Iraq Dispatch: Birthday, Groundhog Day, It's All The Same

 

NPPA president Tony Overman, a staff photojournalist with The Olympian in Olympia, WA, is embedded with soldiers from Fort Lewis and the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, on duty in Iraq. He’s on assignment with reporter Sean Cockerham of the News Tribune in Tacoma, WA, and together for the next few weeks they are covering Stryker troops from Washington State who are serving in and around Baghdad and Mosul. Today Overman filed his third disptach (scroll down page for earlier reports):

FOB MAREZ, MOSUL, IRAQ (October 21, 2006) – Today is my 44th birthday. And in true military fashion, there was no fanfare. We woke at 4:30 a.m. and went on a mission with the engineers who sweep the roads of Mosul for improvised explosive devices.

About the only way I knew was a “Isn’t today your birthday?” question from my reporter teammate, Sean Cockerham, and an eMail from my wife, Toni. I marked the occasion by having a piece of cake in the chow hall. I didn’t want my birthday to pass without at least trying to acknowledge it.

As sad as that sounds, it’s worse for the soldiers who are deployed here for an entire year. They miss every holiday, birthday, and anniversary. First day of school for your kids? You’re not there. Baby takes its first steps? Not there, again.

One soldier told me that the holiday decorations that are put up at the chow hall really depress him, because it only reminds him that people back home are celebrating. The soldiers tell me life in a war zone is just like the movie “Groundhog Day,” everyday.

Weekends, holidays, birthdays only mean that you are going out on a mission again, and again tomorrow. I really feel for these soldiers, most of whom are now officially half my age. Perhaps it’s a paternal instinct, but I worry about them a lot. Sean pointed out the other day that many of them are young enough to be my children. And we’ve gotten to know some of them pretty well. I don’t want to cover another memorial service, because I know it’s another kid who died too soon.

On a lighter note, there have been some good times here in Iraq.

• During a mission into the Hurriya neighborhood of Baghdad, a group of boys came up to me and one boy asked “Mister, give me banana?” I replied by singing in my best overacted Broadway musical voice, “Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today.” The boy’s face lit up with a smile, and he began clapping his hands and singing “We will, we will, rock you!” We stood together clapping our hands and stomping our feet singing Queen’s “We Will Rock You” together, much to the delight of the other boys gathered around.
• You know how cool it is to walk into someone’s house and see one of your photos stuck up on the refrigerator? Now imagine you are in a war zone, 12,000 miles from home, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by desert. I was at FOB Q-West south of Mosul when I slipped on a broken curb and split open my finger. I went to the Battalion Aid Station to get it patched up. And as I was leaving I saw two newspaper clippings on the door, and one of them was my photo of a troop supporter waving an American flag during a snowstorm. The other clipping was a photo by my friend Dean Koepfler of the Tacoma News Tribune. It felt good to thank them for fixing my finger, and be able to tell them that was my picture. In a phrase I had heard before, the medic smiled and said “Small world.”
• Speaking of seeing your buddies’ photos, I have enjoyed keeping up with my friends back in Washington through their photos in Stars and Stripes newspaper. I have seen photos from Ted Warren, John Froschauer, Dean Koepfler and Larry Steagall. Larry’s photo didn’t have a credit, but it was from Bremerton, and if you know Larry, you know a Steagall photo when you see it.
• Shooting photos here in Iraq has been tough. One of “Tony’s Eight Simple Rules” is to circle, circle, circle. Well, in a war zone, you don’t get to do much creative composition. You shoot what you see, from the angle you see it. My friend Mike Urban at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer likes to say that our job is often just “putting A and B together.” The trouble here is that you just get to shoot “A”, and hope that “B” gets in the photo somehow. Often what you see is out the side window of a Humvee, or if you’re lucky, out the hatch of a Stryker vehicle. But that means it passes by at 30 miles per hour, and you get what you get. Or you don’t get it at all. I’ve seen a lot of things I wish I could have spent hours shooting, but only watched them blur past in an instant. It’s frustrating, and makes me excited to come home and shoot things how I want.
• On a positive note, the Army has not restricted my access to anything. There are some operational security restrictions that keep you from shooting things like the flight line at the helicopter pad, or the guard towers as you enter the base. But generally speaking, if I can see it, I can shoot it. That was refreshing because I’m usually under tighter restrictions when I’m shooting back home at Fort Lewis.
• I’ve really enjoyed getting eMails from my friends and even some from photographers that I’ve never met. Most everyone seems honored that I took the time in a war zone to write them back. But I really appreciate knowing people care enough to write.

*****

It's An NPPA World, After All

NEAR BAGHDAD, IRAQ (October 6, 2006 ) - It seems that I can’t go anywhere in the world without there being some serious photojournalism concern to which NPPA can offer its support. First it was freelance video journalist Joshua Wolf getting jailed while I was in San Francisco last August. Now that I’m in Iraq, it’s Billal Hussein, the Associated Press photographer held without charges by the U.S. Army.

But there are also some just-plain-fun aspects to NPPA that occasionally pop up, even in the war zone of Iraq.

When I arrived in Baghdad, reporter Sean Cockerham and I were being shuttled around by Sgt. Frank Merola, an Army reservist from New York state supporting the 4th Infantry Division’s media operations center at Camp Liberty. Merola mentioned to Sean that back home he is a television journalist with News 12 in Westchester County, NY.

