THE GUN.

A Photo for the Weekend Ahead. Reminding that this is Memorial...

Fri, 25 May 2012 17:34:00 -0400

A Photo for the Weekend Ahead.

Reminding that this is Memorial Day.

More (much more) about this image, and others by Todd Heisler, here, in a brief essay by Lily Burana, who wrote, among other things:

This heartbreaking — and groundbreaking — photo showcases the intersection of technology and agony.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

Part of Todd’s work in 2005 that won the Pulitzer Prize. Originally published in The Rocky Mountain News. Profiled today on the NYT.

operatorsgonnaoperate: József Tibor Fejes, a young Hungarian...

Thu, 24 May 2012 18:18:52 -0400

operatorsgonnaoperate:

József Tibor Fejes, a young Hungarian identified by C. J. Chivers in The Gun as ‘the first known insurgent to carry an AK-47.’, ‘Fejes obtained his prize after Soviet soldiers dropped their rifles during their attack on revolutionaries in Budapest in 1956…. The Hungarian Revolution marked the AK-47’s true battlefield debut.’

Paul Fussell is dead. He left behind works on war that will...

Thu, 24 May 2012 13:03:00 -0400

Paul Fussell is dead. He left behind works on war that will outlast us all by many generations. Below are a few of his thoughts about his role as a writer on the subject of war, informed by his own brutal experiences as a foot soldier in Europe in World War Two, and then, by returning home and sensing how the experiences of the war settled into the public consciousness. They form the opening paragraph, fittingly, of “Wartime.”

This book is about the psychological and emotional culture of Americans and Britons during the Second World War. It is about the rationalizations and euphemisms people needed to deal with an unacceptable actuality from 1939 to 1945. And it is about the abnormally intense frustration of desire in wartime and some of the means by which desire was satisfied. The damage the war visited upon bodies and buildings, planes and tanks and ships, is obvious. Less obvious is the damage it did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and irony, not to mention privacy and wit. For the past fifty years the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales.

LIBYA’S SA-24 “STINGER EQUIVALENTS.” A Source...

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:59:00 -0400

LIBYA’S SA-24 “STINGER EQUIVALENTS.” A Source of Enduring Confusion.

After war erupted last year in Libya and led, as Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces gave ground, to the wholesale looting of the country’s military depots, the results presented those who follow arms trafficking with both a rare opportunity to access a dictator’s weapons stocks and to follow up close the flow of gray- and black-market arms.

During Libya’s years of engagement with nations that manufacture arms — variously with the West, the Soviet bloc and the East — King Idris, the former monarch, and Qaddafi, who overthrew him, accumulated weapons at an outsized scale. Much of this was done in secrecy. In recent decades no one outside of the inner Qaddafi circle knew all or exactly what Libya had. In the place of clarity there was a visceral hunch: Colonel Qaddafi’s deep oil-state coffers and his gleeful international bad-boy persona all but ensured if ever the gates were cast open, there would be much to see, plenty to worry over, and many surprises.

And then, at the outset of war, Libya’s gates were battered down. The killing tools rushed into the field, gripped by both sides.

As a result of this sudden and then sustained visibility of the stock, much of what Libya had acquired has now been documented and traced back to its sources. The public record that has been made — by the United Nations, by journalists and non-government organizations, and by Western governments – has sketched in substantial detail the perils of a bunker state. But important questions remain. And on some themes, confusion endures.

One source of enduring public confusion involves MANPADS and the SA-24.

MANPADS, the security community’s clunky acronym for Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, are relatively small heat-seeking missiles that a lone shooter can fire from the shoulder. They are a class of weapon, formerly defined in the public imagination by the American-made Stinger, that in the age of terrorism is feared in aviation and security circles for the menace the missiles pose to civilian air traffic. Many military planes have countermeasures to thwart or confuse MANPADS’ thermal seeker heads. Civilian aircraft (with the generally acknowledged exception of Israeli civilian aircraft) do not. This blog and The New York Times have written of Libya’s MANPADS and their associated risks at length. (Here was an early example; here is a more detailed review.)

The SA-24 is one of Russia’s most advanced short-range air defense weapons, and is manufactured for both larger systems that fire from vehicle-mounted pedestal launchers (vaguely resembling a thick machine-gun turret) and for smaller systems that fire from compact portable launchers, known as grip stocks, that rest on a shooter’s shoulder.

Libya acquired many SA-24 missiles from Russia, at least several hundred individual tubes, according to the shipping documents found in the revolution’s refuse. (One of those documents is visible among the images at the top of this post; I found it in Misrata last year. Peter Bouckaert, a senior staffer and energetic field researcher for Human Rights Watch, found at least one other document, for a larger shipment, in Tripoli.) What these documents and the scouring in the field have presented researchers with is this, which as near as we can tell can be marked down as an ice-cold fact: while there has never been a question that SA-24 vehicle-mounted systems were present in Libya, no evidence has been found that Libya ever possessed the shoulder-fired SA-24 variants.

