Find the Cost of Freedom, Buried in the Ground
It's an old Crosby, Stills & Nash song, by Steven Stills. Many of us who were there in the 70s still remember the words. I know I can recite them from memory: "Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground. Mother Earth will swallow you; lay your burdens down."
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July. Not only my favorite holiday the whole year through -- sorry, I'm a New Englander, we're just born that way -- but also another opportunity - along with Memorial Day, and Veterans Day - to stop and honor the service of those who sacrificed their lives for freedom, or at least, responded to what they saw as the call of duty that they responded to, while others did not. Those whose blood was shed on American soil -- in Lexington, Massachusetts, in the Revolutionary War -- and also, more recently, in the jungles of Vietnam, in the mountains of Afghanistan and in the sands and urban jungles of Iraq.
I'm thinking today about censorship -- and the power of an image to convey, in a single instance, what those of us who labor over our words perhaps never can. The picture, they claim, is worth 1,000 words -- perhaps because it communicates, in an instant, across barriers of language, space and time -- what human beings instinctively understand, nonverbally. With war: that there is a price; that it is never really glorious; that those who give their lives often do so -- as the poet W.H. Auden wrote about the famous art masterpiece, the "Fall of Icarus," by the Dutch painter, Brueghel -- in a depressingly inglorious context:
"About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along...
If you don't remember the Greek myth of Icarus you might need some refreshing. He's the pre-Wright Brothers son of Daedalus, whose father built him a pair of wings, in order to take flight and escape from the island of Crete. But the father glued the wing feathers in with wax, and then warned his son not to fly too close to the sun (probably without explaining actually why.) Icarus partially succeeded in his goal -- he was able to fly, but in flying, did get too close to the sun -- at which point the sun's rays melted the wing feathers' wax and he literally dropped out of the sky, into the ocean -- having succeeded in his fabulous quest and also painfully failed, all at the same time. That's not the parallel with the armed forces: the parallel worth drawing here is that sometimes death on a glorious "mission" turns out to be a most pedestrian thing, and the rest of us, unless we're apprised of it, don't even notice or celebrate. On a deeper level, it brings up the question: as Americans, how exactly do we "support the troops," if we're not even really aware of what they're up against?
Unlike Vietnam, where grainy black and white news footage of U.S. soldiers fighting and dying in foreign jungles was often watched during dinner, with Walter Cronkite narrating -- in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're reduced to very little coverage and certainly not much that could "upset" our "overly tender sensibilities." No flag-draped coffins being offloaded at Dover Air Force Base, instantly communicating that for every loss in combat there's a grieving, distraught family and a hole in the community, left by that veteran, that will never be filled. Even those, like me, who don't exactly excel at math -- we're more than dimly aware that for every servicemember KIA -- or killed in action -- there are scores more wounded and disfigured for life -- emotionally scarred (invisibly) as well as visibly. The human costs are staggering: those are daddies and mommies, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, employees and employers who come home different: maybe unable to work, maybe unable to function - initially or long-term; maybe unable to take care of their families while they struggle with their own wounds of war. This is the human cost of war: it exists whether we are personally dialed in to it and aware of it, or not. It is, to use the words of Hedley Peach, a "generic effect of combat."
And while the news media gives scant coverage to what is happening in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as surely as the hands of our clock tick daily the minutes and the hours, somebody's sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers are dying, and being injured -- somewhere. We can be for or against the wars -- forget that noise for now -- but at the very least, we ought to be for the veterans. And their families. If what happens is fully what they signed up for: so be it. I'll say this for myself, if no one else: They're better people than I am. If it's not what they bargained for: even more reason to feel compassion for what they're going through. But here's a pretty elementary principle: if we don't see it, we can't grasp it -- and we move on with our lives as though nothing were really happening. No coffins at Dover? No bodies on the news? I guess this war isn't really costing that much in human terms after all...it's just another blip on our radar, hardly making a difference among the rest of the pronounced concerns of our lives and welfare. Except that it IS happening -- and men and women are dying, and being injured, often grievously -- and we're, generally speaking, like the villagers in the Icarus poem, above (read the whole thing) pretty unaware of how that affects us, or if it even does.
And THAT is where journalism comes in, and photojournalism -- to convey in a single image, what dozens of column inches can barely touch. A single image that resourcefully, potently conveys the reality of life and death on the knife edge, on the tip of the spear -- somewhere around the globe, and challenges you, me, us -- the viewer -- to say that it matters, and that we finally understand.
Maybe that's why in every craptastic Third World-ish revolution, they always kill -- um, that would be the military who does the killing -- the intelligentsia -- the artists, the poets, the thinkers, the intellectuals -- first. Because I guess if you even goad the populace at large to think, why, you're a highly dangerous individual, and should be stopped -- before you can do any more harm (I mean, good.)
