max s. gerber(the latest shot)

late last night paul sent me a link to a story about the marines involved in the haditha massacre. it seems they have all been cleared, except for one.

as a bit of background, this is from the NPR website:

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the leader of a Marine squad that killed 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha, faces a military hearing Thursday at Camp Pendleton. He is charged with 18 counts of unpremeditated murder in the largest criminal case to emerge from the war in Iraq.

On the morning of November 19, 2005, as Sgt. Wuterich’s squad approached Haditha, a roadside bomb killed a fellow marine. Wuterich said the dismembered body is a sight he will never forget.

About 100 yards away, Wuterich, who had never been in combat before, saw a taxi with five young men in it. In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Wuterich said the men were ordered out of the car and “as they were coming around, they started to take off. So I shot at them.”

this is staff sergeant frank wuterich, with his daughter, talia, at their home in camp pendleton, california. it was shot on september 5th, 2006, and was one of the strangest and most interesting assignments i’d ever been involved in. the story was for TIME magazine, and they seemed to have an exclusive on it. the assignment was strange because of the exclusive - i found out about the shoot maybe a week before it happened, and was instructed to tell no one any details about it whatsoever. it was a big story, and breaking news, and the more excited i got about it the harder it was to refrain from talking about it. i started to feel like i was in a spy movie. i couldn’t tell my friends or family or my girlfriend anything about where i was going or what i was doing, not until it was published. when i was processing the pictures after the shoot i had to hide them from people so no one could know the subject matter until the magazine came out. we were sneaking into the base, so i couldn’t even bring an assistant on the shoot.

i drove down to san diego, picked up the writer at a hotel and went over to camp pendleton. we had a cover, in case the security guard at the gate stopped us. we were officially going to see someone else. the military wasn’t too keen on wuterich talking to the press. but i drove up to the gate and even though i had a big car full of gear they just waved us on through. i guess we got lucky. he was living in a house on base, with his wife, marisol, and two daughters. marisol was pregnant at the time. frank was supposed to be out of the military at that point, but they were keeping him in just until they figured out what to do with him. i guess two years later it’s still ongoing.

i was really surprised to find a relatively normal looking house, and even more surprised to see that it was just frank and his family there to talk to us. no lawyer, no official military liaison. still, he was expressly forbidden by his lawyer to discuss specifics of that day in haditha, so instead we got to talk to him as a human being, not as a soldier. it’s difficult to reconcile any of the details of what happened in iraq with this guy i saw sitting on the couch in front of me. he looked like any normal, clean cut guy in his mid twenties. he played guitar. he liked rock and jazz, he was an honor student in high school. he loved his wife and his kids. he joined the military in part, he said, because he wanted to be in the band.

now it seems that wuterich has filed a lawsuit against congressman murtha for libel and defamation. murtha was instrumental in bringing the haditha massacre to the public consciousness. the charges against wuterich now stand at 12 counts of voluntary manslaughter. this is all brings to my mind the idea of the craziness of war - how it’s all about semantics. it’s okay to kill people, just so long as you do it according to the rules we make up. and if you don’t follow the rules just make sure nobody finds out. then again, i don’t know how these soldiers do it. regardless of your politics, whether you think we should be in this war or not, when you look at the situation it’s hard not to view it as an even tie for last place. is anybody actually winning here? in a situation that’s designed where you have to kill people to progress, is there a way not to come in last? you’re sending kids off into hell, they’re scared out of their minds and miserable, they generally don’t speak the language and everything probably looks like a threat. if ever there was a lose-lose situation, this has got to be it.

when TIME was laying out the original article they were initially going to go with my first select - the B&W shot below. it was to run a full page, no text, and i was really thrilled. it was great space, a great layout and i was really pleased with the picture. it had a quiet that i quite liked. then the editors (not the photo dept.) started second-guessing the picture. the writer said “a marine would never lower his head” and they started worrying that maybe the picture made wuterich seem guilty. maybe it made too strong a statement. i kind of thought that was the point (not an assumption of guilt, but of making a statement of some kind), and tried to argue it, but eventually the photo was swapped out for an alternate of him looking straight ahead. it was okay, but nowhere near as good in my opinion. still, the story got good space in the magazine, which is always satisfying, and it was a unique experience to be involved in. my sincere thanks, as always, go to martha bardach at TIME, a continual champion for photographers.

some relevant links:

the original news story corporal bennett sent me that prompted this post.

the original TIME profile of wuterich in which my pictures appeared.

the wikipedia entry on frank wuterich.

frank wuterich’s home page.

wuterich on 60 minutes - this is long, but it’s really worth it.

an NPR news story on wuterich.

the haditha story broke when an eyewitness to the attacks reported what had happened. this is a youtube video interview with one of the eyewitnesses.

(the opinions expressed in all these links are, of course, not necessarily reflective of our beliefs here at msgphoto.com. if you have a problem with them, blame them, not me.)