Elissa Wennblom
Professor Scott Olsen
IWC 100
8 October 2021
It’s What I Do for the Truth
How important is the truth to you? Would you willingly risk your life for it? Lynsey Addario has, and still will. She is a professional photojournalist who tries to accurately record events around the world, and the author of It’s What I Do. Addario defines photojournalism as a way to tell a story or the marriage of travel, foreign cultures, curiosity, and photography. Addario says after viewing Sebastião Salgado’s photography exhibit in Argentina, “I knew I wanted to tell people’s stories through photos; to do justice to their humanity, as Salgado had done; to provoke the kind of empathy for the subjects that I was feeling in that moment” (29).
However, her photojournalism isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. She covers some dark topics: war, genocide, sexual assault, starvation, and death. She has one major goal in her work: to advocate for the truth. There are many times throughout the book where she states the truth of an event is most important. She states in the prelude after her and her colleagues were kidnapped in Libya, “We had an obligation to show the world the truth, and our sense of mission consumed our lives” (13). She doesn’t have an agenda with the items she presents. She doesn’t push her own political opinions through her photojournalism. She wants people around the world to see what is happening behind the scenes. Addario says, “I wanted to make people think, to open their minds, to give them a full picture of what was happening in Iraq so they could decide whether they supported our presence there” (134). As a photojournalist, she presents the facts and wants people to decide their view on events for themselves. The problem is that we live in a broken world, and there are people who want to hide the things they are doing. There are hurdles that photojournalists must get through to portray the truth. There are good and bad things that happen when the truth is being brought into light.
One of the main struggles Addario faces is censorship, whether that be by the government or her editor(s). The first instance we are introduced to is during her trip to Cuba. She introduces the concept of a government minder, which she defines as a “government appointed guide who accompanies a journalist, writing reports detailing the people they interviewed and the places they visited, then passed that report to the government” (34). When she is talking to the Cuban government about what she wanted to document she said, “I could tell instinctively I would never get the information I wanted from them. They claimed they would arrange shoots for me inside government buildings and hospitals, but I knew in a country like Cuba they would not” (34). Her visit to Cuba is the first, and certainly not the last, time she has faced this difficulty. There are many difficulties that countries face. In the case of Cuba, it was “the failures of communism, the poverty, the lines for food, the struggle for basic amenities” (33). Buildings were falling apart, and a lot of the population was severely poor. Every country wants to display themselves well, and information like this “getting out” does not allow them to do that.
There are two instances of censorship with the U.S. government that I believe are important in Addario’s book. The first one takes place when the U.S. military first invaded Iraq after the events of 9/11. The American army was contradicting the image they were portraying. They were abusing the Iraqi people, who they were supposedly there to liberate. Basic services of water, electricity, and gas weren’t brought into fruition. The Iraqi army was disbanded, which left many Iraqis angry and jobless with no means of feeding their families. The soldiers even went into Iraqis homes, zip-tying their wrists and questioned them; this was done most of the time without an interpreter. The Army was being portrayed as heroes but abusing the people they were “saving” behind the scenes. Essentially the U.S. government is all about free speech, until it jeopardizes their reputation. American journalists were being censored by the very people who were supposed to uphold their constitutional right to free speech. “American journalists—who had every right to take pictures of these public scenes—were beginning to face censorship. We were allowed to cover only what the people with guns wanted us to see” (108).
The second instance was with the picture of Khalid, a young boy who Addario says was injured by American bombs. She was able to get this picture on an embed, which is when a journalist gets to document a military unit during a conflict, with her colleague, Elizabeth Rubin. While they were at the Korengal Outpost, they were brought into the medic tent and immediately saw, “Afghan boys had been brought to the base practically in shock, with superficial lacerations on their faces and bodies” (167). Khalid was one of these boys. She says that she ended up spending the majority of her time in the medic tent photographing Khalid. This photo was extremely important to the reason she went on the embed. She was there to document how the Afghan people were getting injured and killed by the conflict. Once the story was finished, by Elizabeth, Addario got a frantic call from her editor wanting to know all the specifics she had on Khalid; mainly what the cause of his injuries was. It was then that she realized she had, “mistakenly submitted photos without updating the captions, instilling doubt in the mind of the editor in chief” (190). Addario did all she could to convince the editors that Khalid’s true cause of injury was because of bombs the American army dropped on his village. Addario, Elizabeth, and even Captain Dan Kearney, who was the captain of the unit they were on the embed with, all testified for what Addario claimed. “But because of my incomplete caption, the editor trusted the U.S. military public affairs officer—whose main responsibility was to polish the image of the U.S. military to the greater public—over us” (191).
