Ashley Gilbertson's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - Gonzo 'Tog Iraq
We returned to the hotel in Erbil one evening to file pictures. I flicked on the television: still Fox-only. In the green night vision made famous during the invasion, a correspondent was crouching in front of sandbags, wearing a flak jacket and a helmet. He was supposedly on the front lines, reporting via a scratchy video phone. He had to whisper, he said. The enemy was so close. We examined the screen. Hadn't we seen that guy at dinner? Fox's bureau was upstairs, so it was possible. We took a closer look, and behind the sandbags Time and I could make out the distinctive architecture of our hotel. Fox News' frontline correspondent was reporting from his hotel room with his lights turned out. [1, p. 12]
Way post-Pynchon, Ashley Gilbertson's Whisky Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War conveys throughout the oddness of the catastrophe, starting with the claim that he had not meant to photograph war while following the saga of the refugees it made, a pursuit that came to include the story of the Kurds, which coverage then led to being around for Peshmerga engagements with the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam.
"Word spread to the press that I was seeing a lot of fighting," Gilbertson writes.
Talk about not guarding one's reputation . . . .
The first photograph in the tapestry that will become a beer swillin', fear instillin', in-country independent alternating with the in-the-army embedded tour into blood-spattered manhood: two Arabs, accompanied by geese, playing at billiards on a table set out on the enshadowed fringe of a mountain wheat field.
Odd.
The next shot, however, has the more familiar look: "a Kurdish fighter, or Peshmerga, stands guard on the front line near Halabja, facing Ansar al-Islam, a radical Kurdish group connected with al-Qaeda." That fighter in baggy khaki and camouflage, Kalashnikov swung muzzle down over his shoulder, his feet planted before a berm of rock and sandbags, his head turned toward thousands of acres of open range, looks the lonely part and place.
Still, just two pages on, there's the boy in olive serge smiling and pointing a gun, a toy, at the author.
Odd.
There's even a tender moment, sort of, as "Officers from the First Armored Division perform a traditional pileup after one of their peers is promoted to Captain." Equivalent to the football player's collegial pat on the ass for a pass well received, the scene reminds the author of the "human pyramid photographs" out of Abu Ghraib.
Odd.
Not the least bit odd though: the storyline.
Ashley Gilbertson goes to war a young man, taking chances, knocks back a beer (plural) here and there in familiar gonzo journalist fashion, and comes out of it somewhat disturbed as well as much wiser about what I like to call the inexorable workings of things, including, perhaps, his own madness with the experience, about which he writes with a healthy dose of post-traumatic angst: "I wasn't interested in discussing anything except Iraq, but if anyone who hadn't been there wanted to talk about it, I wouldn't give them the time of day. They didn't know jack shit about the place. No one did unless they'd been there."
As far as I've come to be concerned, the engines in the Islamic Small Wars, and I would include the internecine violence in Iraq among them, derive their energy from deeply felt personal assessments--not religious belief--about the character of self and social place in each of the afflicted societies. If instead the violence were truly about cast, class, or faith, the battles would form up categorically, visibly, and with the unalloyed cruelty of conventional confrontations; instead, the evil sends out shoots beneath the surface of cultures and amounts, most often, to the sporadic expressions of suicide bombers and men hunting prey or looking for a fight with what is not or seems no longer themselves.
Perhaps without intending so, Gilbertson's panoramic experience of the Iraqi frontier, from Arabs playing billiards at a table set beside a wheat field to the liberation to a gaggle of Polish peacekeepers--four women wearing tank tops and sitting in lawn chairs behind the walls of a camp on the outskirts of Karbala--as the shadow of the helicopter in which the author rides passes over them to thousands of Shia faithful bowed in prayer and filling a street, as far as the camera sees, in Sadr City to, and this perhaps the signature of the experience overall, an image of a prisoner sitting on a stone floor, his head covered with a black cloth or shirt and his nose practically touching his knee while the shadow of a Marine guard with his gun held muzzle down plays on the wall behind him, the oddest thing about the war is the relative normality of a circumstance that encounters a certain but altogether sporadic violence, and then the odd invisibility, even inscrutability, of key combatants whose knowledge of identities--of themselves as well as their appointed enemy--seems scant.
Again, odd.
Spend a day inside the pages of Whisky Tango Foxtrot, and you will have spent any given day inside the War in Iraq, from before the invasion to just about now.
1. Gilbertson, Ashley. Whisky Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. Introduction by Dexter Filkins. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
