Bearing Witness to American Exploits

The book begins with photographs from van Agtmael’s early years as a war photographer, covering the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which show the routine violence of two worlds colliding. There is an image of a child squinting into the camera as he bleeds from the head in the aftermath of a night raid on his home, in Mosul, Iraq, and one of a U.S. soldier in full battle gear sitting wearily in the bright-yellow décor of an Iraqi living room as the home is searched. Skinny young servicemen relax in the darkness of their barracks on one page, and, on another, the waxy face of a severely injured American soldier looks, in profile, like a corpse. Van Agtmael captures an Iraqi soldier’s final moments, lying in an operating theatre as red-pink blood, the color of fading carnations, streams from his body. On the opposite page, van Agtmael describes an experience of watching a dying American soldier. “As he was lifted from the stretcher to the ER bed he screamed ‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!,’ then begged, ‘put me to sleep, please put me to sleep,’ ” he writes, describing another photographer leaning in to get an overhead shot of the scene. “The soldier yelled, ‘Get that fucking camera out of my face!’ Those were his last words.”