There was another instance of editorial censorship. Before Addario stepped away from covering the War on Terror, she had the rare opportunity, from Life magazine, to take an assignment photographing injured American soldiers. Addario says, “As far as I remembered, the military had never given journalists that type of access to photograph injured soldiers. The human costs of the war had been carefully concealed” (133). She was given five days to photograph at a field hospital where hundreds of soldiers were brought directly from battle. All the soldiers she photographed were “so thrilled with the idea that their contribution to defending America was being recorded in Life magazine that many begged me to take their picture” (133).
Addario was documenting something no other photographer was able to do before. She was going to show America what was truly happening to the people defending their country, which is something they hadn’t seen. Addario received an email from her editor almost three months after her story was supposed to be published. “She explained regretfully that Life would not publish the essay of injured soldiers coming out of Fallujah, because the images were just too ‘real’ for the American public” (133). When do we know something is “too real” for the American public, which has become desensitized to death and war, to see? Is the threshold only met when it deals with our own people being injured? Addario was on the ground witnessing it all and someone back in New York, who hasn’t experienced war firsthand, decides whether is too much for the public. “When I risked my life to ultimately be censored by someone sitting in a cushy office in New York, who was deciding on behalf of regular Americans what was too harsh for their eyes, depriving them of their right to see where their own children were fighting, I was furious” (134). About five months after she completed the story the New York Times Magazine ran her story.
As we have already discovered, displaying the truth about world events is extremely important to Addario. She says, “I was now a photojournalist willing to die for stories that had the potential to educate people” (134). Addario thought the truth was so important that she would give up her life for it. If she had some chance of educating people, she would gladly die for the truth. Throughout her career, Addario has witnessed, and experienced, some dark, traumatic situations firsthand. Majority of which would and has ended other photojournalists careers. She has been sexually assaulted, kidnapped, witnessed people die, and saw despair and grief. In the beginning of her career, she witnessed many firsts. Her first bomb, first death, and much more. Addario had to learn the language of war. She needed to know what each type of artillery sounded like and what each of them meant. Addario was photographing a “pickup truck full of Kurdish peshmerga, posing with their guns” (94), alongside a television cameraman. She says she suddenly felt the urge to leave and ran back to the car. Right after she got into the car there was an explosion. Addario had just witnessed her first bomb. The explosion was a “car bomb—a vehicle laden with explosives, sent to detonate near a specific target—which could have been aiming for our line of Land Cruisers, carefully marked with the letters T.V.” (95). Addario could’ve died that day. “I didn’t know war meant death—that journalists might also get killed in war” (97). She took her safety for granted.
In her career, two of Addario’s drivers died on her “watch”. The first driver she lost was a Pakistani man named Raza. They were driving back to Islamabad after photographing “the camps for Pakistani civilians fleeing their Swat Valley homes” (200). While they were driving, they got into a bad car crash. They were rushed to the hospital, but Raza passed away. “The words sank in—driver expire—and I started to cry. I felt that Raza’s death was my fault” (205). It wasn’t like the driving conditions that day were horrible, “It was one of the few times in my career when my driver and I were actually operating in a safe environment, on a full night’s sleep, caffeine and food in our stomachs, driving along a perfectly paved road. But I still felt guilty” (206). The second driver was a college student from Libya named Mohammed. He was the driver for Addario and her colleagues when they got kidnapped in Libya. They got stopped at a traffic checkpoint when they were pulled out of the car by Libyan soldiers. While they were being bound Addario saw a person “on the ground beside the driver’s door lay a young man, facedown motionless, wearing a striped shirt, one arm outstretched. He appeared dead. I was positive it was Mohammed, and I was sick with guilt… We had killed him with our relentless pursuit of the story” (222). How did two of her drivers dying affect her? She states in her prelude that she feels responsible for both of their deaths. In the photojournalism world, being a driver is a very dangerous job. They drive photojournalists around war zones where they want to photograph. Where they think the story is going to be. Neither of these deaths were necessarily her fault, but because they were with her, she feels responsible. She blames herself for their deaths, because if they weren’t there with her, they could still be alive.
There are two other experiences of sorrow Addario has experienced in her career that are important. The first happened during her embed in Korengal Valley. I would describe this event as sorrowfully beautiful. During Operation Rock Avalanche, a gun fight broke loose between the Taliban and U.S. military. During this “shootout” two soldiers are injured and one is killed. Specialist Carl Vandenberge had been shot in the arm, Sergeant Rice was shot in the stomach, and Staff Sergeant Larry Rougle was KIA, or killed in action.