This is a distinction with a difference, and the subject of a post on The New York Times’ At War blog today.

We examined whether SA-24 MANPADS (the shoulder-launched missiles and systems) actually were present in Libya for two reasons. One is that if these weapons were in fact there, it would signal that the already substantial dangers of loose arms in Libya would be even worse, and the arms-related regional security risks from the combined effects of trafficking to North Africa and of Libya’s uprising were more frightening than what had been known. The other was related to geopolitics, the Kremlin and aviation security worldwide. If SA-24 MANPADS were verifiably present in Libya, then this fact would rearrange our understanding of Kremlin arms deals in the past decade. It would also provide firm grounds to worry that SA-24 MANPADS, one of the world’s most dangerous short-range anti-craft weapons, were more widespread than believed, and that despite its assurances, latter-day Russia was shipping exceptionally dangerous arms in the secret fashion seen in Soviet times. In short, if it were established that Russia had surreptitiously shipped shoulder-fired SA-24’s to Libya and repeatedly lied about these transfers, it might mean that these same weapons were also in the arsenals of any number of other of Russia’s arms clients, and could turn up elsewhere.

Ultimately, the search for evidence of SA-24 MANPADS in Libya has been, in reportorial terms, a dry hole. No sign has surfaced of such transfers. Notwithstanding many sources saying otherwise, Libyan SA-24 “MANPADS” and “Stinger equivalents” do not actually seem to exist. They are a unicorn, if you will, of the Qaddafi era and the latest Libyan war. From a security standpoint, this is inarguably a good thing. But the pursuit of these unicorns led to many other places useful to understanding and framing the risks of Libya’s anti-aircraft missiles.

With that in mind, one of the editors of today’s At War post suggested that we present a few technical and analytical research points here as a supplement.

And so, quickly, typed out between other assignments, here goes.

First, a very brief overview of what the evidence has shown about Libya’s MANPADS stocks generally.

No matter the news stories and Internet chatter claiming otherwise, evidence for only one class of MANPADS – the SA-7 — has been found in Libya since the stockpiles were looted last year and a scrum of investigators went to work on these questions. The SA-7 was a first-generation Russian-designed system, with technical characteristics reaching to the late 1950s. It is potentially a very dangerous weapon, especially against low-elevation aircraft on a predictable course, such as a jetliner approaching a runway or in the minutes after taking off. And it is the only type of MANPADS to have been documented in Libya by credible means. Evidence of its updated shoulder-fired cousins from the old Soviet design bureaus – the SA-14, SA-16 or SA-24 — has not been found in Libya by any credible researchers, at least not of which we are aware.

The Christian Science Monitor reported last September that it had found “crates of SA-14’s” in Tripoli, at a warehouse and press scrum that has contributed to some of the lingering MANPADS confusion. Human Rights Watch also publicly reported finding an SA-14 in eastern Libya early in 2011, and told The New York Times by email that it had found evidence of SA-14s in that same warehouse visited by the Christian Science Monitor. But HRW has since disavowed the Benghazi find, and said that was a mistaken identification of a less commonly seen SA-7 configuration. It has also backed away from the initial claim of discovering empty SA-14 crates in the Tripoli warehouse. In all, after a year of looking, no one else has seen any sign whatsoever of SA-14’s in the former Qaddafi or current militia stock, and not for a want of looking. Peter Bouckaert, of HRW, sent this by email earlier this month: “We also have not found any evidence of the existence of SA-14’s in Libya,” he wrote. So back to the overiew thought: as for types of MANPADS in Libya, the only documented systems have been limited to a sprawling hodgepodge of SA-7 variants. Nothing else has been found.

Second, when it comes to assessing the security risk, there is a question of original numbers. Original numbers, as in, the type and quantity of this class of weapon that Libya possessed at the war’s start, are essential to gauging the current danger, even if the risk ultimately must be assessed by analysis, and not via as rich a body of facts as would be ideal. No one knows the exact number of Libyan MANPADS that remain, and all we have for original numbers is a best guess. The United States government’s public estimate, which may or may not be accurate, is that during Colonel Qaddafi’s long reign his military acquired roughly 20,000 SA-7 missiles. Remember that number, but also remember this: Missiles are only missiles. They are not a complete system. SA-24 missiles, which are held in tubes, are one of two consumable and non-reusable components in a three-part MANPADS system. Each full system requires a battery, a missile tube and a grip stock. One question researchers have been trying to get answers to are how many SA-7 grip stocks Libya possessed. This is because the grip stock is reusable. In a simplified sense, it is to a MANPADS what a rifle is to a small-arms system – the weapon that does the firing. To follow this example out, a missile tube is like a cartridge. And just as there are many more cartridges than there are rifles in any army’s possession, there are many more missile tubes than grip stocks in the arsenals of countries that possess MANPADS. And grip stocks matter. They are worth counting, because without grip stocks, these weapons cannot be shoulder-fired.

