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Laura Youngblood poses for a photographer with daughter Emma, 2, while holding a photo of her husband, at their home in Sebastian, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008. Youngblood's husband Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis L. Youngblood, 26, died on July 21, 2005 from wounds received while serving in Iraq.
(AP Photo/John Raoux)

5 years on, Iraq war has changed lives

By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer
Sat Mar 8, 12:44 PM ET

Laura Youngblood clutched her husband's photo as she drove alone to the hospital. She'd become pregnant nearly nine months earlier, the day he'd left for training for Iraq. Hours later, after the baby was born, she placed the photo in the bassinet next to the infant he'd named Emma in his last letter home. He would never hold her.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis L. Youngblood, 26, had died two months earlier, killed by an improvised explosive device.

Laura Youngblood is just 29 years old, but she insists she will not remarry. Her life is her children, now ages 2 and 7. One day, she says, she'll be buried in the plot with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.

"I tell people I'm a happily married woman," she says, crying.

Five years after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, there are many tears — though not everyone is crying. For the great majority of Americans, this is a war seen from afar. They turn off the news and forget about what is happening a world away.

Then there's the other war, the one that's a very vivid and present part of some Americans' lives.

It's the war that more than a million U.S. soldiers have fought, leaving nearly 4,000 dead and more than 29,000 wounded in action. The one in which thousands of contractors rushed in to serve and to make a buck — though some paid the ultimate price, as well.

Around military bases across America, vacations are planned around deployment schedules. Mini baby booms occur nine months after troops come home. Support groups for widows and injured soldiers have come together.

At small town National Guard armories, the focus has shifted from one weekend a month to filling out life insurance forms and packing a rucksack for war.

"'How did I end up in this kind of a situation?' There were a lot of guys that said that," says Jeff Myers, 48, a tech sergeant in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard from Pillow, Pa. His lips still discharge shrapnel shreds, the residue of two roadside bombs he survived in 2004; a neurologist monitors the concussions he sustained.

In his job as a gunner guarding Army convoys, he saw men so paralyzed by fear they wouldn't go outside the wire. He saw others die 15 minutes after he was chatting with them.

It's not a matter of whether you will have to deal with things like irritability and nightmares after you get home, he says: "It's how you deal with it when it does happen."

And how you deal with your fellow Americans who experience Iraq from a distance.

Amanda Jordan, whose Marine husband was killed three days into the war, says she doesn't know what bothers her more — the days that go by when no one speaks of the war, or the punditry. At a local diner she frequents with her 11-year-old son near their home in Enfield, Conn., she's contemplated standing up and leaving so he doesn't hear when people say Iraq was unnecessarily invaded.

"This is like my life. You're saying my spouse, my child's father, is dead for no reason," says Jordan, a 39-year-old former paralegal who is studying to be a therapist specializing in grief. "That's a pretty harsh thing to hear all the time."

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Some can tell you exactly when their lives changed.

For Hazel Hoffman, from outside Grand Rapids, Mich., it was when the phone rang and she learned her son, Josh, was shot by a sniper. He was left a quadriplegic, unable to speak.

"I cried so hard that I had tears of blood. I remember looking down wondering, where is all this blood coming from? And it took a few seconds for me to realize this was coming out of me," says Hoffman, who has lived more than a year in an apartment with her son's girlfriend near his hospital in Richmond, Va.

Suzanne Stack, 48, was soaking in the bathtub in their house at Fort Campbell, Ky., when the doorbell rang. There were two officers at the door.

Afterward, still numb from the news of her husband's death, she walked her kids to the school bus. She sensed that people were looking at her fearfully, as if they were afraid they would be next. Even before the funeral, one spouse told her there was a waiting list for post housing. When would she be moving out?

"One day you're one thing. The next thing you're not. It's really quite a shock," says Stack, of Fredericksburg, Va., who now volunteers as an advocate for widows on Capitol Hill.

Walter Lajuane Williams, 33, of Fremont, Calif., was stoned when his turning point came. He was couch surfing, unemployed and in an abusive relationship after he left the Army, which took him to Iraq and Afghanistan. Even his service was criticized: "I had a person tell me, `How could you kill another person?'"

He went to the nonprofit Swords to Plowshares, looking for help finding work. A caseworker, wise to his drug use, took him aside. "I'm going to tell you candidly how I feel and what I smell," he said. "I'm going to work with you. Don't make me regret it."

Williams now helps other vets find jobs.

"All we need is a chance," Williams says.

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Recently, an Iraq veteran came to Daniel Fox's office and asked to take a screening exam for post-traumatic stress disorder a second time. He'd lied the first time, he said.

"When I asked him why he wasn't honest, he said because I had just gotten home and everybody's like saying, 'Welcome home hero,'" Fox says. "And how could he tell him that this hero was not doing well?"

