Generations
I’d rather fight a war tomorrow than think my son might have to do it one day.
This sentence, which I know to be true, does not belong to me. It does not emanate from me. It inhabits me because I am part of this living planet. It originates in the deepest strata of life, in the mechanisms that regulate the way life is handed down from being to being, from generation to generation, across time. It does not make me any more courageous than the moderately frightened – or more heroic than the moderately selfish – man that I am.
-
- Maidan Shar, Afghanistan. November 2001. The Frontline: Kabul had been liberated and the Taliban had fled. The frontline had shifted some 60 km south of the capital. It was very quiet, apart from sporadic gunfire. In truth, no one knew what lay beyond. No one knew where the Taliban had gone. Time would tell they they were still there.
-
- Kabul, Afghanistan. November 2001. The Price of a Battle: Two Taliban fighters await their fate in prison, having been captured defending Kabul when their positions were overrun by victorious Northern Alliance soldiers.
-
- Kabul, Afghanistan. November 2001. Children play in the liberated city.
-
- Baghdad, Iraq. April 2003. US Marine: When it became clear that to stay in Iraq was going to be much harder than it had been to get there.
-
- Near Hilla, Iraq. May 2003. A History of Violence: Shortly after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, mass graves from the Saddam era started to surface in various parts of the country. The Mahawil mass grave near the ancient city of Babylon contained the bodies of over 3,000 Shias killed during the 1991 uprising, which followed the first Gulf War. It was the largest one found.
-
- Eastern Iraq. May 2003. The Search: A US marine searches a local man at an improvised check-point. But what would have been useful to find – the history, the fear, the hatred, the faith, the desire for revenge or victory – none of it could be found in this way. Yet only those things really mattered, only things that cannot be kept in a man’s pocket or hidden in his socks would shape the years to come.
-
- Baghdad, Iraq. April 2003. Out of place: A US marine guards a tiger that had belonged to the Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday. Two very deadly creatures, the largest predator and a human soldier, both somehow out of place.
тнє ѕυℓтαη'ѕ ѕєαℓ 