So how many SA-7 grip stocks did Libya have? Again, no one, at least among the many analysts and field researchers we talk to, seems to know. However, a few things are known, gathered from other of the Kremlin’s former MANPADS customers over the years. Generally, when nations acquired this class of missiles, they acquired grip stocks in some fraction of the missile buy. A common ratio was one grip stock for every six missiles, but some nations procured grip stocks at less density than this, to save money or to fit an air-defense unit’s desires.

So do your own back-of-the-envelope calculation. If we apply a similar formula – pick your fraction, 1/6 or ¼ or 1/10 — to the estimate that Libya acquired 20,000 SA-7 missile tubes, we can hazard that Libya came to possess as many as a few thousand SA-7 grip stocks. This assessment, while obviously a crude assessment, potentially puts the risk of transfer to a terrorist of a fully functional SA-7 system on a worrisome scale. The possibility that hundreds, even thousands, of SA-7 grip stocks went missing last year in a lawless and essentially ungoverned state makes Libya’s SA-7 a security problem of a significant order, the more so because SA-7’s have historically been a widely manufactured and distributed system, and SA-7 missiles might be available elsewhere to marry to a Libyan SA-7 grip stock.

Now back to the SA-24. Again, as with the case of Libya’s SA-7 grip stocks, precise public information about how many vehicle-mounted SA-24 launchers Libya came to posses is not known. But if history is a guide, and it likely is in this case, then it would be a fraction of the SA-24 missile purchase. This might put the number of SA-24 vehicle-mounted launchers, known as the Strelets, in the low triple digits, or even double digits.

This would align with what was seen. The SA-24 Strelets, on the evidence available, did not seem to have been widely distributed among the Qaddafi forces. Relatively few of them were spotted during or after the war. When they were documented they tended to be documented among troops deemed most loyal to the Qaddafi clan. (Al Jazeera ran images of one launcher at the western gate of Adjabiya in mid-March, as loyalist forces recaptured that town; those forces were under command of one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons.) As these units were targeted intensely by NATO airstrikes, and ultimately routed by the anti-Qaddafi militias, many SA-24 launchers were likely destroyed in the field, making the surviving number of launchers smaller, and perhaps very small.

Some Strelets launchers, however, certainly did survive. And given the dangerous technical capabilities of the SA-24 missiles these launchers could fire (greater range, a larger warhead, a proximity fuze, and features that enable it to reject many modern countermeasures), one research priority should be in identifying and tallying the remaining Strelets launchers, and developing and proposing means to secure them (if not destroy them) before any still in Libya enter markets or otherwise pass to nefarious hands. It is not lost on anyone that even if these systems are less plentiful and perhaps less likely to be used than Col. Qaddafi’s old SA-7’s, that such smaller quantitative risks will mean nothing if one of them knocks an Airbus from the sky. There are simply few conventional weapons on earth that could kill, at the touch of a trigger, hundreds of people and potentially disrupt international travel. This one of them. Considering the relatively small size of the SA-24 stock in Libya, an effort to account for it would seem a task not only worth undertaking, but within reasonable reach.

Third, what of Libya’s SA-24 missiles themselves? We know they were sold and shipped to Libya from Russia with the Strelets vehicle-mounted system. If someone were to acquire one of these missiles, could they be fired from an SA-24 grip stock acquired from elsewhere? In other words, let’s say a terrorist cell decided to play Mr. Potato Head. By this I mean that it bought a SA-24 tube and battery from the former Qaddafi stock, and then, via a network with access to SA-24 grip stocks from another country (Venezuela comes to mind, as Hugo Chavez’s military did acquire complete SA-24 MANPADS systems in a Kremlin-approved deal several years ago), it came to possess an SA-24 grip stock. Would the SA-24 tube from Libya work on the grip stock from the other source?