I quickly asked if he was a member of NPPA. He said that he had let his membership lapse since deploying to Iraq. But, he added, his brother-in-law is Guy Hernandez, former Region 8 Television Photographer of the Year from Dallas.

When I told him that I was the NPPA president, he replied, “Wow! You must be really good.”

Merola went on to explain that photographers he knew who were “into NPPA” were all about getting better at their craft, challenging themselves to always improve. Those not “into NPPA” were often just doing their jobs, he said, but without the same passion to always get better.

He told me about meeting a video journalist from CNN with 21 years experience who went to his first NPPA TV NewsVideo Workshop last year in Norman, OK. “Even someone with that much experience can learn from NPPA,” said Merola, who also honed his skills at the Norman workshop in 1998.

I think our conversation convinced Merola to “re-up” with NPPA when he returns home in 2007.

Two weeks later I was reassigned to a new part of the enormous Camp Liberty, and got lost in the middle of the night trying to find my way back to the Public Affairs Office. I wandered into the 40th Combat Engineer Battalion office and asked the first person I saw for directions. He asked if I was a reporter, and I explained that I was photojournalist from Olympia. The officer told me that he had a photographer friend from Washington state who shoots for Reuters. At the exact same time, we both said, “Anthony Bolante!”

The officer’s face lit up, and he began sharing stories of the two being at officer training together. I told him that those of us who know Anthony simply as the friendliest photographer in the world have a hard time believing he’s the commander of a National Guard helicopter team. The officer told me that Anthony is currently in Afghanistan working with his unit, and we both shared our best wishes for “Ant Man” to stay safe and come home soon.

As I began to I walk away, the officer smiled, shook his head and said, “Small world.”

*****

Iraq Dispatch: War Photographer

NEAR BAGHDAD, IRAQ (October 2, 2006) – As a photojournalist, I strive to tell the complete story with my photos. I thought I could tell the story of our local soldiers here in Iraq without putting myself at risk. But in a war zone, that story is often violent and scary.

The reality of the danger was made quickly clear upon my arrival at Camp Liberty in Baghdad two weeks ago. My cot in the Comanche Company tent was open because the soldier who had been sleeping in it had been killed a few weeks earlier by explosives buried in the road.

In my 25 years as a photojournalist – despite covering bank robberies, riots and hostage standoffs - I had never seen anyone fire a gun at another person.

That changed with our very first mission in Ghazaliyah, where our Stryker vehicle was on the receiving end of a sniper’s bullet. I grew up around guns, but I had never heard anything as loud as the “bang-crack-ping” of the bullet hitting a few feet behind me.

It wasn’t until I was safely back at Camp Liberty that I began to think about how the bullet that hit just 18 inches below the lieutenant’s hatch could have just as easily hit the lieutenant or the young specialist in the hatch behind him. It could have hit me. And in an instant our worlds would have changed.

The next day, two Comanche Company soldiers in the tent next to ours were injured when they were fired on by civilian security contractors who were being ambushed by insurgents. The Stryker soldiers came and stopped the attack. But in the heat of battle, the contractors mistook their saviors for the enemy and shot at them.

Two days later, another soldier in Comanche Company was shot in the neck by an insurgent sniper as he stood watch in the hatch of his Stryker vehicle.

The three injured men are all recovering well, and were back to work with their units a few days later. Apparently getting shot in battle is not a ticket home from the war.

Even with the realization of the risks, I haven’t felt scared here. Well, I’ll take that back.

During a sweep of farmland in rural northern Baghdad, I walked off with soldiers to photograph them freeing their Stryker vehicle that was stuck in the mud. When I realized that I was not with the soldiers I arrived with, I began walking back down the road to where they were. I quickly found myself alone on a country road, surrounded by farmhouses and exposed to snipers or kidnappers.

David Leeson of the Dallas Morning News told me before I left for Iraq to “listen to the voice inside your head.” Well, that voice was telling me to get the hell back to the safety of the soldiers. I double-timed it to our soldiers, and never left their side the rest of the day.

A photographer friend told me he didn’t want to come to Iraq because he knew he would try so hard to tell the story, that his common sense might be overpowered by his desire to get great photos. I know where he’s coming from.

Four days after my farmland scare, I desperately wanted to photograph an old painting in the upstairs of an empty Iraqi schoolhouse. I started to sneak away from our soldiers and up the stairs. It’s the kind of thing I would do at the drop of a hat back home in Washington State. But that inner voice reminded me to not walk up those stairs by myself, and I turned back. Fortunately, a few minutes later our soldiers searched the upstairs, and I got my photo.

Unfortunately, the journalist in me still feels the need to photograph a firefight. After all, it’s the reality of what’s happening to our local soldiers nearly everyday.

I will remind myself through my remaining four weeks in Iraq of the words I wrote in my News Photographer column last month. “I am not a combat photographer, and I have no intention of becoming one.”

The hard part is that sometimes the combat comes to you. If that happens, I will be listening to the voice in my head, and reminding myself that no photo is worth losing your life.

War photographer? Well, I am photographing a war, and now I have been shot at. Let’s hope it’s the last time.

Like the soldiers we’re covering, the most important thing is to come home alive.

Overman's photo galleries are online at The Olympian here.

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