11 August 14
Please note that all of the images in this article are graphic and
disturbing. Kudos to the article's author, Torie Rose DeGhett, and to
photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke for the images he took significant risk
to capture. - MA/RSN
When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War. But the media wouldn’t run the picture.
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Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of
his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body,
turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. In a photograph taken soon
afterward, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield,
which frames his face and chest. The colors and textures of his hand and
shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him.
Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face,
fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes.
On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front
of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow
soldiers, and photographed him. At one point, before he died this
dramatic mid-retreat death, the soldier had had a name. He’d fought in
Saddam Hussein’s army and had a rank and an assignment and a unit. He
might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait
and fight the Americans. Or he might have been an unlucky young man with
no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad.
Jarecke took the picture just before a ceasefire
officially ended Operation Desert Storm—the U.S.-led military action
that drove Saddam Hussein and his troops out of Kuwait, which they had
annexed and occupied the previous August. The image and its anonymous
subject might have come to symbolize the Gulf War. Instead, it went
unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction
but because of editorial choices.
It’s hard to calculate the consequences of a photograph’s absence. But sanitized images of warfare, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf argues,
make it “easier … to accept bloodless language” such as 1991 references
to “surgical strikes” or modern-day terminology like “kinetic warfare.”
The Vietnam War, in contrast, was notable for its catalog of chilling
and iconic war photography. Some images, like Ron Haeberle’s pictures of
the My Lai massacre, were initially kept from the public, but other violent images—Nick Ut’s scene of child napalm victims and Eddie Adams’s photo of a Vietcong man’s execution—won Pulitzer Prizes and had a tremendous impact on the outcome of the war.
Not every gruesome photo reveals an important truth about conflict and combat. Last month, The New York Times decided—for valid ethical reasons—to
remove images of dead passengers from an online story about Flight
MH-17 in Ukraine and replace them with photos of mechanical wreckage.
Sometimes though, omitting an image means shielding the public from the
messy, imprecise consequences of a war—making the coverage incomplete,
and even deceptive.
In the case of the charred Iraqi soldier, the
hypnotizing and awful photograph ran against the popular myth of the
Gulf War as a “video-game war”—a conflict made humane through precision
bombing and night-vision equipment. By deciding not to publish it, Time
magazine and the Associated Press denied the public the opportunity to
confront this unknown enemy and consider his excruciating final moments.
The image was not entirely lost. The Observer in the United Kingdom and Libération in France both published it after the American media refused. Many months later, the photo also appeared in American Photo,
where it stoked some controversy, but came too late to have a
significant impact. All of this surprised the photographer, who had
assumed the media would be only too happy to challenge the popular
narrative of a clean, uncomplicated war. “When you have an image that
disproves that myth,” he says today, “then you think it’s going to be
widely published.”
“Let me say up front that I don’t like the press,” one Air Force officer declared, starting a January 1991 press briefing
on a blunt note. The military’s bitterness toward the media was in no
small part a legacy of the Vietnam coverage decades before. By the time
the Gulf War started, the Pentagon had developed access policies that
drew on press restrictions used in the U.S. wars in Grenada and Panama
in the 1980s. Under this so-called “pool” system, the military grouped
print, TV, and radio reporters together with cameramen and
photojournalists and sent these small teams on orchestrated press
junkets, supervised by Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) who kept a close
watch on their charges.
By the time Operation Desert Storm began in
mid-January 1991, Kenneth Jarecke had decided he no longer wanted to be a
combat photographer—a profession, he says, that “dominates your life.”
But after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Jarecke
developed a low opinion of the photojournalism coming out of Desert
Shield, the pre-war operation to build up troops and equipment in the
Gulf. “It was one picture after another of a sunset
with camels and a tank,” he says. War was approaching and Jarecke says
he saw a clear need for a different kind of coverage. He felt he could
fill that void.
After the U.N.’s January 15, 1991 deadline for Iraq’s
withdrawal from Kuwait came and went, Jarecke, now certain he should go,
convinced Time magazine to send him to Saudi Arabia. He packed
up his cameras and shipped out from Andrews Air Force Base on January
17—the first day of the aerial bombing campaign against Iraq.
Out in the field with the troops, Jarecke recalls,
“anybody could challenge you,” however absurdly and without reason. He
remembers straying 30 feet away from his PAO and having a soldier bark
at him, “What are you doing?” Jarecke retorted, “What do you mean what am I doing?”
