one purely as housing for infantry troops while the other houses the higher ranks as well as nerve center for planning and communications.

I quickly make my way outside and run to the adjacent building. Inside there is a flurry of activity: Three men stand in front of a large satellite grid map pointing and placing red tacks while several others huddle around a table full of olive green radio communication units that appear as though they were left over from a World War II film set. “A shell landed just outside on the street” a young Captain named Brooks tells me. “There are reports that it hit a family of five, the woman is dead, we’re not sure about the rest…get the rest of your gear, we’re heading out.”

Inside of the Humvee, an armored fighting vehicle with a gunners turret, a soldier speaks on a radio to other members of the platoon, illuminated only by the glow the computer screen used for navigation. Everyone is ready and we speed off, taking a series of zig zags around blast barriers intended to keep suicide bombers and rocket attacks from reaching our compound.

About a half a block away the gunner starts yelling “we’ve got a kite, we’ve got a kite directly above us.” The vehicle comes to an abrupt stop and we quickly jump out. It is about as black as night can get, the one hour a day of electricity in Baghdad means no street lights and only wealthy families can afford to light their homes with candles or generators.

The rest of the group has parked, some soldiers take up crouching positions shielded by the armor of the vehicles while the gunners nervously scan the surroundings. Two tanks take up positions at the end of the block. A group of soldiers break down the gate of a home and then kick in the front door while others push their guns through the windows and swarm around back. I am about the fifth one in the house when I hear soldiers screaming “get on the fucking floor mother fuckers, get on the floor you fucking Haji motherfucker I swear to god I’ll blow your fucking head off…do we have anyone upstairs, get someone upstairs NOW!” The soldiers are obviously scared and so is the family, I hear a woman crying and a man talking calmly and slowly in Arabic.

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While commotion is going on all around me, I stay in the living room as an Iraqi working as a translator for the US Army begins to question the man of the house. The woman continues to cry and rock back and forth. Three young boys sit quietly together in a corner while another tries to light an oil lamp to get some light in the room.

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The soldiers who had been directed upstairs return from their search empty handed. Two other soldiers come in from outside. “The kite is just an old one, it is stuck in some power lines, lets get the fuck out of here.” Another soldier leans over and says to me “they use the kites to signal each other and coordinate attacks on our convoys…this was probably just some kids kite though.”

This was my first night in Iraq. As it turns out, it could have been any other day or night. The US Military, often along with the Iraqi Army in training, conduct hundreds of raids and searches of homes in Iraq every day. Some turn up illegal weapons and militants, the vast majority do not. On the over one hundred raids I photographed, nothing out of the ordinary was found. There were three “accidental discharges” in homes (accidental shootings,) all by Iraqi soldiers who were not using their weapons safeties. We took a few detainees, held them for a few hours or days and in the end, they were all released.
Raids come in many forms and are carried out for different purposes. Some are called “Soft Knock Campaigns,” and are intended to be a civil way to gather information from residents, but later turn into, or just resemble actual raids. Some are done to get Biometric information (name, age, fingerprinting, retinal photograph etc.) Most of the time an ordinary patrol will turn into a series of raids when someone sees a red flag, such as a kite or a motorbike (in the past motorbikes have been used by suicide bombers.)

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Sometimes the soldiers are calm and polite, gently searching the home for weapons then giving out teddy bears to children and claim tags so that the family can get paid for the door, window or gate that was destroyed to gain entry into the home. Other times soldiers destroy property, make profane gestures at the women and children and put cigarettes out on furniture. The soldiers are afraid for their safety and admit that trained for war, they are not the appropriate group to carry out the operations of a police force. The raids are terrifying for the families and do little in the way of making friends and allies with the people that the United States could really use on their side.

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Afghanistan's Children

Wherever you find war, you find children affected by it. Wherever you find a neighborhood reduced to rubble, you find children playing in it. Whenever there is loss, poverty, destruction and chaos, you will find children living in it.

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Embedded with the Afghan National Army and later with the US Army as they ran operations in Afghanistan and cross border raids into Pakistan searching for Taliban insurgents, I crossed paths with literally thousands of children.

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I paid close attention to how they reacted to their small villages being explored and searched by men in uniforms carrying weapons. I watched emotions ranging from awe and inspiration to fear and of course, plain inquisitiveness.

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It is anyone’s guess how children will be affected by the experiences they have in their formative years, but it is important maintain that war always affects those who experience it. With millions of children around the world growing up in conflict, the possible repercussions should be analyzed.

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This photo series is a glimpse into the war in Afghanistan from perspective of the children who live there and experience it on a daily basis.

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Trash Life

The variety of different lives humans live becomes glaringly apparent when walking through a garbage dump in a developing country. A life unimaginable by most, is lived daily by thousands of individuals struggling to survive. A world wrought with disease and often run by organized crime, it is a story that more closely resembles science fiction than any reality western eyes have seen.

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As peasants and farmers head to urban centers, they are often unprepared for the life they are about to experience. Tales of wealth and plentiful jobs often turn out to be illusions and the skills that have helped them survive in rural environments are generally insufficient to sustain them in the complex and competitive cities. To make matters worse, most do not have the financial means to return home once they realize they are in over their heads.

