Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq
Nina Berman
22 - 3 - 2005
“The dead tell no stories. It is the wounded that survive and present us with our own complicity”. To mark the second anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, openDemocracy presents ten portraits from Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq, the acclaimed photography collection on wounded American soldiers, by the award-winning photographer Nina Berman.
In October 2003, I started making portraits of American soldiers who were wounded in the Iraq War. I began the project because I was not seeing any images of wounded soldiers, much less wounded Iraqi civilians, in the American press. The human cost of war seemed conspicuously absent from public view. I felt that maybe if Americans saw images of their own wounded sons and daughters, they might have more realistic understanding of the consequences of war.
There are no lists of the wounded, unlike the dead. In newspapers, the names of the dead are published every day along with their ages, hometowns and command units. I read these names and feel sorry for the soldiers’ families and friends. But the dead tell no stories. It is the wounded that survive and present us with our own complicity.
I found my subjects by going on the internet and plugging in certain words: brain damage, blind, wounded, arm, leg, and amputee. I then tracked the soldiers down in their hometowns after they had been discharged from military hospitals. I avoided photographing them at public events like welcome home parades or medal ceremonies. I wanted to see the soldiers in private and alone as each confronts his or her loss and considers the experience of war, their reasons for enlisting in the military and life ahead.
When I started the project there were a thousand wounded. Now there are tens of thousands. They have lost eyes, ears and pieces of their brain. The damage is wrenching and at first I was not prepared for the suffering. Then I became obsessed. I couldn’t stop the project. I had to find more soldiers.
Looking back, I now understand how desperate I was to carve out a place of truth amid the spectacle of “shock and awe”, “mission accomplished”, the “hunt for Saddam”, and the yellow ribbons and freedom fries.
There is a curious divide between those who live the reality of war each day – the combatants, their families, the civilians under occupation – and those for whom war is just background noise in the nightly news reports.
For me, photographing the soldiers made my country’s actions very personal and real.
The soldiers in ‘Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq’ represent a small number of the 5,394 American servicemen and women wounded in action and the estimated 11,000 others injured in combat support during the first fifteen months of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. A precise number of combat support or non-hostile injuries is not known. The Pentagon omits from its casualty reports those soldiers medically evacuated from Iraq due to friendly fire, sickness, accidents, or psychological trauma even though many of these soldiers are severely injured and permanently disabled.
Iraqi casualties are not counted at all.
Purple Hearts
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