The answers are thus far murky. SA-24 missiles and grip stocks connect via metal pins on the grip stock and plastic and metal receptacles on the tube that houses the missile. These are complicated plugs, like large, flush-mounted versions of the multi-pin cables and receptacles that once connected many desktop computers to monitors and printers. Some sources say that the receptacles for the different SA-24 missile variants are identical, and thus there would be a mechanical match of any SA-24 missile to any SA-24 launcher, whether it was shoulder-fired or vehicle-launched. Others are skeptical. I have made photographs of SA-24 missile tube receptacles in Libya, but have not found good images of the SA-24 grip stock pins to compare them to. And if the pin count and shape did prove to be an identical match to the receptacle, some sources offer that the mere physical connection might not matter. Even if a Libyan SA-24 missile sold for the Strelets were matched to an SA-24 grip stock sold to another customer, these people say, the two would not work together, as they contain incompatible electronic chips. (Some of the people who have been part of this discussion have asked to remain nameless, to protect their jobs; in keeping with the Times’ standards for anonymity, I am acknowledging them here.) By our lights, the answer to this question – can a Libyan SA-24 missile even be matched to a grip stock, and thereby become a MANPADS — is unresolved, and grounds for further research, too.

Fourth, there is one further technical question: Could an SA-24 missile tube from Libya be mounted to a home-made launcher and successfully fired? Again, there is a blizzard of conflicting assessments. David Fulghum, of Aviation Week, in an email exchange this spring, noted that many insurgent groups in the Middle East have proven to be adept at assembling and using makeshift rockets and other arms. This is a sound point. War drives human ingenuity and resourcefulness in all manner of ways, as the Libyan war showed most every day. But ground-to-ground rockets and heat-seeking missiles are very different animals. Jury-rigging a BM-21 Grad or Type 63 rocket is not especially hard. You could figure that one out at home with basic electrical skills and the same intuitive sense that would tell you how to launch a bottle rocket over a local pond. (Though accuracy could be an issue, unless you were an able student of indirect fire.) Making a home-made grip stock that would allow you to acquire a target and fire a heat-seeking missile would be a job of a different order. That said, last year, we watched looters in Libya selectively pilfer most any weapon with a heat-seeking head, even missiles, like SA-9’s, that are fired from large, vehicle-mounted box launchers that would be almost impossible to smuggle or hide, would require technical training to operate, and for which a power source would have to be manufactured from scratch. So, taking into account the energy with which these types of weapons were stolen, perhaps their use in makeshift launchers is in fact a possibility to worry over. As for actually scaling that risk, we’ll take a pass, while, like the rest of the arms spotters, field researchers and analysts out there, we watch and listen to see what forms of trouble Col. Qaddafi’s SA-24’s may yet bring.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Top four images, by Etienne de Malglaive, of SA-24 tubes and batteries in Tripoli as the capital changed hands in the summer of 2011. Left two photos, third row, by Damien Spleeters, of SA-24 tube and battery in Misrata in February 2012. Remaining photos by the author, in Misrata late last year, of SA-24 tubes, battery, packing crate and shipping document.

Early this month, Derek Henry Flood posted on the common use of...

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:41:00 -0400

Early this month, Derek Henry Flood posted on the common use of Kalashnikovs in public murals, leading to a riff on the mixed origins of such treatments and the mixed messages they tend to send.

This afternoon I was looking through a folder of photographs from Libya, for art for a post in works on the NYT’s At War blog, and came upon this one. It’s from Kikla, and was on the walls of a building used as a mountain base by anti-Qaddafi fighters. It mixes messages and origins about as well as any image of the Avtomat Kalashnikova ever could.

Not long back, David Rosenthal at Blue Rider Press sent along a...

Mon, 21 May 2012 15:01:00 -0400

Not long back, David Rosenthal at Blue Rider Press sent along a new novel, set largely in Afghanistan. His timing was good, as I was between books. The novel was The Book of Jonas, by Stephen Dau. It’s a tale of a young Afghan man with a secret, and of the grieving mother of a missing American service member from Pennsylvania. (It’s a novel, and not based on the case of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.)

I’ll spare potential readers many details, as describing the tale too fully would give the full plot away and ruin the ending. But I asked David’s permission to excerpt the novel’s opening paragraphs, which finely frame some of the early Afghan ambivalence and uncertainty to the United States’ noisy arrival for the most recent Afghan war, more than a decade back.

The opening grafs are below.

They arrived like a thought, tracing contrails across the deep sky as though writing out their intentions in letters too big to be fully seen from the earth. Or they flowed low and fast over the hills, their great machines arcing silently from horizon to horizon, so fast that they were there and gone before the roar from their engines caught up, screaming the news of their arrival even as they disappeared.

In the village they tried to make sense of it.

The imam said the Americans were like the lion who had stepped on a thorn, and then about making a great noise, roaring at the world from his pain. But it would soon pass, he said, when the thorn dried up and fell out, when the pain ebbed, and then tranquility would be restored.

