In the news today, was a story about the Associated Press's decision to publish a photograph taken during a battle in Afghanistan of a 21 year-old Marine as he lay on the ground dying from a Taliban RPG attack. My gut reaction is that to publish this photograph or others like it is horrible, but my deliberated opinion is that it is important to have such an image out there. Like the images of flag draped coffins, photos and stories about the reality and trauma of war are both necessary and newsworthy. War isn't just about winning; no one wins a war. War is always about death, destruction, and heartbreak -- and almost always on both sides. I feel for the family, but this young man's sacrifice illustrates our current disconnect over what war means.
Now that we can pop popcorn and watch a war on television we are so distanced from it, unlike wars past when it touched our daily lives. World Wars, Vietnam, these battles were injected into the daily lifestyle of those both fighting and at home. As much as I would hate to see the final images of my husband captured on film and splashed across print and web media, it doesn't make it not news. The war is news. People are still dying, we are still fighting, I am still without my husband. These things are real and just because most mainstream media prefers to cover sex and sensationalism does not make it less of a daily occurrence in world reality.
While you eat your cereal in the morning, men and women are on a mission in the dark, trying to capture an insurgent they believe to have set off an IED. As you watch your football game, men and women are being shot at, as you sip your tea before drifting off to sleep, men and women -- MY HUSBAND, are planning the next mission, a mission in which they will knowingly walk into danger. I'm sorry if looking at a picture of the horrors of war is difficult. It's supposed to be. War is difficult and tragic and filled with death. Pictures don't make it worse, they make it real and that's what we have problems with.
We don't want to know. We don't want to see it. We want to support our troops with yellow ribbon magnets on our car. Well fuck you. Real support comes from remembering that there is still a war happening and not just when there is a slow news day in events surrounding the conspiracy, funeral and whatever else about Michael Jackson. The war is happening now, and people are still dying and being put into danger, RIGHT NOW.
People ask me all the time how I do it. It must be so hard they say sympathetically. Let me tell you something that everyone in my position knows and we just keep from you so that we don't make you too uncomfortable. It is so unbelievably difficult and there isn't a minute that goes by that you're not aware that your loved one could be lying on the ground with parts of his or her body severed by an RPG. We get it, we feel it, we know it, and not just when a newspaper runs a hard to look at photograph. No one wants to hear the truth and so we go about our day as normally as possible and try to not to let it take over our thoughts. Instead, it just exists on our mental back burner, like a constantly simmering pot. The slow cooker of our hard truth.
I agree that the photos need to be out there. I never thought that until I went to Europe and picked up a news magazine. It was shortly after the 2004 Madrid train bombings where nearly 200 people were killed and 1800 were injured. This magazine had graphic photos published of the trains while rescue efforts were underway. The shock and horror of looking at these photos is burned into my brain forever. I grasped from that magazine that moment how horrific this act of terror was and the real lives that were forever changed from that moment on. I remember thinking that news publications should print these images in our country so people who are not directly affected can actually get a reality check and wake up.
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