I saw battle-corpses, myriad of them,
And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all dead soldiers;
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
—Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
A couple of hours into our conversation, Stacy Pearsall mentioned in passing that during her second combat tour, in Iraq, three of her friends had been killed in the explosion and collapse of a house that had been rigged with hidden bombs that detonated when the soldiers entered. It was part of a story about why, as a military photographer, she had started making a portrait of each soldier she accompanied on patrol. “In case they didn’t come home,” she explained. At that point she had lost many friends who were killed in combat and was herself deeply wounded. “You don’t know how long they’re going to be around,” she added, speaking of the living.
Medically retired now as an air force staff sergeant, Stacy was nursing a dark beer, her black boots hooked around a barstool, absentmindedly toying with the folded handkerchief I’d given her earlier when she came to a difficult part of her story and had to mop up drenching tears. The bomb-rigged house incident was a small patch of the tapestry of death, loss, heartache, and physical and emotional pain that has dominated her life for a dozen years and more. When I asked her what she saw in the faces of the soldiers she photographed, she said one word. Vulnerability.
“When someone says ‘American soldier’ or ‘combat soldier,’ people think of brawn, strength, invincibility, and immortality. But what I saw in front of me was a bunch of kids, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. Some of them hadn’t drunk alcohol in their lives. Or felt the touch of a woman. Or maybe never heard gunfire. Now they’re thrust into this foreign country with all these expectations, maybe expectations they’ve put on themselves, unrealistic sometimes, that they’ll perform heroically when the first rounds go downrange. I wanted people to see the reality, the vulnerability. That’s what makes them human beings.”
Stacy was thirty-five when we spoke, eight years after her final exposure to a string of IED blasts that left her with traumatic brain injury, a diagnosis of PTSD, cervical spine trauma, a faulty memory, near-constant pain, night terrors, and occasional seizures. She wears her dark brown hair chopped and tied back in a hasty ponytail, and her large brown eyes and tight smile said to me: Stubborn, tough. And vulnerable.
She was born into a family with a military tradition dating to the Revolutionary War. Her parents divorced when Stacy was an infant, and she and her mother “bounced around a lot, she got remarried and we moved and then that [marriage] dissolved and we moved again.” She enlisted in the air force at seventeen, signing up as a photographer. In the military, the job title “combat camera” designates both the tool and the person. You could be an infantryman, a naval petty officer, a C-130 pilot, or a combat camera. Stacy was a combat camera. The job is to document combat operations—raids, assaults, firefights, IED ambushes, the wounded, and the dead—for analysis within the military, although some images are selected for public viewing. It’s a demanding and dangerous assignment requiring quick reflexes and steady nerves. Combat cameras carried weapons along with their other gear. Stacy loved the work; the military provided the stability, structure, and consistency that her childhood had lacked.
Assigned to Iraq in 2003, she worked out of the tent city at Camp Sather, a U.S. military facility at Baghdad International Airport. She accompanied troops on patrols and on manhunts for former regime and Iraqi army officials, traversing Baghdad’s dangerous streets and the neighborhoods known for suicide bombings. After a few months she got her footing and began capturing images not only to document what happened but to explain how it felt. She looked to capture the impact of war on people for folks back home. “The public provided my paycheck,” she explained. “They were relying on me to provide imagery of the war in which their country was involved.”
She began “focusing more on the military as human beings, with all these things that happened in front of my camera that they are going to live with for the rest of their lives. Yes, watching pornography on their iPhones or joking around about silly things back home, chain-smoking cigarettes, talking about shitting their pants, or making fun of each other. The small intimate details.” She also documented the wounded and the Iraqi civilian dead, often capturing images of bodies that had been carved up. Corpses missing limbs, and heads without bodies. “Seeing a mutilated body did not affect me,” Stacy told me. “There wasn’t life in it and it was tragic that it happened. Please don’t misunderstand what I am saying. We needed evidence that the enemy was mistreating local people. I was not emotionally affected by seeing it or photographing it. But seeing the wives of those killed and mutilated and the emotional impact the war had on them, that… carries with me.”