Recounting the scene two decades later, Jarecke still
sounds exasperated. “Some first lieutenant telling me, you know, where
I’m gonna stand. In the middle of the desert.”
As the war picked up in early February, PAOs
accompanied Jarecke and several other journalists as they attached to
the Army XVIII Airborne Corps and spent two weeks at the Saudi-Iraqi
border doing next to nothing. That didn’t mean nothing was
happening—just that they lacked access to the action.
During the same period, military photojournalist Lee
Corkran was embedding with the U.S. Air Force’s 614th Tactical Fighter
Squadron in Doha, Qatar, and capturing their aerial bombing campaigns.
He was there to take pictures for the Pentagon to use as it saw fit—not
primarily for media use. In his images, pilots look over their shoulders
to check on other planes. Bombs hang off the jets’ wings, their
sharp-edged darkness contrasting with the soft colors of the clouds and
desert below. In the distance, the curvature of the earth is visible. On
missions, Corkran’s plane would often flip upside down at high speed as
the pilots dodged missiles, leaving silvery streaks in the sky.
Gravitational forces multiplied the weight of his cameras—so much so
that if he had ever needed to eject from the plane, his equipment could
have snapped his neck. This was the air war that comprised most of the
combat mission in the Gulf that winter.
The scenes Corkran witnessed weren’t just off-limits
to Jarecke; they were also invisible to viewers in the United States,
despite the rise of 24-hour reporting during the conflict. Gulf War
television coverage, as Ken Burns wrote
at the time, felt cinematic and often sensational, with “distracting
theatrics” and “pounding new theme music,” as if “the war itself might
be a wholly owned subsidiary of television.”
Some of the most widely seen images of the air war
were shot not by photographers, but rather by unmanned cameras attached
to planes and laser-guided bombs. Grainy shots
and video footage of the roofs of targeted buildings, moments before
impact, became a visual signature of a war that was deeply associated
with phrases like “smart bombs” and “surgical strike.” The images were
taken at an altitude that erased the human presence on the ground. They
were black-and-white shots, some with bluish or greenish casts. One from
February 1991, published in the photo book In The Eye of Desert Storm
by the now-defunct Sygma photo agency, showed a bridge that was being
used as an Iraqi supply route. In another, black plumes of smoke from
French bombs blanketed an Iraqi Republican Guard base like ink blots.
None of them looked especially violent.
In late February, during the war’s final hours,
Jarecke and the rest of his press pool drove across the desert, each of
them taking turns behind the wheel. They had been awake for several days
straight. “We had no idea where we were. We were in a convoy,” Jarecke
recalls. He dozed off.
When he woke up, they had parked and the sun was about
to rise. It was almost 6 o’clock in the morning. The group received
word that a ceasefire was a few hours away, and Jarecke remembers
another member of his pool cajoling the press officer into abandoning
the convoy and heading toward Kuwait City.
The group figured they were in southern Iraq,
somewhere in the desert about 70 miles away from Kuwait City. They began
driving toward Kuwait, hitting Highway 8 and stopping to take pictures
and record video footage. They came upon a jarring scene: burned-out
Iraqi military convoys and incinerated corpses. Jarecke sat in the
truck, alone with Patrick Hermanson, a public affairs officer. He moved
to get out of the vehicle with his cameras.
Hermanson found the idea of photographing the scene
distasteful. When I asked him about the conversation, he recalled asking
Jarecke, “What do you need to take a picture of that for?” Implicit in
his question was a judgment: There was something dishonorable about
photographing the dead.
“I’m not interested in it either,” Jarecke recalls
replying. He told the officer that he didn’t want his mother to see his
name next to photographs of corpses. “But if I don’t take pictures like
these, people like my mom will think war is what they see in movies.” As
Hermanson remembers, Jarecke added, “It’s what I came here to do. It’s
what I have to do.”
“He let me go,” Jarecke recounts. “He didn’t try to
stop me. He could have stopped me because it was technically not allowed
under the rules of the pool. But he didn’t stop me and I walked over
there.”
More than two decades later, Hermanson notes that
Jarecke’s resulting picture was “pretty special.” He doesn’t need to see
the photograph to resurrect the scene in his mind. “It’s seared into my
memory,” he says, “as if it happened yesterday.”
