US:My photograph of Joseph Dwyer made him famous. Did it also help lead to his death? Warren Zinnon the story behind his iconic war picture
THE E-MAIL was a punch in the gut: "the soldier you made famous - killed himself last Saturday - thought you should know."
I thought I'd put photojournalism and war behind me 4½ years ago when I traded in the dusty battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan for law school in Miami. But you never truly leave the battlefield behind.
I knew at once what the message meant: Joseph Dwyer was dead. I drove home in a daze and walked into my apartment. And there was Joseph, on the wall, looking at me.
Dwyer was the subject of a highly publicised photograph I'd taken as an embedded photojournalist during the first week of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It captured the young medic running toward safety with an injured Iraqi child in his arms. It was splashed across newspapers worldwide and brought Joseph instant fame. And for years, I'd proudly displayed the front page of USA Today featuring the photo. It was a tremendous accomplishment for me; I was only 25 when I took it.
Now, though, the picture was suffused with a different meaning. Joseph Dwyer was dead of a substance overdose at 31. I'd read news reports that he was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. He thought he was being hunted by Iraqi killers. He'd been in and out of treatment. He couldn't, his mother told the media, "get over the war".
But as I stared at his image on my wall, I couldn't dodge the question: Did this photo have anything to do with his death? News reports said he hated the celebrity that came with the picture. How much, I wondered, did that moment - just 1/250th of a second when three lives intersected on a river bank in Iraq - contribute to the burdens he'd brought home with him?
If I'd never taken his picture, would he have ended up as he did? Would he still have been a casualty of war?
In the pre-dawn hours of March 25th, 2003, less than a week into the invasion of Iraq, the US army's 7th cavalry regiment was in Mishkab, south of Baghdad, contending with ambushes from all directions. I was embedded with the unit as a photojournalist for the Army Times. Sheltered for the night in the cramped quarters of a Bradley armoured fighting vehicle, I managed to sleep through intense fighting but was awakened when the ground started shaking beneath me. US aircraft were dropping bombs on Iraqi fighters, who were using the cover of the nearby village on the banks of the Euphrates river to launch attacks against the 7th cavalry.
My eyes barely open, I grabbed my camera gear, threw on my helmet and bullet-proof vest and crawled out of the Bradley. I opened the hatch to see fire engulfing the palm trees that lined the Euphrates. A few minutes later, a man appeared, jogging up the dusty, winding road from the village toward the soldiers. His hands were in the air, one clasping a makeshift white flag.
Visibly shaken, he said that there were injured people in the village who needed immediate medical attention. Fearing an ambush, the unit commander told him that the army would treat the wounded but that they had to be brought to the road.
The man left. A few minutes later, he was running up the dirt road again, this time carrying a four-year-old boy named Ali Sattar. Ali was naked from the waist down, and his left leg was wrapped in a blood-soaked white scarf.
As the man ran toward me, I fired away with my camera, sensing that something special was developing before me. A medic suddenly appeared to my right and ran to the Iraqi man, who handed the injured child to the American soldier. The soldier was Dwyer.
As both turned to run, Dwyer to the aid station and the man back to the village, I kept shooting, thinking, "I hope this is in focus, I hope the exposure is right, God, Warren, don't mess this one up."
I knew this was a moment that the world needed to see - a moment of American heroism, of American commitment to saving a people and to saving lives.
In June 2003, a few months after that incident on the Euphrates, I travelled back to Iraq to document Ali Sattar's fate. Back at Mishkab, I spent an hour showing residents the newspaper covers and photographs of the boy before I was finally directed to his house. His father walked out with Ali in his arms. The boy's leg injuries had been massive, and he hadn't been able to receive proper follow-up medical care from the local Iraqi hospitals. Ali couldn't walk without a painful limp, so his relatives mostly carried him everywhere.
We spent that afternoon together on the banks of the Euphrates, drinking Pepsis and Iraqi tea as I showed the family the photos I had taken of Ali. He was a typical shy little boy, but he was enamoured of the picture of himself, though his farming family didn't understand why it was such a big deal. As we said our goodbyes, an airplane passed above. The noise of the engines panicked the four-year-old, and fear spread across his face.
Ali would be about nine now. I don't know where he is, though I wonder about him sometimes. I wonder whether he has grown used to war and conquered his fears. And whether he's fully recovered and able to walk.
I know there was a time when Joseph wondered about Ali, too.
Joseph and I hadn't had much time to speak in Iraq, except for spending a couple of hours together the day after I took the photograph, so I was surprised to get an e-mail from him one day a month or two after my return to Mishkab. I think he was back in the States by then, or at least not in Iraq, and he wanted to know whether I knew what had happened to the boy in the photo. I e-mailed back and told him about my trip to find Ali.
"I can't believe you went back to Iraq . . . I was afraid the kid didn't make it," he replied on August 6th, 2003. "I wish I was there with you back at that village."
In November he messaged again. "Hey Warren it's Joseph Dwyer the kid you made famous. Hope your (sic) doing well and staying safe." He asked whether I had any other pictures from that day that I could send him and whether I'd heard anything more about Ali.
In January 2004 I was due to return to Iraq for a third stint. But after two rotations in Afghanistan and two in Iraq, I decided that it was time to hang up my cameras. That's the difference between me and soldiers like Joseph Dwyer: I had the privilege of calling it quits whenever I wanted to.
I left journalism, moved home to Miami and soon after enrolled in law school. I heard from Joseph a couple more times, casually. He didn't tell me that while I was struggling with contract law, he'd been struggling to fit back into civilian life after his three-month stint in Iraq.
I first learned of his problems with PTSD in a 2005 news story about his arrest in Texas after a stand-off at the apartment where he was then living. He thought there were Iraqis outside trying to get in, and he was shooting at the phantoms.
The last message Joseph sent me was on December 1st, 2004. "When I first got back I didn't really want to talk about being over there to anyone," he wrote. "Now looking back on it, it's one of the greatest things I've ever done. I hope you feel the same about what you have done. I truly believe you played an important role in this war. You told everyone's story."
About a week after Joseph died, his mother called me. I'd been trying to contact her to share my condolences with the family and to let them know how badly I felt. Maureen Dwyer told me that she'd read the statements claiming that Joseph hated the fame the picture had brought him, and she wanted me to know that they weren't true. Joseph loved the photograph, she said. He'd always been proud of it. He just felt somewhat embarrassed at being singled out.
I don't know that the photograph of Joseph was the best one I ever took, or my favourite, but I think it represented something important. At the time, it represented hope. Hope that what we were doing as a nation in Iraq was the right thing. Hope that soldiers such as Joseph cared more about human life than anything else.
But now when I look at the picture, it doesn't feel hopeful. It makes me realise that so many soldiers are physically torn and in such mental anguish that for some of them, hope has turned to hopelessness. That, I have to believe, is what happened to Joseph Dwyer, who was haunted by the ghosts of what he'd seen in Iraq, by fears he had lived with for too long. He could never leave the battlefield behind.
He was memorialised in that image trying to preserve life. But he could no longer preserve his own. -
Warren Zinn covered Afghanistan and Iraq as a photojournalist for the Army Times from January 2002 to December 2003. He is now a student at the University of Miami school of law.