Younis’s father, on the other hand, said that no, this was only the beginning. The planes in the sky were like the first gray dusting of blight on the wheat, which this year might affect only a few sheathes, but which would spread over time, draining the golden crop of its color, rendering it foul and devoid of life.

Most of the villages tended toward one or the other of these two points of view.

The Book of Jonas is here. You can follow Mr. Dau on Twitter, he’s @StephenDau.

[David, I’m between drafts at the Times, so had a moment to get this up while waiting to hear back from my editor on an At War post in works. Thank you for your permission to cite.]

Using Data to Save: One doctor’s effort to understand more...

Thu, 17 May 2012 20:09:25 -0400

Using Data to Save: One doctor’s effort to understand more fully wartime trauma, with hopes of mitigating risks and improving the prognosis for those struck. On the NYT.

A profile on the merits of making — and sharing widely — thorough databases on combat wounds and battlefield ailments, and the downside of keeping such data in disparate storehouses, largely out of reach.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

Ian Bugh, an Army flight medic, treats Brett Sayre, a Marine infantry corporal, after a joint U.S.M.C.-Afghan patrol was hit by a hidden bomb. Corporal Saye survived. Corporal Jacob C. Leicht, the 1,000 American service member to die in action in Afghanistan, was killed by the same blast. Corporal Leicht was a previous recipient of the Purple Heart, for wounds suffered in Iraq. He had fought to return to full duty, and to be assigned to an infantry unit in Afghanistan. Helmand Province. Spring 2010. By Tyler Hicks.

Soon on the NYT: One colonel’s quest to determine how...

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:04:54 -0400

Soon on the NYT: One colonel’s quest to determine how soldiers are wounded or get sick, and how they fare. And a look at a potential shortfall in military data-keeping that could prevent a full and proper study of more than a decade of American war.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

An Afghan soldier, wounded when a van packed with explosives detonated at a joint U.S.-Afghan outpost in Sangsar, Afghanistan. Dec. 2010. By Tyler Hicks.

Ever wonder how some photos get made? Did he levitate above a...

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:41:00 -0400

Ever wonder how some photos get made? Did he levitate above a small craft in the first blast of a gale?

(No one there quite remembers, having been busy in the scramble to get the lines in and then the boat up and pointed where she needed to go.)

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Sixty-five or so miles out on the Atlantic, S by SE off the New England coast, as a squall hits. October 2008. By Tyler Hicks. In Field & Stream. Top, the opening spread. Bottom, original frame, made apparently by standing on the wet gunwale on the starboard side, up high, and leaning out.

Chechnya, Inside, Up Close. A photo essay about the lives of...

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:51:00 -0400

Chechnya, Inside, Up Close.

A photo essay about the lives of Chechen women on the website of The Boston Globe.

Photojournalist Diana Markosian spent the last year and half covering Russia’s volatile North Caucasus region. This year she started a personal project entitled “Goodbye My Chechnya” documenting the lives of young Chechen women as they come of age in the aftermath of war. She writes, “For young women in Chechnya the most innocent acts could mean breaking the law. A Chechen girl caught smoking is cause for arrest; while rumors of a couple engaging in pre-martial relations can result in her killing. The few girls who dare to rebel become targets in the eyes of Chechen authorities. After nearly two decades of vicious war and 70 years of Soviet rule, during which religious participation was banned, modern-day Chechnya is going through Islamic revival. The Chechen government is building mosques in every village, prayer rooms in public schools, and enforcing a stricter Islamic dress code for both men and women. This photo essay chronicles the lives of young Muslim girls who witnessed the horrors of two wars and are now coming of age in a republic that is rapidly redefining itself as a Muslim state.”

For more about the treatment of women by the current Chechen authorities, go here. For something about the perils of working toward change, read this.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Scenes from a wedding in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. By Diana Markosian.

Nobody can tell the foreigners to stop what they’re doing, A few...

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:40:00 -0400

Nobody can tell the foreigners to stop what they’re doing,

A few hired slaves are ruling the country.

O Kabul! We will clean you from these black faces,

Lines of committed believers are formed.

--From “Kabul is set on fire,” by Hafiz Ikramuddin, Aug. 8, 2008.

The lines above are from Poetry of the Taliban, an anthology of 200 poems, edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Keuhn, that has been newly published by Hurst & Co. in the U.K. The same volume will be published next month by Columbia University Press in New York. A fuller précis, with a few notes about an old and unsurprising controversy, can be found on the NYT’s At War blog, here.

This post begins with a photograph of Anton Hammerl, taken a few...

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:32:00 -0400

This post begins with a photograph of Anton Hammerl, taken a few days before he was shot and killed in Libya, in the spring of 2011. Let’s look at it for a moment. Then let your eyes roam. Now listen to the story behind the display above.

