Armed with a Camera, in the Midst of War

On the ground during the early actions of the Iraq War, photographer Ashley Gilbertson filmed a nation sliding into chaos.

Interview by ROSETTE ROYALE, Staff Reporter

In the beginning days of the Iraq War, photographer Ashley Gilbertson filmed the human side of those affected by the invasion. His efforts led to a book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Photo by Edward Wong

But when Turkey refused the U.S. access, the military changed tactics, choosing to storm into Iraq from the south. That meant Gilbertson wouldn’t be seeing much combat. Or so he thought. Because as the virus of conflict spread, Gilbertson found its tendrils stretching in his direction, pulling him, and his camera, into the sick fever of war.

More than 250 photos from the conflict’s early days have been collected in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of the Iraq War (University of Chicago Press, $35), Gilbertson’s crystalline window into the chaos that engulfed a nation. Within these pages reside images of blood and chaos, death and terror, confusion and destruction, and, surprisingly, brief moments of calm and humor. Intermixed with these photos are Gilbertson’s recollections of being in Baghdad, Samarra, Karbala, and Fallujah, where he witnessed fighting so deadly, it seems impossible he’s still alive, an irony he himself acknowledges.

Echoing the frank manner in which he both photographs and writes of combat, Gilbertson, named National Photographer of the Year in 2005 at the National Photo Awards, talks honestly about the horrors he saw in the war and how they affected him. Speaking from his cell phone while visiting Shanghai — his Australian accent as smoky as a Marlboro, his words as clear as a shot of Stoli — Gilbertson recalled his early pro-war stance, the danger foreign reporters pose to Iraqis, and the death of U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Billy Miller.

In the book, the first thing you write is you never had any intention of being a war photographer. So how did you become one?
I always felt that war photographers were a very, very specific group of people who seek out combat. And my concern was really the civilians and the refugees: the people who were caught in the middle. So I felt, if anything, I was a humanitarian photographer, like a humanitarian worker.

Now, when I had gotten to Iraq, and I was seeing combat firsthand — in particular, on top of a mountain, where the Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia, were facing up with al Qaeda — I wanted to hide and stay inside the bunker. But [the Peshmerga] ran outside headfirst into what I felt was certain death: there were rockets and bullets flying everywhere. And this passion, to not only defend their homeland and independence, but this willingness to die for and kill for a cause, it’s something I felt that I needed to witness. So I kind of went into what I call — and I know it’s trite — the heart of war. I wanted to see with my own eyes what those horrors in fact were.

InIraqi Ali Shankar, 26, recovers from an attack on the Italian base of Nasiriya that killed his wife and son and injured 104 other Iraqis. Photo by Ashley Gilbertson

What did you think about the invasion before it happened?
I was very much pro-war in 2002 and 2003 , simply because I had worked with the Kurds, and the stories I had heard — very good friends of mine who had lost huge amounts of family or been tortured within an inch of their lives by Saddam and his men — I felt that anything would be better than Saddam in power. However, I started rethinking that as I became more experienced, as I stood in Mosul and I watched that city on fire and the Americans not intervening, not stopping the looting, not stopping the destruction. And I think that eroded further and further until finally, in 2004 in Fallujah, during the offensive there, I saw what war really is. And there is no such thing as a “just war.” There is no such thing as a winner in war: everybody loses. So it was only then, in those crystal clear moments of battle, that I really became an anti-war photographer. I became somebody, however naïve this philosophy may be, who really believes that there should be no end to diplomacy.

So how do you keep your wits about you, when you’ve got bombs dropping and there are bullets flying and people are being blown apart?
There are really a variety of ways. The first and most important thing you always need to keep in mind is to be constantly evaluating the situation all around you: who’s looking at you, what that might mean, where is hard cover, where is soft cover, where’s the best escape route. And it was that really extreme discipline that I think was one of the things that kept me alive.