Fox, 47, works for the Department of Veterans Affairs as a case manager, assisting Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. For a year, Fox, an Army Reservist, worked as an intensive care nurse at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany; the injured would be airlifted from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fox and his fellow nurses called themselves the ICU angels on the ICU angels tour. To lighten the mood, they made T-shirts with the slogan. Their bravado just helped mask their intense emotions.

"You had a mom and dad and the new wife with the babies in their arms standing in the door of this patient's room and he's got a gunshot wound to the head," says Fox, of Wichita, Kan. "How do you explain that to them? You can't console them."

"After a while, you go home and you cry about it," he says.

He used to be more macho and unemotional. Today, "I have more sympathy, more compassion," he says.

Lt. Col. Douglas Etter's job was sympathy and compassion. Etter, a minister, was a chaplain with the Pennsylvania National Guard in Al Anbar Province; his battalion lost 13 soldiers and two Marines.

He laid his hands on some of the men and delivered last rites. One morning, after he memorialized two of the dead, he says his stoicism dissolved; jogging by the Euphrates River, he cried.

In blunt newsletters home, he chronicled what the troops were seeing and experiencing, from delivering shoes and school supplies to happy Iraqi children to the story of a dead soldier wrapped in a flag by his fellow soldiers in the middle of a firefight because nothing else was available.

"As excited as we are to go home, many are equally afraid," he wrote in one of his last letters.

When Etter himself returned on leave to Pennsylvania to officiate at the funeral of a close friend, he turned to his wife and said he wanted to go home.

"I said, `OK, get in the car. Let's go home,'" said Jodi Etter. "And you said, 'No, my home in Iraq. I just want to go home.'"

When his tour was over, and he went with his wife to buy furniture for their new house in Lebanon, Pa., he had to remind himself that it was important to her — even if it seemed trivial to him after the war. He drove fast, and bought a BMW so he could do it. One day, Jodi pointed out that he was drinking more.

With time, his life settled down, and he came to feel that his months in Iraq were a time of growth. Now executive director of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Veterans Affairs, Etter says a deployment is like a magnifying glass.

"Personalities that are strong become stronger," he says. "Personalities which are weaker are made to become weaker."

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Phil Nesmith came away from Iraq with a certain clarity.

It wasn't the money that lured him to Iraq, he insists. He was like most of the U.S. troops he was living with at the time — idealistic about the mission.

He had been an Army paratrooper, but now he was among the first group of government contractors to arrive in Iraq after the invasion in 2003. His task was to help get telecommunications running.

At night, rockets flew into their compound. Sometimes they missed and hit apartments nearby, killing Iraqis. On the ground near where he was sleeping, a young officer shot and killed himself.

Violence did not account for all the stress. While he was there, Nesmith says, his relationship with his girlfriend of three years ended and she got pregnant by another man. "Pretty much every other soldier around me, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, had left them or they suspected them cheating on them."

It was hard. "You've left your life and you're wanting to maintain some kind of connection with that, but everything you left behind is continuing on even though your life is kind of suspended while you're there."

As he left Iraq, he crossed paths with a contractor who bragged about what he was going to buy with the money he was going to make in Iraq.

"I was just like, well, `You know, everybody's got their reasons, but I've got to ask you this: You lose both your legs, is that $160,000 going to be worth it?'" he says.

By that point, Nesmith says he knew what he wanted, what was important. He wanted to backpack through Australia, visit Montana, and go to photography school.

He did all three.

He had taken pictures in Iraq. Now he took some of those shots and manipulated them to look like they were taken in the Civil War era. They were shown at Washington, D.C.'s Irvine Contemporary Gallery in Washington, D.C., and priced at $1,500 each.

One photo depicts a single soldier standing alone in the desert. It reminds him of his own plight. "I knew I was on my journey back and when I got there I was going to be alone," Nesmith says. "No one was going to understand what that year was like."

Another photo, his favorite, is of an Iraqi flag flying outside a government utility office. Some Iraqis had just put it up. It was a time of optimism.

But now, he says, "it just seems like a more naive time, when you thought there was so much more that could possibly happen."

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Before Travis Youngblood left for Iraq, he and his wife watched a TV interview with a pregnant woman whose husband had died in Iraq. Laura Youngblood cried.

"I felt so sorry for her," Youngblood says.

But then, "When my husband died, my first words were, 'I became her.'"

Today in nearly every room of her Florida house, there's a photo of her husband.

"It is hard. I feel bad for my son because he's 7. He doesn't know how to ride a two-wheel bike. His daddy was going to teach him," she says. "I can't do all the boy things that he wants to do."

She put together videos so her daughter will know the father she never met.

"I'm a survivor of the war. I'm a surviving spouse," Youngblood says. "That's the best way I can say it because every day you're surviving."

