THE GUN.

An RBK 250-275 cluster munitions dispenser that the Syrian Air...

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:42:00 -0400

An RBK 250-275 cluster munitions dispenser that the Syrian Air Force did not manage to use. From Taftanaz Air Base, which was overrun by opposition fighters in January. By the author. Earlier this year.

Service. Whatever you think of President Obama, or of the...

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:39:16 -0400

Service.

Whatever you think of President Obama, or of the American presidency itself, on many levels this is a strange use of a U.S. Marine.

To be clear: Presented with photographs showing a long and robust precedent, and establishing that many Presidents have enjoyed this same and particular service, I’d wager that most past and present grunts would say the same thing.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

By Doug Mills. The New York Times. Today, accompanying this.

From the tractor works in Minsk, this old Soviet beast has made...

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:14:00 -0400

From the tractor works in Minsk, this old Soviet beast has made life much easier this spring, and helped us expand the plantings. Dan calls her the AK-47 of farm machines and points to the utilitarian streak in her design (30-weight motor oil serves as her hydraulic fluid; the oil filter need only be cleaned, not replaced, etc) that would make her a labor-multiplying machine under circumstances in which a fussier tractor might fail. That may be so. But she’s a hell of a lot harder to master than a Kalashnikov. Believe me, because I’m trying.

Battlefield Update: The Fight for Isolated Government Outposts...

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:33:33 -0400

Battlefield Update: The Fight for Isolated Government Outposts in Northern Syria.

On the NYT. With riffs on the way that Syrians actually are dying, while outsiders debate whether chemical weapons have been used. With pix by Bryan Denton.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

The Ferris wheels of the so-called Youth Camp, one of the Syrian Army’s hold-out positions in Idlib Governorate. Note the olive groves in the foreground. This kind of open terrain rings the camp, forming one of the many reasons approaching the army bunkers is so tactically difficult. By the author.

Did NATO Kill These Afghans With Air-Burst Ordnance? Alissa...

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:50:00 -0400

Did NATO Kill These Afghans With Air-Burst Ordnance?

Alissa Rubin (@alissanyt) examines the deaths of at least 17 women and children in Kunar Province; their bodies were discovered after a vicious firefight on April 5 and 6 in which a CIA officer was killed and his unit pinned down and nearly overrun. A glimpse at a failed joint CIA-Afghan operation, which went “catastrophically awry,” ending in blood, recrimination and sorrow.

NATO’s rules for airstrikes allow Western and Afghan forces to call for ordnance with air-burst fuzes, which convert a standard air-delivered bomb (a weapon that with guidance systems and delayed fuzing can be extraordinarily precise and reasonably discriminate) into a much more dangerous and often indiscriminate means of killing. But these weapons are almost never the first choice. They are typically used when a ground unit is desperate and wants many targets hit or suppressed at once. The downside is that ordnance configured in such fashion carries grave risks to any friendly units or civilian lives and property nearby.

To clear up the many lingering questions, NATO might release all of the weapons systems video from the airstrikes in this fight, and might explain which fuzes and fuze settings were used for each piece of ordnance. Thus far, its denials of responsibility — and its insistence that the Taliban may have smothered the victims (an allegation presented without evidence) — are unconvincing.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

By Meer Afzal/European Pressphoto Agency.

Instagram. Several readers had asked me to open an Instagram...

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:52:00 -0400

Instagram.

Several readers had asked me to open an Instagram account. So I did. It’s here.

Truth is I don’t quite know what I’m doing there. While I carry cameras, I’m not a photographer, no more than any fool carrying a rifle is an infantryman. In my case, the cameras are visual notebooks - efficient ways to improve the accuracy of my words. And for photographs to serve as notes, photographs need not be strong. They need only to capture information more quickly than I can write it down. (What was that man wearing? What was the nature of the damage to that building? What was written on that ammunition crate? How many parts were there to that makeshift rocket? The number of bullet holes in that door? And on and on. The little cameras capture much more than the memory, or the hand-writing, ever could.)

Ultimately, photos taken for such ruthlessly practical purposes can find a second life, by complementing work that we publish in The New York Times; that’s what some of them do here on Tumblr. Others serve as an index (of sorts) on Pinterest or as a billboard on FB. Those accounts are (or can be, post by post) connected to one another, turning back on themselves in the service of discussing the same or similar themes, and pointing to journalism or other writing or photographs elsewhere.

We will now see if Instagram can fit, too. Will it really — what’s the word? — work? Nothing is certain, except that apps don’t come to me intuitively, in part because I try to limit severely all screen time not necessary for my journalism, so that real life can happen off the clock. (You can’t harvest, clean and eat virtual fish, or raise virtual crops from soil and seed, or have an intense and laughing game of backyard pickle or capture the flag with your children on-line. Or if you can, these are absurdly poor substitutes, so you shouldn’t.)

So, Instagram needs to provide a purpose. We’ll see if it will. The next step then is to figure how to embed links in the images or the comments on Instagram, so these photos, poor as they are, might become connected to something more than themselves.

