Ricochet

I think my favorite image of the war was one I took far from the battlefields, at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. A soldier had just finished his two weeks of R&R and was returning to Iraq. He walked through the concourse in his desert camouflage uniform holding his young son by the hand. As I photographed them from behind, the two stepped onto an escalator, the son barely reaching his father's hips. To me, that image is truly iconic: an anonymous soldier holding his child's hand as he heads off to battle, hoping that he'll see his son again, sometime soon.

Just like those daily, unnoticed heroic moments, there are also numerous soldiers who are suffering, unnoticed, from the wounds of this war, both mental and physical. Had I never captured that image of Joseph, it's likely that very few people would have paid any attention to this one soldier's death.

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About a week after Joseph died, his mother called me. I'd been trying to contact her to share my condolences with the family and to let them know how bad I felt. Maureen Dwyer told me that she'd read the statements claiming that Joseph hated the fame the picture had brought him, and she wanted me to know that they weren't true. Joseph loved the photograph, she said. He'd always been proud of it. He just felt somewhat embarrassed at being singled out because so many other soldiers were doing exactly what he'd done.

Like Joseph, I was proud of and excited by my accomplishment with that picture. But also like him, I always had the sense that others deserved recognition more than I did. I'm a little embarrassed when people call the photo iconic or compare it with other famous photos. I was a photojournalist doing my job, just like hundreds of others in Iraq. There were countless pictures produced during the invasion that were better composed, better exposed and more compelling.

Photographers like to say that when they place the camera to their eye, it acts as both a physical and mental barrier to what's going on around them -- that somehow the camera can be a shield between you and the awful scenes taking place in front of you. The fatal flaw in that thinking is that the shield has a hole in it right where your eye goes. Nor does the camera block smells and sounds, which are rampant on the battlefield. So although it may be easy to say that you're just a fly on the wall, not a participant, the truth is that journalists are participants, in their own way. I've never struggled to the degree that Joseph and Ali did, but there are small things that affect me every once in a while. Certain sounds will get to me. Fireworks, for instance, make me jump.

I don't know that the photograph of Joseph was the best one I ever took, or my favorite, but I think it represented something important. At the time, it represented hope. Hope that what we were doing as a nation in Iraq was the right thing. Hope that our soldiers were helping people. Hope that soldiers such as Joseph cared more about human life than anything else.

But now when I look at the picture, it doesn't feel hopeful. It makes me realize that so many soldiers are physically torn and in such mental anguish that for some of them, hope has turned to hopelessness. That, I have to believe, is what happened to Joseph Dwyer, who was haunted by the ghosts of what he'd seen in Iraq, by fears he had lived with for too long. He could never leave the battlefield behind.

He was memorialized in that image trying to preserve life. But he could no longer preserve his own.

photo@warrenzinn.com

Warren Zinn covered Afghanistan and Iraq as a photojournalist for the Army Times from January 2002 to December 2003. He is now a student at the University of Miami School of Law.