The War according to Essdras Suarez
Editor’s note: Boston Globe photographer Essdras Suarez, JM 1993, wrote a 35,000-word journal about covering the Iraq war with reporter Thanassis Cambanis a year ago. Here is an excerpt.
Baghdad had been “liberated” and we were two days late already. We made good headway until we reached the MSR (main supply road). It was six lanes of pure light-brown dirt and sand. Military convoys going in each direction created walls of dust that seemed impenetrable. Metal spikes could be found on both shoulders of the thoroughfare. You couldn’t travel behind a vehicle because the sand blowing your way made visibility almost nil.
We were nearing Baghdad. This we knew by the increased number of burnt tanks on the road. Shrapnel littered the highway and the black carcasses of missile-platform trucks could be seen partially hidden in the date-palm fields dotting the landscape. The setting sun cast a beautiful orange tint to the destruction of war.
At the outskirts of Baghdad we came upon masses of people carrying looted items. Ahead stood an American tank in the middle of the road. We approached it cautiously and with the biggest smiles we could muster.
Just as we cleared our way off the on ramp, our convoy stopped. I poked my head over the railing and called out to some GIs below, “Hey, what are you guys doing down there?”
A voice with a Midwestern twang answered. “Just trying to figure out what to do with these bodies.”
I asked, “Do you guys mind if I go down there?” “Sure, come on down if you want to see some gory s—-t!” I gulped and said I was on my way.
A thousand questions crossed my mind: Is it safe down there? Am I mentally prepared for what I am about to see? Can I do this?
The two GIs were most welcoming. They wanted to show me what they had done and tell me what they had gone through. “See the back of that dude’s head? It’s over here,” one of them said, pointing to a spot 15 feet away. “He came running our way screaming I don’t know what when one of my guys took him out.”
I could see the headless body in the middle of a dirt road. I stayed clear from that one, shifting my attention to the five or six bodies under the overpass.
I needed to capture the scene’s horror and the humanity. How do you show the bloated parts that once belonged to somebody’s dad or son? I decided to focus on the content of their wallets. Pictures, IDs, and other personal items were scattered around the corpses. Soldiers later told me that after a firefight, they searched the bodies for clues as to who they were, pulling out their wallets and emptying their content.
I struggled to find the right angle and composition. The wallet was in the light and the body was in the shadow. Film could have handled the exposure difference easily but we live in an era of immediate gratification – digital cameras are what we use. One of their biggest drawbacks is their inability to handle extremes of light within the same frame.
A soldier asked what was I doing. I told him about the two items, the body and the wallet, needing to be under the same kind of light. God bless him – he offered to move the wallet for me – an offer I kindly rejected. I tried explaining to him that this would have been unethical. He said it was O.K. but if I needed any “help” he could provide it. I smiled and moved away to another body. Here I found a picture within a wallet, probably the dead man’s son. I photographed this by the feet of the corpse.
I started watching the two soldiers who had greeted me. One had found a hand grenade and was about to toss it over a wall as I caught a glimpse of him. I photographed the act and took cover. It turned out to be a dud. Just as we were laughing, we heard the whistling of a mortar round falling. The explosion was a good 300 to 400 meters north of our location, but it was still too close for comfort.
I felt vulnerable. It dawned on me that I was only wearing my ballistics vest that was only good for small arms and shrapnel. I was not wearing my helmet either. I didn’t think the area was still under conflict.
Despite having my camera bags and two cameras, I believe I ran the fastest I had ever run. I was clearing obstacles that even as a 17-year-old I would have hesitated to tackle. All of this under the encouraging shouts of my peers on the other side of the highway. In the middle of my sprint, I recalled Jenny screaming to Forrest Gump, “Run, Forrest, run!”
I made it just in time to see tanks heading toward the mortar rounds. They moved fast by the palm trees along the road. The light was perfect and I knew these were going to be good pictures. A shaft of orange light illuminated the remains of a vehicle that had been blown apart two days ago. It looked like the carcass of a beast from a time long gone.
It didn’t take long for the sounds of mortars to cease.
When I called the office, somebody said it would be nice to have a Baghdad dateline. I believed I tried to explain there was still a firefight going on not far from our position and that I wasn’t sure if my satellite antenna would find the signal in this spot. The outcome was the office waiting for me to file within the next couple of hours.