A few days after the top photo was made, by Unai Aranzadi, Anton was shot by forces fighting for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on the road near Brega. The men who wounded him left him to die. They rounded up three other journalists traveling in his group and abruptly drove away, abandoning a heavily bleeding and unarmed man to the desert. The Qaddafi government lied about his fate, repeatedly telling official and diplomatic enquirers that he was alive and in custody with his peers. Only when his colleagues were released from prison, after a season of negotiation lasting more than six weeks, did the truth break free.

Anton’s death was one of the Libyan revolution’s uncountable horrors. His remains have not been found. And as is the case with almost all stories of violence, his story does not end at the scene of the crime, or neatly. It was not simply a tale of battlefield chaos, anonymous villains and the cruel and unnecessary end of a decent man. Its effects reverberate, and will for at least a generation.

Why? Because Anton was survived by his wife, Penny Sukhraj, and their three young children, who live in London. He was a freelancer, not a staff photographer for a newspaper, wire service or magazine. This means that his family — which has lost him as a husband, father and breadwinner — has no institutional support.

And this is a reason for the auction, organized by Friends of Anton and to be hosted by Christiane Amanpour, that will be held next week at Christie’s in New York. Scores of prints by many of the world’s best known photographers - Robert Capa, Platon, Joao Silva, Kate Brooks, Tyler Hicks, Lynsey Addario, Sebastiao Salgado, and many more - will be offered. They are scenes from abroad, scenes from here in the states, portraits, landscapes, and much more. They come from quiet glades and vicious firefights, from the desert, the forest, the cities and the sea. Among them are works by Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, who were killed in Libya, also by pro-Qaddafi fighters, a few weeks after Anton died.

Don’t rely on the small sample here. Go to the Friends of Anton site and look. Some of these photos could hold your gaze for hours, and will still seem fresh should you look back in an hour, a week or a year. The proceeds from their sale will go to Penny’s children.

The last two years have been nightmarish for the cadre of journalists who worked as Anton did. Naturally, people ask: What can I do? In my own case, frankly, I do not think Suzanne and I can afford one of these prints at the auction, and I am already blessed with crowded walls, as Suzanne and friends I work beside have over the years given me prints from the shared work, which hang in the shed where I am typing this today. A black-and-white print of the portrait by Tyler, of an Afghan National Police officer in Uruzgan Province in 2007, is looking down on me from my right, from above a shelf of munitions scraps. The image by Chris Hondros, made on the road not far from where Anton was killed, in the last weeks of Chris’s life, is tucked beside my left knee underneath my work bench, waiting to be dropped off at the frame shop in town. The other frames will have to be rearranged to make space for it.

My shed, in short, is out of wall. So we decided to do something else. Late last month the Overseas Press Club, to my and most everyone else’s surprise, gave me an award, which came with a $1,000 prize. That money was unexpected, which meant it was unbudgeted; Suzanne and I had not been counting on it for raising our own children. So Suzanne and I talked. We knew well that although the prize was awarded in my name, this was in many ways an embarrassment, because I do not work alone. I work for a bank of gifted and committed editors, and with people in conflict zones who share their stories or tips with me, or help me with rides, advice, bunk space and translations. All of them make each day, and each story, come together. Throughout it all I wander the beats side-by-side with photographers, just like Anton, who share each risk and every step. It is with them that the best work has flowed. And often when I work, our family is at risk, just like Anton’s was.

And is.

For these reasons, and others, this week Suzanne and I donated the $1,000 from the Overseas Press Club to Friends of Anton. It is a small thing, barely a drop when considered against a single-parent family’s needs. But we hope it might help, and that you will help, too. If any of you can afford the time or a few of your dimes, please consider visiting Friends of Anton on-line. Then consider attending the auction or making an absentee or telephonic bid.

Great photography outlasts those who do it. In Anton’s case, so very sadly so. Those who carry away these prints will have that work, and will have helped good people, too.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

The photo at top is of Anton, by Unai Aranzadi. The bottom six images, clockwise from upper left, are by Tyler Hicks, Chris Hondros, Tim Hetherington, Joao Silva, David Burnett and Robert Capa. Courtesy of Friends of Anton. (In the case of the photograph by David Burnett, Tumblr’s photo-spread feature callously auto-crops it in the display above. Click on the photograph to be treated to the full frame.)

Remembering E.O.D. Techs, Killed in the Line of Duty. This blog...

Fri, 04 May 2012 15:00:00 -0400

Remembering E.O.D. Techs, Killed in the Line of Duty.

