Photographing America’s Wounded Soldiers in Iraq | Nat Geo Live

In 2004, I got a call from LIFE magazine. They said we have this incredible assignment for you. It's to photograph the wounded coming out of Fallujah. When we flew in, this is one of the first scenes I saw. This is on my birthday in 2004, and it was during the Battle of Fallujah.

And there were so many wounded Americans coming out of Fallujah that they cleared out the inside of a C-17 cargo aircraft and put all the wounded on the ground. And this is how they flew them to Germany for treatment. And this is a young man who was wounded in Fallujah, and that's how he was being flown to Germany. And this is from an IED attack.

I spent five days on the ground, and when I got back from the assignment, I called and I said, "You know, I think these pictures are really going to change the tide against the war. The public is gonna see them and turn against the war, for sure."

LIFE magazine asked me to send the pictures; I sent them, and that was in November of 2004. And through November, December, January, February, they held the pictures and never published them. And finally in February, I got an email from my photo editor saying, "I hate to tell you this, but we will never publish your pictures of wounded American soldiers because we don't think the American public can handle seeing them."

I was frustrated and angry, and so at that point as a freelancer, I can then try and sell the pictures to someone else. I called my editor at the New York Times magazine, Kathy Ryan, and she was able to get them in the next issue of New York Times magazine.