Just before she completed her first deployment, in 2004, Stacy was riding in an unarmored Humvee that was wrecked in an IED blast. She was “shaken up quite a bit” but insisted she was okay. When she got home, however, she experienced a cascade of symptoms: insomnia and then nightmares when she did fall asleep, constant fatigue, anxiety, not eating well. Some of it was undiagnosed PTSD; some of it was moral injury that would never be diagnosed. Whatever it was, she felt she was falling apart. A Vietnam veteran she met persuaded her to check in with the mental health unit at Charleston Air Force Base, South Carolina, her home station. “I walked in, and it was weird: there were people there for couple’s therapy. I went to the counter and said that I needed a little help, I was not sleeping, and the person told me to see my primary-care doctor and get sleeping pills. I said, ‘Really? So I can overdose and kill myself?’” Stacy turned and stomped out, but a counselor ran after her and suggested that she see the chaplain. “I said fine. I showed up at his office fifteen minutes early. The office was locked and dark. I waited until fifteen minutes after my appointment, and he never showed up. Turned out he was at a golfing tournament and totally blew me off.”
Eventually she did get help from a VA-operated vet center at Syracuse University, where she had won a spot in a military-photojournalism course. The vet-center therapists taught her to recognize those sights and sounds that would trigger her emotional reactions and how to deal with them. Driving past what looked like potential IED sites, for instance, on safe American streets. Feeling more in control, she got married in 2006 to Andrew Dunaway, also a combat camera, and she immediately went off on other military assignments.
Back in Iraq on her second deployment in January 2007, she felt more emotionally stable. “I felt if I was stressed, I could stop in the moment and stop my brain from getting away from me, and understand that I’m in control and can change the outcome if I want to by presence of mind,” she said.
It was a brave attempt. But in Iraq the killing had accelerated. President Bush had ordered a troop surge, and insurgents were stepping up the resistance. Twenty-five Americans were killed in battle on a single day, January 20; in all, 904 American troops would be killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom that year. The danger and stress rose to extreme levels and played out in some unexpected ways. When I asked Stacy about the time she pulled a gun on a child, she sighed and stared into her beer for a minute or two.
At that point, at the height of the war, she said, many Iraqi men had been detained or killed or simply fled, often leaving wives and children to panhandle or find some other way to survive, and some of the kids were taken in by insurgents and paid to pickpocket U.S. troops or dig a hole for an IED or carry a grenade into a crowd. Everywhere she went, kids would swarm around, trying to get into her pockets, and she’d have to strong-arm them away, and she began to feel utter disdain for the gangs of children. “Repugnance” is the word she used.
One day, she was out photographing an operation to hunt down insurgents thought to be hiding in an apartment building, a painstaking and dangerous job of examining stairwells and rooms and shadows from floor to floor. “We had encountered heavy fighting, and I hadn’t slept in several days, and it was taking a really long time,” she said. At one point she came down out of the building to one of the waiting vehicles. “The driver was sitting there, and the turret gunner was up there, and I had the door open, it was sweltering hot, and a young kid came running at us full speed…” Stacy yanked out her 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol and the other soldiers swiveled with their weapons and everyone froze, and it turned out the kid only wanted a soccer ball, sometimes handed out by American soldiers.
“At that moment, even though none of us acted precipitously and fired our weapons, we took the time to make sure he wasn’t a threat, and thank God nothing negative happened, but… it definitely made me look inward at myself, like, What kind of woman am I? Women are made to make life, not take it. It was a moral thing. It definitely tested me, and it changed how I think of myself,” she said. “Now if I see a group of kids, I’m walking the other way.”
In an earlier conversation, Stacy had told me, “I have many reasons for not having children of my own. But in the long run that [incident] has persuaded me not to.”