The GIs told me I could work on my laptop as long as I left no light showing. I blocked the windows in our car with my sleeping bag and long-sleeve shirt. While working, a GI knocked on my window. He asked if I was the one on the other side of the highway during the firefight. I answered yes and he said his commander told him to apologize for allowing me to go into this area. It was littered with depleted uranium shells. We all had to be tested for radioactivity exposure but especially me since I walked all over the scene. I thanked him and continued editing my images.
I was raised to believe if you have no control of a situation, you don’t worry about it. This was the approach I chose to take in this situation.
Once I chose seven or so images, I set up my satellite phone. At first, I tried it under the safety of the underpass with the antenna on top of the car. I knew this would be a futile attempt. I kept moving away from this spot until I found myself in the middle of the field, between two Bradley tanks. I opted for placing my sleeping bag over my head as I sat on the dusty ground. Every once in a while, a gust of wind laden with the stench of decay would ruffle the sleeping bag and hit me in the face. Of course, I had to be downwind from the rotting corpses.
Just as I was getting up, I heard somebody shout, “Get them! Get them!” The sound was twoosh, twoosh, twoosh. It was brief but accurate. According to the GIs, somebody had tried to run the checkpoint. The next morning we saw two dead bodies.
That morning, I heard a commotion in the direction of the checkpoint. I came out of the car, rubbing my eyes to wake up. Despite the stressful night, I slept like an infant in his mother’s arm. I watched a man carrying a white flag followed by his wife approach a soldier. The early morning light painted the players in a warm yellow tone. There was a cool breeze and the silence was broken only by their footsteps on the dusty soil.
That’s when it hit me! Instead of just watching I needed to take pictures. I ran to my car and picked up my cameras. By the time I was ready, the soldier and the couple started walking our way. I followed the couple through my viewfinder with my long-lens camera. As they got closer, I switched to wide angle. They stopped and the man asked why they were being photographed when they were mourning deaths in their family and all they wanted now was safe passage and some food. I apologized but said this was part of history and needed to be recorded.
We started driving to the center of the city. On the way out, we saw the bodies in the car that allegedly tried to run the checkpoint. I believe most checkpoint deaths occur because the Americans don’t speak the language, there are no clear signs telling people to stop, and fear on both sides. The drivers panic when they hear warning shots and instinctively step on the accelerator. The young soldiers with big guns shoot just in case. The result is usually tragic.
As we drove, we didn’t speak much among ourselves. We were in sight of the Palestine Hotel, where days prior, two TV cameramen lost their lives when overzealous soldiers confused the glint of camera lenses with sniper scopes.
It was April 11, 2003. Just as we were settling down [editor’s note: Suarez and Cambanis ended up staying at a different hotel], we heard shots. Thanassis and I looked at each other and said at the same time, “Let’s go.”
We ran downstairs with our helmets and flak jackets. The firefight was right behind the Palestine Hotel. Troops were taking fire from a location just on the other side of the river. As I ran toward the scene, I noticed Thanassis no longer being by my side. I remembered reporters don’t have to be in the middle of the action. Thanassis could always interview people afterwards. I did not have that luxury.
I always wondered what I would do when bullets were being fired around me. Would I go forward? Would I freeze? It turned out that I really didn’t have to think. Before I knew it, I was taking cover behind a line of U.S. Marines cutting through a wire fence. There were several photographers in the same situation. I moved near a young Marine cutting a piece off the fence. A Japanese photographer stood right on top of him. I told him to give the guy some room to work. He backed off a little. He then moved down the line to where other troops had taken position.
The young Marine from Chico, Calif., scrambled through the hole in the fence and I followed closely behind. Shots rang overhead and behind me dirt behaved like jumping beans as a couple of bullets struck the ground. The firing ceased briefly thereafter. Eyeing my lens, he said he wished he could have binoculars to look closer at the firing position from across the river.
I told him I couldn’t offer it to him but if he asked I would not say no, either. It felt like a good compromise. He looked through my telephoto lens. The light was dwindling and the position was backlit, but he later called on another soldier to pass along information about what he had seen across the river. The moment in which he pointed and the other soldier leaned into him as they looked to the distance was as memorable to my camera as to my mind.