This blog and the NYT At War blog alike owe debts beyond what we can expect to pay to the many Explosive Ordnance Disposal Techs who have helped us over the years, both in the field and in our copy. Friends and sources from this specialized community have helped us identify munitions and improvised weapons, patiently and repeatedly filled in all manner of gaps in our knowledge, and often provided quiet counsel as we have made safety decisions about how we work on the ground, where too many people we have covered or worked beside have been maimed or killed. All of this made the work stronger, more vivid and more relevant. On more than a few days, it has helped keep us alive.

And so it is with both gratitude and sorrow that the At War bog takes a moment today to point toward a ceremony to be held Saturday morning at Eglin Air Force Base to honor 289 members of the American military E.O.D. field who have been killed on duty since 1942. It is also with sorrow that the same At War post reports on one senior E.O.D. tech whose name will not make his community’s memorial wall this year, because he was killed only a few days ago.

One of the ambitions of the non-profit E.O.D. Memorial Foundation is to preserve the memories of the fallen techs, and to assist their families. These lost service members, their peers know, were much more than committed and highly-trained specialists. They were people — parents, spouses and children themselves.

With that in mind we hereby commemorate Lt. Christopher E. Mosko, USN, as a representative of his class. Lieutenant Mosko was killed in action on April 26. The few sentences about him, below, landed in my email in-box minutes after the post went live on the At War blog. They are from Chris’s wife, Amanda.

How better to frame the memory of an officer, and a man, than this:

It’s hard to sit here and put into anything in to words at this point. But I can say that Chris was an extremely loving and thoughtful husband. We had to do a lot of long-distance in our 6-year relationship, but Chris always showed he cared. He was always writing me cards, surprising me with flowers and finding small thoughtful things to make me happy. He even figured out how to send a cake for my birthday this year while he was in Afghanistan. Every phone call I got from him made my day.

He was also incredibly dedicated to work and often went in on weekends and holidays to make sure things were set up for his team. I always admired his leadership skills, he always seemed to know the right thing to do.

R.I.P., Lieutenant Mosko, and all E.O.D. techs killed while shouldering one of the battlefield’s most dangerous — and human — jobs.

The At War post is here. The memorial service for the entire E.O.D. community will be held Saturday at 9 a.m. at Eglin Air Force Base. Lieutenant Mosko’s funeral will be held next Friday at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery.

Now hear Taps.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Top, courtesy of the U.S. Navy, Lieutenant Christopher Mosko in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, not long before he was killed by a hidden bomb. Bottom, courtesy of Amanda Mosko, Chris and Amanda Mosko. Husband and wife.

Soon on the At War blog: Remembering E.O.D.’s...

Thu, 03 May 2012 19:49:36 -0400

Soon on the At War blog: Remembering E.O.D.’s Fallen.

ABOUT THE PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

Navy Lieutenant Christopher E. Mosko, a senior explosive ordnance disposal technician, with members of a Special Forces team he served with in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan. Lt. Mosko was teaching Afghans how to find and destroy hidden bombs. He was killed in action last week. Released yesterday by the U.S. Navy.

Mikheil Saakashvili's Georgia and Torture.

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:51:03 -0400

Mikheil Saakashvili's Georgia and Torture.:

Another man dies in custody, of what the authorities called a heart attack, according to the clip above by Democracy & Freedom Watch. Paul Rimple, a journalist who has long lived in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, raised a related question on Facebook, pointing out a fact mentioned in passing in the story: Six years for possession of marijuana?

By that standard, we could transfer a large fraction of the American college population straight to prison, thereby setting things right.

The veneer on Georgian democracy came off long ago. The rougher edges were exposed by the erratic behavior of the government’s ruling clique, and not masked by official obsequiousness to the West.

Georgia is certainly not alone among the nations of the post-Soviet space to have abusive security services and legal systems, inhumane prisons and a government with limited interest or ability in setting a different course for those who end up in the authorities’ grip. And Georgia is not all bad; there is among many of its people and its officials a genuine desire for something better, and certainly much different than this.

But stories like the one above serve to remind of the work to be done in the Caucasus, and of the enduring ugliness, no matter the supportive statements from Western capitals for one of the nations that learned, long back, that going along with Western foreign policies (including offering contingents of marginally trained and poorly equipped troops for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) would be rewarded with official warmth — and sometimes silence, too.

Hit the link to see some of the wounds on Zurab Delianidze. Posted by Democracy & Freedom Watch.

For a long list of reasons that many of you know, this blog...

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:29:15 -0400

For a long list of reasons that many of you know, this blog watches weapons iconography closely, and now and then posts images of how weapons are used as symbols and to shape public perception. Many of the images, unsurprisingly, are of Kalashnikovs.

Derek Henry Flood, an intrepid (and often solo) journalist and analyst who roams some of the hardest-to-reach precincts of the conflict beat, sent along the frame above, which is worth sharing.