[Bluestar]

Robert Fisk: Snapshots of life in Baghdad

The dangerous face of ordinary life has been captured by Iraqis on their mobile phones – reaching the places Western photographers can no longer go. Robert Fisk reports

Wednesday, 18 June 2008


Three bodies lie beside a Baghdad street on a blindingly hot day. The one on the right is dressed in a white shirt and bright green trousers, his hands tied behind his back. Two others on the left lie shoeless, both dressed in check shirts, dumped – how easily we use that word of Baghdad's corpses – on a yard of dirt and bags of garbage. They, too, of course, are now garbage. The wall behind them, a grim barrier of dun-coloured brick, seals off this horror from two two-storey villas and a clutch of palm trees, the normal life of Baghdad just a wall away from the other "normal" life of Baghdad's sectarian killings. No one knows whose bodies they are and the picture – taken from a car window – was snapped in fear by an unknown Iraqi.

It is a cell-phone picture, for now only the cell phones of the Iraqi people can record their tragedy. Another shows a young man's body, taken from beside a car wing mirror, hands tied behind his back with his own shirt. Bombs explode across the Baghdad skyline, columns of smoke move into the air like sinister ghosts. Palm trees block off streets of fearful Iraqis. A car bomb blazes, the faint image of a US Humvee outlined against the trees. There are broken bridges, wounded friends, blood-soaked cloth.

But there are also families; even a Muslim family celebrating Christmas, all dressed in Santa Claus hats, and a graduation party where the girls wear Bedouin black dresses with gold-fringed scarves and the boys wear Arab headdress and white abayas – something quite foreign to the middle classes of what was once one of the most literate and educated cities of the Middle East.

But it is the cell phone that has captured this terrible, fearful, brave face of Baghdad. Western photographers can no longer roam the streets of the Iraqi capital – and few other cities in Iraq – and in south-west Afghanistan, the same phenomenon has occurred.

We Westerners need the locals to photograph their tragedy and their ragged, often fuzzy, poorly framed pictures contain their own finely calibrated and terrible beauty. The fear of the cell-phone snapper is contained in almost every frame. Most of the Iraqis are refugees-to-be, for the Dutch photographer Geert van Kesteren, who collected 388 pages of photographs for his book Baghdad Calling, wanted to catalogue the tragedy of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who are the largely ignored victims of our demented 2003 invasion and occupation.

Van Kesteren, an unassuming but imaginative journalist whom I met recently in Holland, noticed that refugees used their cell phones as family albums and decided, in the words of Brigitte Lardinois, formerly director of Magnum Photos in London, "to let the pictures of ordinary, non-professional photographers tell the story this time". Iraqi refugees in Jordan asked friends to send more pictures from Baghdad.

Some were rejected because of their suspect provenance – alas, we therefore do not see the picture of an American soldier, apparently firing a rifle from atop a donkey, but which might have been digitally edited – but others cannot be anything but the truth. The smiling families, hiding in their homes as the killers roam the darkness outside, the young men relaxing in the safety of Kurdistan, swimming in the lakes, revelling in the nightlife, the plump nephew of one of the anonymous cell-phone photographers sitting on a bright red sports car, have to be real.

It must have been hard for Van Kesteren, a news photographer in his own right, to have submerged his own work for this brilliant amateur collection. A few of Van Kesteren's own professional pictures appear in Baghdad Calling but they are taken in the safety of Syria, Jordan or Turkey and – save for a group photograph of courageous Iraqis captured after illegally crossing the Turkish border but still determined to escape from their country again – they lack the power and immediacy of the Iraqi snapshots.

The refugee statistics are so appalling that they have become almost mundane. Four million of Iraq's 23 million people have fled their homes – until recently, at the rate of 60,000 a month – allegedly more than 1.2 million to Syria (a figure now challenged by at least one prominent NGO), 500,000 to Jordan, 200,000 to the Gulf, 70,000 to Egypt, 57,000 to Iran, up to 40,000 to Lebanon, 10,000 to Turkey. Sweden has accepted 9,000, Germany fewer – where an outrageous political debate has suggested that Christian refugees should have preference over Muslim Iraqis. With its usual magnanimity – especially for a country that set off this hell-disaster by its illegal invasion – George Bush's America has, of course, accepted slightly more than 500.

This collection of pictures is therefore an indictment of us, as well as of the courage of Iraqis. The madness is summed up in an email message sent to Van Kesteren by a Baghdad Iraqi. "This summer," he wrote, "a workman wanted to quench his thirst by putting ice in his tea. A car pulled up, the driver stepped out and began to beat and kick the man, cursing him as an unbeliever. 'What do you think you're doing? Did the Prophet Mohamed put ice in his water?'

The man being attacked was furious and asked his assailant: 'Do you think the Prophet Mohamed drove a car?'

Robert Fisk: Snapshots of life in Baghdad - Robert Fisk, News - The Independent