A government air strike on a government school. Civil war....

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:30:29 -0400

A government air strike on a government school. Civil war. Syria. 2012.

Preparing a Shrine. This weekend will mark the 2013 E.O.D....

Wed, 01 May 2013 22:31:35 -0400

Preparing a Shrine.

This weekend will mark the 2013 E.O.D. Memorial Ceremony to honor techs killed in action in the past year.

Who are EOD techs? These are the men and women who, among many other things, find, identify, disable and gather evidence from makeshift bombs — weapons that have become the leading cause of injuries to American service members and that were used in the Boston Marathon terrorist attacks. It is hard to conceive of a profession that is both more essential and more dangerous than this one, and often, as the memorial above suggests, more selfless.

The ceremony is held each May at the E.O.D. Memorial, located directly across the street from the main building of the E.O.D. school on Eglin Air Force Base. The four plaques on the wall list techs killed in action — one plaque for each of the four American military services. The lower photograph, above, shows several Air Force techs killed in recent years.

For each name there was a life. Consider, for just one example from the center of the small section of the list shown above, Technical Sergeant Anthony L, Capra. Sergeant Capra was killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq in early 2009. He was the father of five. He was killed on his fourth combat tour.

More names will be added to the lists, and read aloud, on Saturday.

To support the EOD Memorial Foundation, go here.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Top, a working party cleans the memorial ahead of the ceremony. This morning. Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Bottom, detail of the Air Force list.

Fresh Air with Terry Gross. On NPR today, a few observations...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:16:00 -0400

Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

On NPR today, a few observations from Syria.

Those of us from The New York Times who have the assignment and the privilege of reporting inside Syria say it often and so now we say it again: None of our coverage would be possible, or even imaginable, without the Syrians who help and host us. For every detail gleaned, every image made, every analysis developed and every understanding deepened there are Syrians who cut path, often at risk and always with great courtesy during their own time of hardship and need. At top, Karam Shoumali, running with a medical kit across a sniper’s alley. Bottom, Abdulkader al Dhon, pulling up a chair to a fire (with furniture for fuel) made by fighters from the Tawhid Brigade. Inside Aleppo during dark days, and cold, wet nights. These two young men have been essential to our work. All credit belongs to them.

What Was Different About That Explosion? The Answer. Introducing...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:18:24 -0400

What Was Different About That Explosion? The Answer.

Introducing the VMODS, a new(ish) variant on the concept of a disruptor charge. A minor exposition on counter-IED tools, and the pursuit for a safer, lighter touch. On the NYT.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

Gunnery Sergeant Pierre Anthony, USMC, background, and three VMODS modules, between the front and back seats of a Honda Civic, soon to be destroyed. By the author, a tellingly not-very-well done effort at a portrait. At the Advanced Improvised Explosive Device Disposal course. Eglin Air Force Base. Last week.

Fire and Russia. Andrew Kramer on the latest fire to kill...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:56:00 -0400

Fire and Russia.

Andrew Kramer on the latest fire to kill Russians by the dozen. The rate at which Russians perish in smoke and flames is one of the dark indicators of a dysfunctional state.

Background (from here, six years ago):

MOSCOW, Nov. 6 — Sergei Babayan was trapped. Minutes before, wisps of smoke had begun flowing through cracks in his classroom door at the private Moscow Institute of Government and Corporate Management.

There had been no other warning, he recalled, not even an alarm. Now smoke filled the room and flames roared in the corridor, where the steel door to the sole fire exit was locked. The only escape was out the windows, four stories above the street.

Students jostled at the sills and screamed. One young woman scrambled to the ledge and fell, slamming onto a canopy two stories below. Gasping, Mr. Babayan, 17, crawled out and clung to an air-conditioner.

There, he said, he saw his chance: a cigarette-thick cable dangling nearby from the roof. He grabbed hold and descended — a sensation, judging by his injuries, like sliding down a knife. Other students and teachers started to leap, shattering themselves on the ground. So far 11 people have died as a result of the fire, including 5 whose blackened remains were found in a classroom after firefighters cut through the locked fire door.

Eight years into the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian government has filled its coffers with cash and its ministries with swagger, allowing the Kremlin to reclaim a place on the world’s stage. But the fast-moving fire on Oct. 2, and the grotesque panorama of desperation, injury and death that accompanied it, underscored the enduring disorder beneath Russia’s partial revival.

Respect for law, safety and public health, and the Russian government’s ability to govern, still lag far behind the Kremlin’s restored sense of self, as evidenced by the scale at which Russia’s population suffers from fires.

More than 17,000 people died in fires in 2006 in Russia, nearly 13 for every 100,000 people. This is more than 10 times the rates typical of Western Europe and the United States, according to statistics from Russia’s government, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and the Geneva Association, a Swiss organization that analyzes international fire statistics.

There are many factors, including the enduring popular disrespect for law, including fire safety and building codes, and the corruption that undermines fire-safety and building inspectors. High rates of alcoholism and smoking indoors also contribute, creating conditions under which more fires start and some victims are in poor condition to react.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

A fire in St. Petersburg, and equipment not quite up to the job. By the author. 2007.