An Australian cameraman filmed us. During a lull, I introduced myself to the Marine. He pulled out his wallet to show me family pictures. I promised I would e-mail his family and let them know he was doing well. As we sat in that trench waiting for the day to come to an end, we looked at the red-blood sky as the sun set. He told me he often saw sunsets and sunrises. He asked if I could make a picture of it and send it to his family. He wanted his family to see some of what he was seeing.
Later that day, I wrote to them and attached a couple of images of the young Marine and even one of the sunset. They answered me with the warmest, most thankful e-mail I’ve ever gotten.
Meanwhile, I needed to decide how to transmit my images from the hotel’s non-existing rooftop. I knew the Americans would have had the area peppered with snipers but I also realized, from my experience earlier that day, the area was still not fully under U.S. control. This meant there could have been Fedayeen, Iraqi soldiers or Bath party members trying to take pot shots at anything that moved at night.
I concluded, however, that the Americans had the better equipment and the night goggles, thus owned the night. So I decided to make myself as visible as possible. I put on a headlamp, one flashlight on all three pockets of my pants and hung one more around my neck. I walked up to the zinc roof and squatted down making sure that every light was on and that my laptop screen would be at its brightest. To a sniper looking through the green haze of night vision I must have looked like the character from the Electric Cowboy. After about a nerve-wracking half an hour on the roof and a couple of calls to the office and my loved ones, I finally was able to get down from my precarious perch. I slept like a baby that night.
The next night, while working at our hotel, I told Thanassis he shouldn’t sit with his back against the window the way he usually did while working. He created a perfect silhouette against the well-lit living room. To a sniper looking into the room, the image would have looked like a target practice torso cutout.
When I went to sleep, Thanassis, the perennial night owl, kept working in the living room. I was halfway asleep when I heard bullets striking outside my window. I rolled immediately to the floor as I heard Thanassis voice an expletive. The shots were so close, plaster from the wall scraped the back of Thanassis’ neck. I tried going back to sleep afterwards while using the flak jackets to cover the side of my body facing the window.
I felt too jazzed to fall back asleep. I took Thanassis’ satellite phone to the safety of the inner hallway. I was about to call my wife when I thought better of it. If I were to tell her what had just happened I would accomplish nothing more than worrying her even more than she already was. I called a friend in Texas and he put me on a conference call to another friend in Panama. They joked about it and so did I but in reality I was just happy to hear their voices. When I finally managed to sleep it was 0445 hours.
The next day, we did a story about the Al-Mansur neighborhood, where American missiles killed 17 people in a block in which Saddam Hussein allegedly hid. It was said the dictator also used to frequent a restaurant next to the spot hit by the bomb.
I made some images of the crater, which was two houses wide and two stories deep. As I walked on the edge, I saw personal belongings intertwined with metal and concrete. By smell and sometimes the darkening of the rubble and soil, you could pinpoint body parts.
In the rubble, I saw a rag doll, and two metal doors wrapped around a palm tree. The spoiled contents of a refrigerator mixed with the smell of death to create a nauseating olfactory stew.
Neighbors said the Americans never came afterwards for damage assessment. They must have known they had missed their target and didn’t care about the aftermath of their deed.
As I walked inside one of the adjacent houses, I heard screams from next door. It was a family coming back to their house for the first time since the attack a week prior.
I ran next door and introduced myself as best as I could. I gestured to see if I could come in. In good Iraqi manner they invited me into their house. I witnessed the pain and sorrow of their loss. I found a group of women crying on the floor of their living room as a man vigorously gestured for them to calm down. They were the lucky ones. One of their two sons had suffered only a cut in his head while the bathroom ceiling fell on top of him.
The rest of the house was covered in a thick layer of dust, and the furniture was in disarray. I followed the women upstairs as they surveyed the rest of the rooms.
I crouched in a corner as the owner of the house was consoled by her best friend while they sat at one of their kids’ beds.
As we drove back, I had ambivalent feelings. I felt ecstatic about the kind of images and story we had bumped into, but I was also somewhat unsettled by the realization that the worse the scene, the better I was at my job.
