Rummaging through his camera bag, Specialist Michael D. Carter wanted to make sure he had all the equipment he needed for the mission.
His Nikon D2X?
Check.
His Sony PD170 video camera?
Check.
His batteries?
Check.
It was all there, but he just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. Maybe it was because the Special Forces guys had forced him to “strip down” his bulky equipment bag filled with cameras. They laughed when they spotted it, and told Carter he didn’t need all that gear—not where he was headed. Not when he was going to be climbing up a mountain to reach an enemy compound built on top of a cliff.
Carter wasn’t exactly sure where he was headed. He only knew it was someplace called the Shok Valley. But he could tell from glancing at the guys—the way they were pacing and chain-smoking cigarettes—that this was no routine mission. He could sense it was dangerous, and it just figured. This was his last assignment before heading home. That’s just the way it goes sometimes. The luck of the draw, Carter thought as he stood near the flight line waiting to board a CH-47 Chinook, a twin-engine, heavy-lift helicopter used to move troops, artillery, supplies, and equipment on the battlefield.
He had been in a “homeward-bound state of mind” when another combat cameraman, Staff Sergeant Corey Dennis, contracted pinkeye. Carter was his replacement, and he didn’t mind accompanying troops one last time. He had been in Afghanistan for nearly a year, and enjoyed his job. He had gone on dozens of missions, taking photos and videos of soldiers “at work in the field,” and providing pictures and video to help combat commanders plan missions.
Carter was hardworking, and his commanders thought highly of the tall, wiry, quiet, clean-cut Texan with the round glasses. With cameras dangling around his neck, he looked like a throwback to another era—not someone from the digital age. But Carter was part of a lineage of photographers whose roots stretched back more than 150 years.
Photographers had been on battlefields since the Civil War when Mathew Brady supervised a corps of shooters to follow troops and document the war on a grand scale. In the 1860s, photography was still a relatively new art form, and many of his photographs captured the “terrible reality and earnestness of war” with stark, sobering shots of corpses rotting in farm fields after battles. At the time, it was startling for the public to view such images.
After the Civil War, the military discovered that photography could be a useful tool. To many, combat cameramen are the unseen frontline warriors and their work can be viewed on nightly news shows or while watching one of the many documentaries containing archival combat footage.
But Carter’s job was more than just documenting history. It was dangerous. A member of the 55th Signal Company, Carter knew each embed was risky. Since 2003, nearly a half-dozen combat cameramen had been awarded the Purple Heart, and more than thirty soldiers had received the Bronze Star during missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Carter had been lucky. He hadn’t been in any major firefights and he didn’t want his luck to change now. Not when he was so close to the end of his tour.
He took a deep breath and sighed, then snapped a few frames. He had arrived at the base a day earlier, and didn’t get much sleep. Now, with all his nervous energy, he was trying to find a way to kill time before boarding the Chinook. His job was nothing like the movies, where combat cameramen always seemed to be jumping on helicopters or riding in Jeeps, darting from village to village, taking photos of firefights that would somehow end up on the front pages of major American newspapers. In contrast, Carter rarely said a word as he snapped pictures in relative anonymity.
And he liked it that way.
It all stemmed from his upbringing in a small Texas town where people were taught to be polite, humble, and praise God for their blessings. Carter was born in Smithville, Texas, a hardscrabble, former railroad town in the southeastern part of the state near the Colorado River. A flyspeck on the map, Smithville, about forty-five minutes south of Austin, had only 2,500 people. It was a place where fathers would take their sons hunting in the woods and fishing in the river, or would watch them play football on Friday nights. It seemed like most of the inhabitants drove pickup trucks—mostly Fords and Chevrolets—and worked on farms, where they raised cattle or toiled in the hundreds of oil fields that dotted the landscape from Corpus Christi to Beaumont.
Carter’s father, Mark Carter, worked in those oil fields, while his mother, Anna, was a teacher and later a principal in private schools. But there was little stability at home. His family moved all over southeastern Texas from Smithville to Bowie to Katy as his father took a series of oil jobs, including one on an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
When Carter was a boy, his father would sometimes take him to the refineries—giant playgrounds of pipes and pumps and big metal buildings that turned black crude oil into liquid gold. He would tousle his hair as he told young Carter stories about growing up in south Texas. At night, the sparkle of refinery lights would illuminate the pitch-black sky. To approaching motorists, it would appear as if they were driving toward a magical city. It was more Las Vegas, Nevada, than Lake Charles, Louisiana.