Countering Makeshift Bombs. A brief account of a drill last week...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:35 -0400

Countering Makeshift Bombs.

A brief account of a drill last week at the Advanced Improvised Explosive Device Disposal course, on the NYT.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

A shelf inside a simulated bomb-makers work shop, part of one of the course’s scenarios. By the author. Eglin Air Force Base. Last week.

Bomb Drill. A Talon remotely-operated Explosive Ordnance...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:01:11 -0400

Bomb Drill.

A Talon remotely-operated Explosive Ordnance Disposal robot examines a suspect package on a Delta luggage trailer during an exercise last week in Florida. Soon, on the NYT, a look at training at the military’s advanced course for defeating makeshift bombs. Northwest Florida Regional Airport. By the author. Last week.

What’s This? Do you notice anything peculiar about the...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:21:00 -0400

What’s This?

Do you notice anything peculiar about the explosion that destroys this Honda Civic? For those who study weapons and tactics, there is something here to discuss. More soon, on the NYT.

ABOUT THE VIDEO

By the author, last week. Florida.

Fallen EOD Techs, R.I.P. Last week, even as the bombs exploded...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:14:08 -0400

Fallen EOD Techs, R.I.P.

Last week, even as the bombs exploded in Boston, I happened to be in northwest Florida at a long ago pre-arranged trip to an advanced course for disposing of improvised bombs. It was an assignment within an assignment, part of an effort to learn more of the weapons of our time, and of those who counter them. A first story from the trip will appear soon in the NYT. Today, as I was filing that story from the work shed in the first hint of a seam in the Boston coverage since the Tsarnaev brothers set down their backpacks on Boylston Street, I glanced up from the desk. My eye caught a memorial card I placed last year on the shelf. It’s for a victim of an earlier bomb, in another place. The card, visible at right, above, just as it stands in the shed, is for Lieutenant Chris Mosko, USN, who was killed in Afghanistan almost exactly a year ago, and whose name will be put on the memorial wall across the street from the EOD school quarterdeck the Saturday after next. Early May is the annual ritual of remembering those killed in the service of one of the battlefield’s most difficult jobs. More on this soon.

Background: Chechnya. (More). In a reprise from Esquire, an...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:43:45 -0400

Background: Chechnya. (More).

In a reprise from Esquire, an excerpt from The School.

The point? If you are looking for the origins of Chechen violence, do not seek to simplify, at least not at the outset, until the facts become known. Because the roots can be very complicated.

More here, on the NYT.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Top, the remains of the gymnasium at Public School No. 1, Beslan, September 2004. (I have, and I have passed along, so many photographs of Beslan that I cannot always remember their origins. I think this may be one of the investigators’ pics, from the morning after the siege ended in bloodshed and fire.) Bottom. Dzhokhar Tsrarnaev, at left in white ball cap, slipping away, but soon to be very, very well known. Boston. Last week. By David Green.

Background: Chechnya. With Peter Baker on the NYT, a primer on...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 23:02:10 -0400

Background: Chechnya.

With Peter Baker on the NYT, a primer on the land from which the Tsarnaev family hailed.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

At a memorial for the deported, a mix of defiance, sorrow and rage, looming over tallies of the dead. Grozny, the Chechen capital. By the author. 2008.

If you visit here often, you have heard of Brown Moses. How...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:46:00 -0400

If you visit here often, you have heard of Brown Moses.

How about Bronze Moses, Silver Moses, Gold Moses or Platinum Moses?

Visit here (or here) to learn about, and support, the Brown Moses crowdfunding campaign.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH From the recent Brown Moses post on Slovak weapons in Syria.

AK-Related Photo of the Day. 7.62x39mm ice cubes, in...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:35:19 -0400

AK-Related Photo of the Day.

7.62x39mm ice cubes, in magazine-shaped tray. By Bryan Denton, from his Instagram account. The Kalashnikov endlessly resurfaces in pop culture, art and symbols. Much of the material is long past familiar; some is outright tiresome. This managed to be new and old at once. (For those who have asked me, or encouraged me, to open an Instagram account, I haven’t come around to that yet. Though I might. Busy now with many other things, including projects in works that are chewing up the days.)

Never underestimate the quiet energy of a wren, especially this...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:23:15 -0400

Never underestimate the quiet energy of a wren, especially this visitor, which after rustling through the leaf piles came in low through the open door and hopped about the work shed not long back, examining the fishing rods, the mounted muskellunge heads, the wooden striped bass plugs, and all else, before bolting back to the warming shrub lines all around. Spring must be here. (Not because of the wrens, which are about all winter, but because we can work again with the door open to air.) A good reminder that we need to put the houses back up, beside one of the vegetable patches and over one of the stacks of split and curing wood. We took them down in the winter to scrape out the old nests and compost their parasite load. Those little boxes are wanted again now. Time to grab the hammer, and a few nails, and a few minutes, and make their place. They pay us back in song, and in visits like this.