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Hunger, need for small amounts of money or shelter are a few of the reasons why people end up working and living in dumpsite communities. What is normally thought of as a quick fix to an immediate problem can become an entire way of life, often for generations. As awareness of this issue spreads, new schools are popping up in these communities as well as laws which aim to prevent children from working in the dumps.

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Within the sites, work is highly organized and each person has his or her own job. After usable items have been collected, they are taken to small shacks that line the perimeters of the dumps. The items are weighed and separated into groups, copper is pulled out of wires, glass removed from light bulbs and all recyclable material is gathered and separated. The scavengers are usually paid by the weight of what they bring in.

The organized crime aspect of the business dictates who can take garbage from where, how much they are paid and enforces brutal and often lethal consequences for those who break the rules. Assassinations and turf disputes occur on a regular basis and most governments steer clear of involvement. Add disease, injury and exposure to toxic chemicals to the list of dangers that face the dumpsite workers.

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Despite this, the spirit of the workers shine through. Their kindness and warmth in letting me in to document their lives was astounding. Children are children and it was not uncommon to see them take a break from their grueling work to hike up a mountain of trash at sunset or have a garbage throwing fight…it was also not uncommon to see their pain and the weight of their existence bearing down on their shoulders.

Images shot in Cambodia, The Philippines and Mexico

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Deconstructing China

In hopes of modernizing its society, both in preparation for the 2008 Olympic games and in anticipation of its booming population, China ramped up it campaigns to flatten entire neighborhoods and communities and replace them with modern retail spaces and mass dwellings.

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Families who had lived in their homes for generations found notices on their doors, giving them one week to pack their belongings.

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Many of the families were moved into suburbs far away from their cities, their jobs and their neighbors, forced to live in massive apartment complexes instead of the homes the had grown up in. Ancient paths winding through alleyways and around stunning brick homes were now littered with rubble and the occasional scavenger hunting for scrap metal and other usable items.

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Architectural landmarks, beauty and culture were almost instantly erased as the country rushed to an unknown future. For the residents of these neighborhoods, life would never again be the same.

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Images were taken in Beijing and Shanghai

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IRAQ DETAINEES

An Iraqi man sits in a chair in small wood shack with no windows and little ventilation। A torn shirt blindfolds his eyes and his wrists are tightly bound with plastic, military handcuffs। He sits perfectly still even as he hears the door open।

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An American soldier sits in front of the man and pulls off his blindfold as his eyes struggle to adapt to the light। “What were you doing walking along the highway? Don’t you know that is a restricted area?” After a masked Iraqi translator speaks to the man in Arabic he replies “my car was broken down, I had to walk.”

“We found nearly four thousand US dollars in your pocket, why do you have so much money” asks the interrogator। “I own a computer shop। I had to go and pick up a shipment in another city, there are receipts for my order along with the money” the man responds। The soldier is getting frustrated and obviously does not believe the man। “That’s bullshit, no one carries that much cash…what were you doing with that money? Is it for weapons, are you buying weapons।”

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As the man shakes his head, the translator begins to explain to the interrogator that most Iraqis do not have bank accounts or credit cards and actually do most of their business in cash. That, and the fact that with only one hour a day of electricity, few banks are even open. The story does not seem to sink in and the interrogator continues on the same path for quite a while, before finally realizing that the mans story will not change.
Another soldier uses a biometric device to scan the man’s retina, fingerprint and enter his personal data on the small screen. I walk outside with the interrogator. I ask him what will happen next and he replies “we don’t have anything on him, we will probably just release him tomorrow if we cant get anything else out of him.”

The next day the man is driven back to where he was picked up and given back his money and personal belongings. I ask the interrogator how many detainees they bring in each day and what percentage, in his personal opinion, are actually guilty. “Sometimes we only bring in a few guys a day, sometimes we can take in a couple hundred. In my opinion, less than 1% of them have done something wrong.”

A couple of weeks later while stationed at another base with a different platoon, I find out that a group of detainees are about to be released. Although formally forbidden to take photos of ANY detainees under ANY circumstances, I am close with the unit and they invite me along.

The detainees, still blindfolded and cuffed are led into a convoy of armored vehicles. We set out to drop the men off in the area that they had been taken into custody the day before. It is about a fifteen minute drive and the sun is beginning to set.

“This is it, this is where we picked them up” says one of the soldiers as the convoy pulls off to the side of the road in a residential neighborhood. The detainees are led out of the vehicles and lined up against a wall. Their blindfolds are taken off and when the men realize that they are being released they begin to cry with relief. They look absolutely exhausted, their clothes filthy and torn with a look of fear and confusion on their eyes.
As the soldiers escort the detainees back to their homes, a crowd of friends and relatives begins to gather on the streets. There is screaming, crying and hugging as the community sees the missing men are alive. Two women faint and are held up by their husbands and sons.

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One man starts screaming in English “why did you do this? Why did you take them? They are graduate students at the University. These are not terrorists they are students! Why did you take them? What did you do to them?

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In Iraq, if someone does not come home by nightfall, the family fears the worst. When they have not returned by the next morning, they assume that their loved ones are dead. When finally reunited, it is a truly emotional experience. When detainees are held indefinitely, the family often never knows they were taken into custody and assumes they have been killed and that they will not see them again. Under the US Patriot Act, detainees can be held indefinitely without any trial or any opportunity to speak with or notify their families.

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