The incinerated man stared back at Jarecke through the
camera’s viewfinder, his blackened arm reaching over the edge of the
truck’s windshield. Jarecke recalls that he could “see clearly how
precious life was to this guy, because he was fighting for it. He was
fighting to save his life to the very end, till he was completely burned
up. He was trying to get out of that truck.”
He wrote later that year in American Photo
magazine that he “wasn’t thinking at all about what was there; if I had
thought about how horrific the guy looked I wouldn’t have been able to
make the picture.” Instead, he maintained his emotional remove by
attending to the more prosaic and technical elements of photography. He
kept himself steady; he concentrated on the focus. The sun shone in
through the rear of the destroyed truck and backlit his subject. Another
burned body lay directly in front of the vehicle, blocking a close-up
shot, so Jarecke used the full 200mm zoom lens on his Canon EOS-1.
In his other shots of the same scene,
it is apparent that the soldier could never have survived, even if he
had pulled himself up out of the driver’s seat and through the window.
The desert sand around the truck is scorched. Bodies are piled behind
the vehicle, indistinguishable from one another. A lone, burned man lies
face down in front of the truck, everything incinerated except the
soles of his bare feet. In another photograph,
a man lies spread-eagle on the sand, his body burned to the point of
disintegration, but his face mostly intact and oddly serene. A dress
shoe lies next to his body.
The group continued on across the desert, passing
through more stretches of highway littered with the same fire-ravaged
bodies and vehicles. Jarecke and his pool were possibly the first
members of the Western media to come across these scenes, which appeared
along what eventually became known as the Highway of Death, sometimes
referred to as the Road to Hell.
The retreating Iraqi soldiers had been trapped. They
were frozen in a traffic jam, blocked off by the Americans, by Mutla
Ridge, by a minefield. Some fled on foot; the rest were strafed by
American planes that swooped overhead, passing again and again to
destroy all the vehicles. Milk vans, fire trucks, limousines, and one
bulldozer appeared in the wreckage alongside armored cars and trucks,
and T-55 and T-72 tanks. Most vehicles held fully loaded, but rusting,
Kalashnikov variants. According to descriptions from reporters like The New York Times’ R.W. Apple and the Observer’s
Colin Smith, amid the plastic mines, grenades, ammunition, and gas
masks, a quadruple-barreled anti-aircraft gun stood crewless and still
pointing skyward. Personal items, like a photograph of a child’s
birthday party and broken crayons, littered the ground beside weapons
and body parts. The body count never seems to have been determined,
although the BBC puts it in the “thousands.”
Following the February 28 ceasefire that ended Desert
Storm, Jarecke’s film roll with the image of the incinerated soldier
reached the Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where the
military coordinated and corralled the press, and where pool editors
received and filed stories and photographs. At that point, with the
operation over, the photograph would not have needed to pass through a
security screening, says Maryanne Golon, who was the on-site photo
editor for Time in Saudi Arabia and is now director of photography for The Washington Post.
Despite the obviously shocking content, she tells me she reacted like
an editor in work mode. She selected it, without debate or controversy
among the pool editors, to be scanned and transmitted. The image made
its way back to the editors’ offices in New York City.
Jarecke also made his way from Saudi Arabia to New
York. Passing through Heathrow Airport on a layover, he bought a copy of
the March 3 edition of the Observer. He opened it to find his
photograph on page 9, printed at the top across eight columns under the
heading, “The real face of war.”
That weekend in March, when the Observer’s
editors made the final decision to print the image, every magazine in
North America made the opposite choice. Jarecke’s photograph did not
even appear on the desks of most U.S. newspaper editors (the exception
being The New York Times, which had a photo wire
service subscription but nonetheless declined to publish the image). The
photograph was entirely absent from American media until far past the
time when it was relevant to ground reporting from Iraq and Kuwait.
Golon says she wasn’t surprised by this, even though she’d chosen to
transmit it to the American press. “I didn’t think there was any chance
they’d publish it,” she says.
Apart from the Observer, the only major news outlet to run the Iraqi soldier’s photograph at the time was the Parisian news daily Libération, which
ran it on March 4. Both newspapers refrained from putting the image on
the front page, though they ran it prominently inside. But Aidan
Sullivan, the pictures editor for the British Sunday Times, told the British Journal of Photography on March 14 that he had opted instead for a wide shot of the carnage: a desert highway littered with rubble. He challenged the Observer:
“We would have thought our readers could work out that a lot of people
had died in those vehicles. Do you have to show it to them?”
