Three images to ponder -- three black and white depictions of war and the veteran:
This first image, by the humanitarian photojournalist Zoriah -- currently in Iraq -- is profound, stark and spectacular. It is also very recent. Zoriah narrowly survived a bombing in the Anbar province last Thursday. This is an image he captured from last Monday -- of a young U.S. soldier. Zoriah writes: "A couple of days ago I went out on a foot patrol in Sadr City with a young a soldier and noticed the tattoo on his arm, featuring a rosary and the words “Forgive Me.” I asked him what the story behind it was.
He said, “After my first tour in Iraq, I went back home to the states and all my friends called me a murderer and killer. I guess I started thinking a lot about all the things I had done over here…you know.”
(Zoriah's blog, filled with inescapably riveting images like this one, is linked here. Stay safe, Zoriah!)
The second image is of a Vietnam-era veteran, standing, head bowed, in front of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, also known as "The Wall." It's taken by French Canadian photographer, Patrick-Andre Perron, whose website is here. Interestingly, on Perron's website, he "illustrates" this photograph with a poem he must particularly like, that he apparently saw on the wall. We include it here:
"If you are able, save for them a place inside of you and save one backward glance when you are leaving for the places they can no longer go.
Be not ashamed to say you loved them,
though you may or may not have always.
Take what they have taught you with their dying and keep it with your own.
And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane,
take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind."
- Major Michael Davis O'Donnell
1 January 1970, Dak To, Vietnam, Listed as KIA February 7, 1978
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The third image is of Lance Cpl. Nicholas G. Ciccone, USMC, captured by Marine Combat Artist and Warrant Officer Michael D. Fay, whose blog, Fire and Ice, is linked here. This is a pencil sketch of a young Marine, core-level exhausted after a nine-day firefight in Afghanistan. Says Fay: This "was the face of Lance Cpl. Ciccone I looked upon inside the freezing gutted remains of Kandahar International Airport in early January 2002. His platoon had just dragged themselves into the terminal building after completing a nine-day combat patrol. They had originally intended to be out for only twelve hours, but found a huge weapons cache and the Taliban wanted it back. I don’t know what happened during those long days, but whatever it was, these Marines had the look. And of them all, Ciccone had it in spades. The drawing shows him the very moment he’s dropped his backpack and removed his helmet. Looking at it now I realize what it was about him — the weight was still there."
Sadly, Lance Cpl. Nicholas G. Ciccone later lost his own battle with PTSD, killing himself in October of 2003. Ciccone's suicide, Fay remarked, "made me acutely aware that not all fatal wounds are physical."