But I’ve always got a fixer with me, somebody who, while I’m actually taking pictures, can watch my back, somebody who understands the language, who can understand what a sudden slight may mean from an Arab sheik and that we have to get the hell out of there because there’s a kidnapping gang on the way. [My fixer,] Jaff, who I talk about in the book — I mean, I owe my life to that guy. And more recently, as access got worse and the situation got worse, I’ve been traveling with armed security guards. Occasionally, we travel in armored cars. So while in 2003, I could have spent three hours on the street taking pictures, now it’s 10 minutes.

In the book, you mention reporters and photographers who embedded with the military. You chose not to really go that route. How come?
I felt, and I still feel, that my strength as a photographer is having compassion and being able to pay attention to stories that other people don’t want to pay attention to. Now during the invasion, I think there was something like 900 reporters embedded with the military. I think the majority of the photographers who were doing that were a hell of a lot better than I was, and a lot more experienced. I didn’t think there was any place for a young Australian freelancer to embed with the American military. But there was a place for an unknown, freelance Australian photographer to spend time with the Iraqi civilians, to go around and see things with my own eyes, and try to tell those stories.

So people are going through war and there’s a photographer there, taking a picture. How did people take to that?
In 2003, when we would walk into somebody’s home and say, “I’m a reporter, blah blah blah blah blah, for The New York Times or The Boston Globe,” they would say, “Please, sit down, feel welcome. You’re always welcome in our house.” And they would tell their stories, because they really wanted that chance to tell the horrible things that had happened in their lives and during the invasion. I think they felt, and we felt, that we were doing something to help them.

But as the years have gone on, it’s become pretty clear that we’re not affecting public policy, we’re not helping these people. I mean, the guys that I interviewed three years ago in a bombed-out house are probably still living in the same bombed-out house. So I think the Iraqis started seeing reporters as kind of useless, like, “What’s the point of talking to them?” You see a foreign reporter walk into someone’s house, and instantly that person is targeted for death, because he or she is a collaborator with the American spies.

I’d like to talk about when you were there with the Marines and they stormed into Fallujah in 2004. Overall, how was that experience?
[Pause.] It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. If I had to go through something worse that, I don’t know how on earth I’ll recover.

I’d done embeds with military units on large-scale offenses. Now what generally happens is that you’d go out, you’d get briefed, everyone would get ready for a big fight, and you would accompany the troops and it would be one day of fighting. And then the insurgents would just melt away and the fighting would finish. But as we all know, it famously continued for more than a week of just intense fighting. Every time you took a step, you were being shot at.

The reason I wrote so much text, and it’s so emotional, is because you look at the pictures and you can see that people are killing each other, you can see that people are dying, you can see the extreme violence. But it’s very hard to relate, as a human being, to that violence. So when I write about feeling responsible for the death of a Marine, when I write about crossing the street and freaking the fuck out, when I write about pissing myself in my sleep because there’s a guy shooting at insurgents while I’m asleep — it’s because I want people to understand that it’s real.

Can you talk a little bit about Lance Corporal Miller?
Yeah. I mean, that was — when I say that I wanted to explore what war was, that was when I really experienced how bad it can actually get.

I had seen little snapshots that one of the Marines had taken of a dead foreign fighter in a minaret. And I said to him, “Where’s the minaret?” and he said, “It’s 200 yards up the road.” And I spoke to Dexter [Filkins, a New York Times] reporter I was traveling with, that we have to go and see it: we needed to see evidence that insurgents were using the mosques as staging grounds, because the City of Mosques had every mosque either flattened or damaged in some way.

I went to see the captain and said, “I want to go,” and he said, “It’s out of the question, it’s too dangerous.” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding. You just cleared that mosque. I’m just going to walk up there. Just tell your guys not to shoot at me.” And he said, “You can go, but I’m sending a squad.” I said, “No no no no no, I don’t want the responsibility.” As a photographer, I’ve been almost religious about never, ever influencing the situation anymore than I am with my presence alone, so I would never request a squad or an escort, but he insisted. It was intense running up there, and I thought to myself, “I’ve crossed the line. This is actually really dangerous. I shouldn’t be doing this.” But it was too late.