“There were 1,400 [Iraqi soldiers] in that convoy, and
every picture transmitted until that one came, two days after the
event, was of debris, bits of equipment,” Tony McGrath, the Observer’s pictures
editor, was quoted as saying in the same article. “No human involvement
in it at all; it could have been a scrapyard. That was some dreadful
censorship.”
The media took it upon themselves to “do what the
military censorship did not do,” says Robert Pledge, the head of the
Contact Press Images photojournalism agency that has represented Jarecke
since the 1980s. The night they received the image, Pledge tells me,
editors at the Associated Press’ New York City offices pulled the photo
entirely from the wire service, keeping it off the desks of virtually
all of America’s newspaper editors. It is unknown precisely how, why, or
by whom the AP’s decision was handed down.
Vincent Alabiso, who at the time was the executive
photo editor for the AP, later distanced himself from the wire service’s
decision. In 2003, he admitted to American Journalism Review that the photograph ought to have gone out on the wire and argued that such a photo would today.
Yet the AP’s reaction was repeated at Time and Life.
Both magazines briefly considered the photo, unofficially referred to
as “Crispy,” for publication. The photo departments even drew up layout
plans. Time, which had sent Jarecke to the Gulf in the first place, planned for the image to accompany a story about the Highway of Death.
“We fought like crazy to get our editors to let us
publish that picture,” former photo director Michele Stephenson tells
me. As she recalls, Henry Muller, the managing editor, told her, “Time
is a family magazine.” And the image was, when it came down to it, just
too disturbing for the outlet to publish. It was, to her recollection,
the only instance during the Gulf War where the photo department fought
but failed to get an image into print.
James Gaines, the managing editor of Life,
took responsibility for the ultimate decision not to run Jarecke’s image
in his own magazine’s pages, despite photo director Peter Howe’s push
to give it a double-page spread. “We thought that this was the stuff of
nightmares,” Gaines told Ian Buchanan of the British Journal of Photography in March 1991. “We have a fairly substantial number of children who read Life magazine,” he added. Even so, the photograph was published later that month in one of Life’s special issues devoted to the Gulf War—not typical reading material for the elementary-school set.
Stella Kramer, who worked as a freelance photo editor for Life
on four special-edition issues on the Gulf War, tells me that the
decision to not publish Jarecke’s photo was less about protecting
readers than preserving the dominant narrative of the good, clean war.
Flipping through 23-year-old issues, Kramer expresses clear distaste at
the editorial quality of what she helped to create. The magazines “were
very sanitized,” she says. “So, that’s why these issues are all
basically just propaganda.” She points out the picture on the cover of the February 25 issue:
a young blond boy dwarfed by the American flag he’s holding. “As far as
Americans were concerned,” she remarks, “nobody ever died.”
“If pictures tell stories,” Lee Corkran tells me, “the
story should have a point. So if the point is the utter annihilation of
people who were in retreat and all the charred bodies ... if that’s
your point, then that’s true. And so be it. I mean, war is ugly. It’s
hideous.” To Corkran, who was awarded the Bronze Star for his Gulf War
combat photography, pictures like Jarecke’s tell important stories about
the effects of American and allied airpower. Even Patrick Hermanson,
the public affairs officer who originally protested the idea of taking
pictures of the scene, now says the media should not have censored the
photo.
The U.S. military has now abandoned the pool system it
used in 1990 and 1991, and the Internet has changed the way photos
reach the public. Even if the AP did refuse to send out a photo, online
outlets would certainly run it, and no managing editor would be able to
prevent it from being shared across various social platforms, or being
the subject of extensive op-ed and blog commentary. If anything, today’s controversies often center on the vast abundance of disturbing photographs, and the difficulty of putting them in a meaningful context.
Some have argued that showing bloodshed and trauma
repeatedly and sensationally can dull emotional understanding. But never
showing these images in the first place guarantees that such an
understanding will never develop. “Try to imagine, if only for a moment,
what your intellectual, political, and ethical world would be like if
you had never seen a photograph,” author Susie Linfield asks in The Cruel Radiance,
her book on photography and political violence. Photos like Jarecke’s
not only show that bombs drop on real people; they also make the public
feel accountable. As David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2003, war photography has “an ability not just to offend the viewer, but to implicate him or her as well.”
As an angry 28-year-old Jarecke wrote in American Photo in 1991: “If we’re big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it.”
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