On the way back I try to talk to my mom about why I’ve chosen the life I have. Perhaps for her sake. Perhaps for mine.
“You remember the freelance piece I did on Karen Wheeler?” I ask her. She takes a moment to place the name, so I add, “Lieutenant Wheeler? With the women’s engagement team? Who stepped on a bomb?”
“The one they gave you trouble with, for the photos?” she says.
Wheeler, who would lose a left foot and a good chunk of intestine, had given us permission to take the photos while we waited for the medical evacuation. It had been a painful, protracted affair. The Taliban arrived and shot at the incoming helicopter, so the helicopter asked the soldiers to go to a safer LZ. The soldiers had to pick up their wounded and drag them five hundred meters back to a safer location, by which point Wheeler was screaming curses, only to have the pilots declare that landing zone too hot as well, and they had to drag the wounded another five hundred meters, by which point Wheeler was silent. The images and text together made for a powerful piece, I thought, but the oh-so-chivalrous military PAOs threw a fit over images of wounded women, and ultimately an editor, from the safety of New York, decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and that the images were “too real” anyway, because “goriness distracts from the substance here.” Which I thought, and still think, was cowardice.
Yes, the photos were gnarly. Yes, you’d never have just run them alone, because that would have been pornography. War photography needs the context the writer provides, because without context it’s too easy for photos of life’s extremes to become kitsch or propaganda. But writing only shakes the reader if they cooperate, put in the work to go past the headline and the lead and imagine their way into what you’re trying to tell them. A good photo stops you in your tracks. Shakes you against your will. So writers need the photos just as much. They need them to put you there.
“Mom, when those photos got canned, I could still . . .” I decide not to tell my mother that I could still smell the shit from Wheeler’s open intestines, bled out over her stomach and crotch. “I could still hear her, cursing the pilots. And they were beautiful photos. They weren’t just pain and fear. They showed people. They made you look.”
“I remember how mad you were.”
“At the time I thought, here I am, risking my life to educate Americans about what this war is, and some jerk in an air-conditioned office is saying no. No, thanks.”
My mother is starting to look uncomfortable, so I wrap it up.
“But things like that teach you about what you really believe. Because next up I get a chance at another embed, in another rough area, and I’m scared. And I’m like, Here we go. Am I really going to risk my life again to educate Americans about this war after all that, after getting something vital and important thrown aside like it was trash? And then I thought, Yes. Yes I am. Because not every editor is a coward. And because doing that work is who I am. That is what matters to me, more than anything.” I say it with conviction, to remind myself I still believe it.
My mother nods. She gets what I’m telling her. That even if I’m not going back to Afghanistan, it doesn’t mean I’m staying home. And she keeps her eyes on the road, and she says, “I’m proud of you, don’t you know?”
I’m not sure I believe her.
• • •
The next couple of days are fine, in part because I promise my mom I’ll have a serious talk with Uncle Carey before I leave. It seems to satisfy her, though it weighs on me. I spend much of the time reading with my mother on the glassed-in part of the back porch, looking out over the hills from time to time, sipping tea. My mother has a wonderful way of not asking questions, of practicing patience until things spill out, but this time I don’t have so much to report. I don’t want to talk about Kabul, or why I’m not going back, because I haven’t perfectly worked out the answers to any of those questions, and I don’t want to speak out of turn and learn something about myself prematurely. If my father were here, he’d hustle us around, convince us we needed to do something, go fishing or hiking or just out for a walk. “Wild apples are hanging from every tree,” he’d say, “and here you are eating Oreos.” But of course my father is not here. Even the plants he used to keep out on this porch have died, so there’s nothing obstructing our view. Less work, my mother would say, if I were to ask her why she never took care of them. The only conflict comes when my mother gets up to go to church and asks me if I’m coming, even though she knows I’m not, but it’s a small spat, an old rerun of fights past, dating back to high school, and it’s over quickly enough and then she leaves me there, on the porch, looking out over the hills, sipping tea, alone.
When the time comes to leave for good, I load up the rental car, say my good-byes to my mother, and make my promised trip to Uncle Carey’s. He lives about five minutes west of Davidsville, in a perpetually poorly maintained one story with an oversized American flag, a small and tattered Gadsden flag declaring “Don’t Tread on Me,” an overgrown front yard, and a beautifully ordered, pristine garage. He has a beer cracked open for me before I even walk in the door, and we spend the time reminiscing, laughing about the things he used to do, the scoldings my mother would give him, like he was one of