The more his family moved, the more his parents’ relationship began to dissolve. When Carter’s father worked on an offshore oil rig in Lafayette, Louisiana, he would spend two weeks at a time away from home. It was too much for his mother. When Carter turned fifteen, his parents separated. His mother moved the family back to Smithville and filed for divorce. A few months later, his father died of a heart attack. The sudden death hit Carter hard. His father was a mentor, someone he could talk to.
After his father’s death, his mother struggled to make ends meet. She was unemployed for a while. Then she took a job in a nursing home. Her life began falling to pieces. She began drinking heavily. It all began to take a toll on Carter and he turned inward. He kept everything inside. He would find solace in hunting and fishing. And guns were his passion. He could tear them apart and put them back together. He knew everything about guns. Maybe that’s why he enjoyed action movies so much—everyone had guns and the action heroes knew how to use them. One of his favorites was Rambo, a former Special Forces soldier who battled a crooked sheriff and later the Soviets after they invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s. Rambo was big and tough and smart and wasted bad guys without thinking. In fact, it was Carter’s love of guns and action movies that sparked his interest in the military.
At Smithville High School, he was unsure about his future. He knew he didn’t want to go to college or follow his dad into the oil fields. The military was appealing. He had two uncles who were in the Army and his grandfather was a Marine.
When he told his mother what he wanted to do, she didn’t stop him. She already knew, telling him she had “figured it out.” When he was a boy, she would stare out the kitchen window and there, in the backyard, she would watch him as he ran around with his friends, playing war games in a thicket of woods.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he became passionate about enlisting. He was a sophomore, sitting in English class, when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. His English teacher, Robert Duke, escorted his class into the library to watch history unfold on television. Other classes followed, and they mostly sat there in silence. When the buildings collapsed, Carter had one thought: These motherfuckers are going to get paid back. He remembered looking around the library and spotting some students who were laughing and joking. They weren’t paying attention, and Carter became angry at their indifference. They are attacking your country, he thought.
When Carter told his uncle he was going to enlist, the older man made a suggestion: “If you’re going in, go for a job that you can take with you when you get out.” That idea clicked. He loved guns, so why not learn how to repair them? With a knowledge of small-arms armament repair, he could become a gunsmith and work with guns for a living.
So he called up his recruiter and enlisted for six years. All set, Carter said his good-bye to his aunt Raymeh Davis, who helped raise him after his father died, and to all his other relatives. He was excited and couldn’t wait to get to basic training.
But days before he was scheduled to leave, his mother was hospitalized with pneumonia. She told him to go, but he was worried about her. She was growing weaker and weaker. Carter stayed with her at the hospital, monitoring her condition and praying. But she continued to deteriorate and soon passed away. Carter was heartbroken. He loved his mother and to see her die so young was heartbreaking. Now, as a young man, he had no parents. His aunt Raymeh stepped in and promised to help his younger brother. She encouraged Carter to go.
So on an autumn day in 2003, Carter boarded a plane in San Antonio and flew to Louisville, Kentucky, then took a bus to Fort Knox.
But there was a problem. He had missed the beginning of basic training. That meant he would be late for the small-armament repair program—and he had to be there for the first class. So Carter had to find another military occupation specialty, or MOS. He was disappointed, but there was nothing he could do. As he sat in an office at the base flipping through a book of possible specialties, nothing seemed to grab him. Sometimes, Carter asked the sergeant what a certain MOS entailed. But when he heard the details, he would shake his head no.
He was searching for an MOS that would allow him to split time between the field and the office. When someone mentioned a combat cameraman, he paused for a moment and asked the sergeant to explain. When Carter heard the fine points, he perked up. He had never thought about becoming a photographer. Sure, in high school, he had a few “happy snap cameras.” But it never crossed his mind that he would do something like that for a living.