We get to the mosque and I try to go up the minaret and make this as painless as possible — just go up there, get the picture really quickly, get back, before anything happens. But before I went up to climb this very narrow staircase in the minaret, I felt a hand on my back and it was Lance Corporal Dominguez, who was one of [Lance Corporal] Miller’s friends, and he said, “We’re going up first.” I argued and [Lance Corporal] Billy Miller said, “You have no choice,” and started going ahead of me, then Dominguez, then me. And a few flights up, shots ring out — you hear a gun discharging, right in front of me. And I thought, “Ha ha ha,” somebody accidentally discharged their weapon. And then I felt something wet. And I then I thought, “Fuck, somebody discharged their weapon and they shot these Camelbaks®,” which is how they carry their water, in little backpacks. Then Dominguez started screaming, “Run! Run! Run!” and we started tumbling down the stairs. And when we got out, I saw on my cameras and all over my clothes that it was in fact blood. And in my mind— I know I didn’t pull the trigger, rationally I understand that. But emotionally, I still feel that Miller wouldn’t have been inside that minaret had I not requested we go up there and see this body.

Now, I’ve come to terms with that responsibility, but it’s something that haunts me every day. And I really feel that that is what combat is: every single soldier, every single Iraqi civilian, everybody involved in war zones across the world feels some responsibility like, “What should I have done that might have saved somebody’s life?”

So, The New York Times: you were working for them and they sent you to a therapist. How did that go?
I’m really a pretty unrefined Australian guy and I honestly felt that any issue that I ever experienced was not something that needed to be shared with a shrink, my wife, or anybody for that matter, that it would be something I could drink away and ignore, except this was too big to try to deal with by myself. So I started freaking out when I got back to New York. You know, a college boy would jump one of my cabs and I’d beat the shit out of him. My wife would try to be supportive, and I would shout at her, for no reason. And the Times sent me to a shrink — the guy was in Toronto, I was doing it by phone, I was drinking vodka and smoking while I was talking to him. It was useless. But I ended up seeing a guy in New York, who had worked with refugees in Kosovo, and he kind of got my respect for that. I’m still seeing him today — and what comes up more often than anything else is Iraq. I didn’t realize how affected one is by these sorts of situations. Car bombs, assassinations: it kind of became normal for me. It took me a long time to realize that’s not normal. Waking up and having a cup of coffee, reading the paper, and going to work is normal.

Do you think people in the United States or Australia really have any idea what it’s like for the Iraqi people or the military there?
I think that they did have some idea when there were a lot more reporters there, when there was a lot more play given to this story. But I believe that it’s impossible for any reader to read the daily or the wrap-up story, where it gives you the body counts essentially. You can’t relate to body counts. There’s nothing to anchor that to a compassionate human being.

But as our access has become more difficult and more and more reporters have pulled out, and as interest has waned and turned to other things — be it a hurricane or a primary — people are having less and less idea of what’s taking place there. Which drives those of us that still work in that place to continue to work harder than ever.

How often do you go back?
It’s only a couple of months of each year now. I’ve only spent, in total, about 18 months there, and it’s been so close — I mean, at least, 20 times, that I can count, where I should have been dead. It was curtains. And I just think, if I spend too much time there, covering this story, I will come back in a body bag myself one day.

Do you think Iraq is going to ever piece itself back together?
The more you study the country, the more you think about it, the more involved you get, the more confusing the question of whether Iraq can come back together into one state actually becomes. It’s my dream that that can happen. It’s also my dream that there’ll be no end of diplomacy instead of people going to war with one another. While I think it’s incredibly unlikely, the prospect of Iraq splintering into Shiite, Kurdish, and Sunni countries, I think the repercussions would be so intense and so negative across the entire region. Should that happen, we would all of a sudden be dealing with the prospect of regional conflict.

All I want is to see those people living in peace and enjoying the kind of life we have the option to enjoy in the United States or Australia. But I just can’t see how this is viable anymore. Every end result I look at is somehow a disaster. The genie has been let out. We’ve opened a can of worms and it’s just exploded. Or more precisely, imploded. I don’t know how we can come back. But I’ll tell you: as soon as I do get the answer, I’ll call you. And I’ll call Washington, as well.