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Want a riveting image, that "stops the presses," and conveys for all time the intrinsic truth -- or at least, one powerful truth -- about an experience? Turn to a photojournalist. I've read more words than I can think of in my time, but if you want to know what I remember -- it's the images, often Pulitzer Prize-winning, from the eras of our shared experience. Vietnam? It's the naked young girl, covered in Napalm, running from her burning village. (We dropped the Napalm, btw...) Famine in Africa? It's the buzzard, waiting for the tiny dark baby with its protruding ribs to just "hurry up and die, wouldja?!" so the buzzard could eat it. (The photographer who shot that amazing scene, and won a Pulitzer Prize for it, later killed himself -- perhaps because those who witness tremendous suffering, also suffer tremendously themselves.)
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I'm not going to say who it is, because -- call me a fatalist -- I don't want to wake up tomorrow and find out that he's dead. ESPECIALLY not on the Fourth of July -- that would be offensive in the extreme. But the other day, some well-known and ridiculously good photojournalist blogrolled me -- stuck a link to this blog on his blog -- and I checked it out, to see what his stuff was like -- and of course it was riveting. He's an embedded photojournalist in Iraq, or was, I should say, until the Marine brass apparently got fed up with him, and summarily pulled him out of his embedded assignment and out of the country. His only offense, from the sounds of things? Shooting the aftermath of a suicide blast in Ramadi -- you know, the Anbar province -- the Sunni triangle -- the previous hotbed of violence in Iraq -- which if we're to read the mainstream media, why, all that has calmed down considerably from a few years ago, and there's hardly anything brewing there at all. Well, except for the lives of scores of people who died there, INCLUDING MARINES, in a suicide bombing just last week. This guy documented it -- as sensitively as one could, given the horrific nature of the scene -- and he expressed the emotional toll it was taking on him, as no other experience had. And somebody in the Marine Corps upper echelons took offense at what the rest of us call -- oh, I don't know -- the First Amendment -- and took steps to pull him out of there, on the double.
Let's HOPE the guy lives long enough to evacuate safely. Really. And then let's hope he still gets to show what he shot, at great personal cost -- because some of the rest of us (it's a refresher course: we're called Americans) want to actually SEE the cost of freedom -- in a way that those of us who don't serve, don't know; and those of us who do, and did -- know only too well. It's only fair. If we sanitize the living daylights out of these wars -- for what? -- not only will the American public not "get" the tremendous price paid by those serving AND their families; they won't be as compassionate to the same people afterwards as they need to be. It's in all of our best interests to actively fight for, and preserve, the freedom of the press. And that means photojournalists, who document war's horror, sufferings, and triumphs in a way no print journalist could ever begin to approximate.
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For my part, when I saw the photos in question the other day, I had myself a good, therapeutic, and instantaneous cry -- not just for the crumpled bodies of THOSE Marines on the ground -- he was subtle, nuanced and concerned enough not to show their faces, or anything else that identified them -- but for all the others I knew and knew about, who'd fought, been injured, or died there -- or returned home, not quite as intact, in body or soul, as when they'd left. To deny us, as Americans, the chance through images like this to share the plight of those who are fighting on our behalf elsewhere in the world, is to deny us the chance to share what servicemembers are going through; and to deny them the chance to know that somewhere out there are people who "get," admire and respect the tremendous price they've paid through their service.
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The Marine Corps, which wants to sign more patriotic young sons and daughters up to fight, apparently thinks that by constraining the version of what reality is to just a portion of the whole will keep them happy and us in the dark, and people like this brave guy, the photographer, well, in complete limbo. Little do they know that the patriots will still fight, but the rest of us could use an education course in compassion, sensitivity and yes, tenderness for those who've fought in battle, that only comes through expanding our horizons, and by facing the whole truth of what they're really going through, as combatants. Don't sugar coat the truth: everyone who goes to war comes back changed -- that's just how it is. Let's develop a compassion and an understanding for what they go through, not sweep it under the rug. The death and injury of those with whom they serve is often the most scarring aspect of combat there is. Just ask those who've never been the same since.
So especially on this Fourth of July, as one extraordinarily talented photojournalist sits in limbo, let's hope still alive, ripped out of the fight for no other reason than that he was getting a little too close to home in showing us what war is really like -- I'm appalled to think that as Americans, we're not being trusted with the whole truth, when it's expressly the whole truth that we need, as Martin Luther King once said, to set us free. We need to know the human costs of these battles we're in. And suppressing the images of that just harms our servicemembers and their families, and cripples the compassion of us as a people.
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Until I looked it up just now, I didn't realize that Crosby, Stills and Nash song had other lyrics. Apparently it does. Besides the chorus (above), which I remember so well, there's another verse as well:
Daylight again, following me to bed
I think about a hundred years ago, how my fathers bled
I think I see a valley, covered with bones in blue
All the brave soldiers that cannot get older been askin' after you
Hear the past a callin', from Armegeddon's side
When everyone's talkin' and no one is listenin', how can we
decide?
On the behalf of all those "brave soldiers that cannot get older," could we at least not suppress and crush the efforts of those who are trying to get us to see the whole truth? What truth is that, you may ask? The very cost of freedom, buried in the ground -- in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Vietnam beforehand. Godspeed, Z. You are a witness on ALL of our behalf, to the price that war really exacts, on those who serve in it.