Derek’s busy blog, the link to which is in preceding sentence, begins with a priceless nugget from Ambrose Bierce: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” And it gets much better from there.

Thank you, Derek, for pointing me to this. I’m busy this week with several NYT files in works. But I’ll post a few companion images soon.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

A Monument to Martyrs. Central Iran. 1999. Derek Henry Flood. (Follow Derek on Twitter; he’s @DerekHenryFlood.)

The U.S. Military & Trade in Imperiled Species. A look at...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:04:38 -0400

The U.S. Military & Trade in Imperiled Species.

A look at how the American military presence abroad creates market forces in the trade in endangered species, with a focus on Afghanistan, where bazaars serving the troops on American bases often carry pelts from snow leopards and other species at risk. On the At War blog.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

Items confiscated from American troops at Bagram Air Base, one of the U.S. military’s principal transportation hubs in Afghanistan. By Elisha Hubbard. Courtesy of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Todd Heisler and the Cost of War. Earlier this month I visited...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 22:01:00 -0400

Todd Heisler and the Cost of War.

Earlier this month I visited Dustin Kirby and his family in rural Georgia, catching up to a friend from one of the walks in Iraq after his medical retirement from the Navy. (Dusty was shot through the mouth on Christmas Day, 2006, and has been recovering since.)

This blog had a quick post about Dusty and his paternal grandfather, who was wounded in World War Two, and the strangely undocumented and unexplored tendency of the same American families to produce, over and again, sons and daughters who go to war.

Shortly after that post published I opened one of the email accounts to find the top photo, above, along with a string of notes from Todd Heisler, a photographer who has chronicled the experiences of American military families.

Todd received the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for a series of photographs in The Rocky Mountain News documenting the remains of American service members returning home. Among them was the second photo, above.

That run of work did more than receive a Pulitzer. It was so resonant, so enduring, so memorable, and so eminently sensitive and well conceived that there is a quick story here.

This:

As it happened, days before Todd was in touch by email I had been having an off-record conversation with a senior military officer in Virginia. We were talking Afghanistan and a few other things. And then, that officer, unprompted, mentioned Todd’s photographs. He remembered them as one of the great journalistic artifacts of these recent wars.

Of course he was right.

Two or three days later Todd landed in the in-box. Why? He had joined The New York Times staff a few years back, and had made a set of images of Dustin Kirby and Colin Smith, which ran with this article in early 2007. The fresh blog post from Georgia had reminded him of his own trip there, and of a remarkable family — the Kirby’s. So he wrote to say so.

To see Todd’s slide show of the Kirby and Smith families as they first dealt with the wounding of their sons, go to that link, look for the Multimedia tab on the left side and hit the “Audio & Photos” box. Then listen as Dusty and Colin’s father, Bob Smith, talk you through the experience of a wounded vet coming home. Todd’s photographs roll by as the audio streams.

Follow Todd on Twitter at @heislerphoto. And thank him for his work, documenting an all-too-often hidden aspect of more than a decade of American war.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

By Todd Heisler. Top, The New York Times, 2007. Dusty and his grandfather, two wounded American vets. Bottom, The Rocky Mountain News, 2005. The body of Second Lieutenant James Cathey, USMC, arrives at the Reno Airport.

Suzanne and I had the privilege of passing the hours after...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:43:00 -0400

Suzanne and I had the privilege of passing the hours after midnight with Joao Silva and André Liohn, as they held early-morning court after the OPC dinner last night.

It was one fine time, with two of the bravest and most human photographers a writer could meet, much less have the honor and good fortune of working beside. And we are grateful to Andre for this photograph, which we will keep as a memory of the night. It will have a place with several others to be cherished in private, including of Joao and Andre.

Next step: getting you both out of the city and up here to New England, then out past the docks, for some fish-killing, soon. (Which is a reminder that now that the squid and tautog are starting to run, and the first bass have pulled in, it’s time to get the Barbarians on the sked, too.)

We’re back home after a dash to the city worth every...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 21:53:00 -0400

We’re back home after a dash to the city worth every second — a chance to meet friends, including breakfast with former Sergeant Robert Soto (U.S. Army, recently honorably discharged) and the hours passed with Joao Silva (who is in the states for a new pair of prosthetic legs), and a gala honoring Andre Liohn, the recipient last night of the Overseas Press Club’s 2011 Robert Capa Gold Medal Award.

Thank you, Andre, for work that will outlive us all, from a year none of us will ever forget. And for your comments about the sadness indelibly a part of it all.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

The Robert Capa Medal, on a table, sometime very early this morning in New York.

For a tiny glimpse of Andre and his work, go here. Stick around there long enough to watch the video, and imagine doing that.