He accepted the MOS, but it didn’t take Carter long to discover that there was more to taking pictures than squinting through a lens and pressing a button that trips the shutter release. There was a real skill—and science—to shooting good photos.
When he arrived at photography school at Fort Meade, Maryland, he quickly realized that most of the people in his class had some photographic background. They had owned digital cameras and studied the art. For them, it had been a calling. But Carter struggled.
He had to learn how to use the shutter speed, which controls the length of time the shutter remains open. Not only did he have to understand the terminology, he had to deal with math and science. (Typical shutter speeds are measured in fractions of a second, such as 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, and 1/1000 of a second.) Then there was the theory of prisms—how, when light passes into a material at an angle, the light beam is bent or refracted. And when beams are refracted, they can cause problems with camera lenses.
At first, Carter had a hard time grasping the concepts, calling it “fucking stupid.” But once he started going out in the field to shoot, the concepts clicked. And he soon discovered that he could be at peace with his cameras. He could be an observer and fade into the background. And he discovered that he was pretty good at shooting video—a critical part of his job.
After his graduation, the Army gave him a thirty-day leave before he was deployed to Germany, to join the 7th Army Training Center. He flew back to Smithville and visited his aunt and brother, who was considering becoming a corrections officer.
While he was there, he stopped by the recruiting office to help a local recruiter. It was early 2004 and the war in Iraq had entered a new phase. It had morphed from “shock and awe” when U.S. troops quickly dispatched Saddam Hussein from power, to Al Qaeda and insurgents attacking soldiers and planting improvised explosive devices, known as IEDs. Still, it appeared to Carter that people in his hometown wanted to enlist. The country was in the middle of a patriotic boom, still angry at the terrorists’ attacks.
At the end of his leave, Carter boarded a plane and headed to Germany. Inside, he was a little apprehensive. He knew he still had a lot to learn about photography and Germany would be a perfect place to train. It was better to learn his craft in a peaceful country than in a war zone.
And he was right.
He worked with the training support center, and shot stills and video of companies conducting training exercises. But Carter quickly grew bored. The job just plain sucked. Here he was, documenting everyone else prepping to go to war while he was left behind. He felt like he should be going, too.
After two years in Germany, he returned to Fort Meade. A few months later, he was told he would deploy to Afghanistan. Now he was stoked. This is what he had been looking for all along. He wanted to prove his mettle in firefights. Finally, he was going to be a real combat cameraman. He felt in-spired and invigorated.
Transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia, for more training, Carter was informed that he would be assigned to Special Forces. He smiled when he heard a commander tell him, “Don’t fuck up. You’ll have to be able to do what they do. You need to train with these guys so you don’t stand out. So you all look the same.”
Carter took the words to heart. For several weeks, it was like he was back in basic training. He knew the commander was right: He would have to be in the best shape of his life if he was going to be embedded with Special Forces.
The night before he shipped out to Afghanistan, his friends threw a big party in the barracks. Carter and his buddies drank all night—Jack Daniel’s, beer; whatever they could get their hands on. They swapped stories and laughed at the frat-house jokes. And at dawn, Carter showered and got dressed, and boarded a plane for the first of a series of flights that would end at the Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan.
When he landed, it was unlike anyplace he had ever seen. He gazed at towering mountains with snowcapped peaks in the distance. When he opened his mouth, he could taste the gritty blowing sand. The temperature was hotter than a typical southeastern Texas day in the summer, but with less humidity, which made it somewhat bearable. He actually liked it.
Over the next year, Carter traveled with 7th Special Forces Group, and then 3rd Special Forces Group. He would go from firebase to firebase, talking to soldiers and taking photos. He enthusiastically tackled each assignment and, thankfully, he didn’t see serious action.
And he was packing his bags, getting ready for the long trip back to the United States, when he heard that his friend Dennis was sick. The next thing he knew he was packing his gear and heading to Jalalabad to hook up with Walton’s team.
Now here he was, waiting to board a helicopter with the other soldiers for an operation to hunt and kill a top terrorist—a mission that seemed straight out of Mission: Impossible. And for a moment Carter couldn’t help wondering if his final mission in Afghanistan would be his last.