Sergeant John Clinard and Specialist Franklin Eckrode, emerged carrying Rougle’s body in a body bag…Clinard and Eckrode were openly crying as they walked toward me, the limp body dangling between them…a bunch of young Americans who should have been out drinking beers at bars back home and living up their early twenties were instead carrying the lifeless body of their dearest friend through the lonely mountains of Afghanistan… (183-184)
Captain Kearney ran down to them from the overwatch position with tears running down his face. “They all stood there and wept, soaking up the incredibleness of the ambush” (183). This moment is extremely tender and vulnerable. This moment is important because it shows us the tragedy of war and captures true humanness beautifully. It shows how you don’t worry about something happening around you until it happens to you or someone who know. During the many times Addario has been in a war zone she says you feel invincible until you don’t. You are constantly put into near death experiences and hopped up on adrenaline. Each time you survive you feel even more invincible, until someone close to you or even yourself experiences an event of mortality. That is exactly what happened here. This is a normal reaction to what had just happened to them. There is nothing normal about killing people or seeing people around you die. It is the bit of normalcy they have in a world of nothing normal. Personally, I’ve only ever imagined the military as hard and emotionless. The darkness in the world has been normalized to people around the world for generations. To be able to see this break of emotion was something I have only witnessed in movies, fiction. This was an eyewitness testimony, truth.
The second experience of sorrow was after being kidnapped in Libya. Addario was dealing with the trauma of her kidnapping and getting back into the swing of things with photojournalism when she got an e-mail about her friends, Tim and Chris, being killed.
Their sudden deaths hit me profoundly, in a way that my own experience in Libya failed to affect me. For the first time I felt the weight of the years of accumulated trauma…Those e-mails could have easily been about me, Tyler, Anthony, or Steve…but it was Tim and Chris, two of the most experienced photojournalists in the world, who met their fate in Misurata, in a mortar attack. It didn’t make sense. (245-246).
Later that week Addario and others who knew Tim and Chris got together. “We all sat and looked at one another and cried openly, a display of emotion that was uncharacteristic of our profession. The bravado was gone” (247). A few months after she gave birth to her son, she got another e-mail telling her that, “Anthony Shadid, my longtime friend, had died in Syria of an asthma attack…how could he have died of an asthma attack, of all things, in the middle of a battle zone?” (266). These men, alongside Addario, have experience so many difficult things. They’ve been kidnapped and almost died countless times. The fact that these men died in simple ways deeply troubles her. She starts thinking that every near-death experience people have increase their chance of death. That their lives are a game of chance. There are many instances where Addario could’ve, and she says should’ve died, but she survived. She was struggling with the question of why she got to survive, while they didn’t.
Among Addario’s difficult experiences, sexual assault is a big theme. There are two instances in this book that stick out. The first being when she was documenting Pakistani men dousing, “effigies of President Bush in kerosene and ignited their lighters, screaming, ‘Down, down America’” (73). Addario was dressed like Muslim woman, but the Pakistani men could tell she was foreign since she was carrying a camera. She says, “I tried not to make a scene in front of my peers. I didn’t want my gender to determine whether or not I could cover breaking news, so I continued photographing, ignoring the sweeping hands on my butt, the occasional grab” (73). As she tries to continue photographing this event more and more men start to grope her. She explains that the grabs become more and more aggressive, going “butt to crotch, back to front” (74). She tried to make them realize what they are doing is shameful. “I turned around, ‘Haram! Don’t you have sisters? Mothers? Aren’t you Pakistani men Muslim? Would you allow another man to treat your sister or mother like this?’” (74). She knew that what they were doing was unacceptable in their religion, but since she was foreign, they got to have a “free-pass”.
The second instance was when she was kidnapped in Libya. For Addario, this was one of the first times in her life where she feared rape (222). Throughout the time she was kidnapped with her other colleagues, they were abused and assaulted so many times, but Addario was never raped. She was groped and touched everywhere, but not raped. To the Libyan government this was important. Once Addario and her colleagues were “released” to the Foreign Ministry, an interpreter asked her if she was OK and if the Libyan soldiers touched her. The conversation went like this, “Yes they touched me. Every soldier in Libya touched me.’ ‘But were you raped?’ he persisted. ‘No. I was not raped. I was touched, punched, pushed around, but no one took my clothes off.’ ‘Oh, good.’ His body language immediately relaxed” (233). How does getting sexually assaulted every which way other than rape warrant relief? Does this man care about what she went through, or was he just worried about the PR drama that the Libyan government would have to go through? This was the first experience outside her kidnapping that she had some sort of security. This man first came across as nurturing, but as soon as he knew she wasn’t raped he essentially invalidated what she was put through. Just because someone foreign is portrayed a certain way does not give you the right to use them for your pleasure.
Addario has witnessed more than what the average human could handle. She has witnessed war, genocide, sexual assault, starvation, and death. The world we live in is broken. The truth is sometimes very difficult to capture. There are a lot of dark things in the world that leave marks once people experience them. But despite the censorship, sexual assault, and all the darkness in the world she has witnessed and experienced, she ends here book with this: “I choose to live in peace and witness war—to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty” (269).
Works Cited
Addario, Lynsey. It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War. Penguin Books, 2015.