The hidden face of the war

[Skybird]

Be advised that although these pictures are from a public exhibition in New York, some sensible minds may find them disturbing. But if you are here in this forum and consider yourself ripe enough to play wargames on PC, I expect you to bear such photos, too. And they are - by far - not the worst the human eye can see.

The photographer took them without judging the fate and the person behind the portrait, and without pathos either. This is what makes them appear to be very moving, in my perception, and more honest than the propaganda sh!t you use to see on TV.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...502785,00.html

http://www.ninaberman.com/index3.php?pag=prt&dir=phmov

http://www.ninaberman.com/index3.php?pag=prt&dir=marine
http://www.ninaberman.com/index3.php...t&dir=imagesph

from:
http://www.ninaberman.com/index3.php?pag=prt

"I seek them out in their hometowns, after they have been discharged from military hospitals," Berman says in a statement on the gallery's Web site. "I photograph them alone, mainly in their rooms, which to me feel like little cages. I strip them of patriotic colors and heroic postures. I see them alienated and dispossessed, left empty handed amid dreams of glory and escape." (...)

"We had a good time," reports Seageant Joseph Mosner, 35, who lost his scalp and the left side of his face to a bomb. "We made it fun. After we got hit, we'd give each other high fives and laugh about it." Private First Class Randall Clunen, 19, tells a similar story. "I liked it. The excitement. The adrenaline. Never knowing what's going to happen." (...)

Even Specialist Sam Ross, 21 -- who was seriously injured in a Baghdad bomb blast and now lives alone in a trailer in Western Pennsylvania -- doesn't lament his fate. "I lost my leg just below the knee. Lost my eyesight. I have shrapnel in pretty much every part of my body. Got my finger blown off. It don't work right. I had a hole blown through my right leg. You know, not really anything major. I get headaches. "And my left ear, it don't work either. I don't have any regrets. It was the best experience of my life."
For his part, though, Corporal Tyson Johnson III is bitter. Following a mortar attack resulting in massive internal injuries, the 22-year-old is now completely disabled. Nevertheless, he has to pay back a $2,999 signing bonus he got when he joined the National Guard. "I'm burning on the inside," he says. "I'm burning."

I will be very unforgiving to everybody trying to turn this thread into the usual political debate about Bush and Iraq. You all know that I often do that myself, and where I stand. But here such talking is not needed, neither wanted. Please respect the way and intention in wich the photographer did her work.: "Berman, for her part, found the experience of photographing the veterans profoundly moving. "Meeting so many severely disabled young men and women was deeply disturbing to me," she says. "I felt complicit because they had fought in my name. And I felt the divide of privilege because I did not have to make a similar sacrifice." "