Stacy Pearsall was not physically hurt in the situation where she almost gunned down a child; nor did that incident contribute to her old PTSD. Instead, her injury was a moral one, and like other combat veterans I’ve known, she recognized the difference immediately. “I feel differently in situations where there was a moral problem versus what triggers my PTSD,” she had told me in our first conversation several weeks earlier. “Moral injury is more deep-seated. Any human being has difficulty justifying things that happen, and a lot of things happened that don’t sit well with me, some that I don’t really want to get deeply into. I’m just not ready for that.”
But now she was ready and wanted me to know.
Not long into her second deployment, she was assigned to cover the operations of a U.S. Army team working with Iraqi soldiers. The American soldiers at the forward operating base were clearly not eager to have her there. That kind of reception was always emotionally difficult, because combat cameras bounced around from one unit to another, rarely having time to develop friendships, and they came to rely on the instant camaraderie that is usually possible among men and women at war.
Not this time. “They were bastards, cold and unwelcoming was the general feeling I got, and I loathed the idea of working with this team,” she said. The prospect of entrusting her life to a group of men indifferent to her existence who excluded her from their intimate circle was daunting. But the unit’s commanding officer, the captain, was “a ray of sunshine in these dark clouds. He was always joking around, always had a smile. A family guy, married with kids… I loved him.”
Under orders, she worked with the unit for a few days, then was assigned elsewhere, and then came back, and she came to value her time with the captain. (She asked me not to use his name.) They ran into each other occasionally “for a couple of months,” Stacy said. “No! Gosh, wow, it was really fast actually, like maybe six weeks.” One day, as the soldiers gathered for a mission briefing, she felt there was “a really, really bad vibe, kind of funky, but it was a critical mission. Everybody was hanging around with little rain clouds over their heads acting all down, and the captain was there on his computer, Skyping home, and he was a little out of sorts and actually kind of abrupt with me, a little short in some ways. I was like ‘Aaaaaggghhh! I hate this place!’ I was so mad and angry with him because he was supposed to be my breath of fresh air.”
The rest of the story came in short gasps between sobs and long silences as she worked to form the words. “So my feelings were hurt and we were riding in two separate vehicles, we were getting ready to leave and I didn’t say… anything… so we left the FOB and we hit heavy resistance right away, like we couldn’t even get into the village and mortar rounds were coming in and small-arms fire ricocheting off our vehicle and mortar rounds were, you know, homing in, we were getting targeted a little closer and closer and we were feeling the pucker factor after a while… and then guys from the other vehicle radioed over that the captain had been hit and he was… he was… down… And the medic was the driver in my vehicle, so we pulled up alongside their vehicle and opened the doors, and there was gunfire and cross fire, but it was weird, in this moment it was really quiet, and I had the medic’s medical case and I passed that off to him and we didn’t know the extent of, what severity, his injuries were, but it was pretty bad and the commander made the decision to get back to the FOB for a helicopter medevac.
“My vehicle pulled in first. We got out and I had my camera in my hand and I stood there debating what to do. Because the journalist in me has to document what is happening, because people need to know, and it doesn’t matter that… he is my… friend… So I started taking pictures of the soldiers taking the body out of the vehicle, and I found it just repulsive physically to do it, like the act of having the camera to my face and taking the pictures just made me feel less than human. Like I had no… feelings… I was a voyeur. That I had no morals. And I was judging myself harshly, thinking about what Uncle Sam was having me there to do in the first place, and I felt this sense of obligation. And in that moment the soldiers turned to me and called me every name in the book, they were screaming at me for doing what I did, and I felt bad enough already… and the last picture I took he was unconscious, but his eyes were open, and I remember thinking…” She stopped to try to compose herself, and after a while she was able to go on.
“The helicopter landed, and I put my cameras down feeling disgusted with myself, feeling awful about what the soldiers thought of me, and I watched them put him in and everybody went and took cover, but I just, I couldn’t move, I felt cemented there, and the rotor wash sprayed gravel everywhere, rocks and sand just pelted me, and I felt it was retribution, I guess… or my penance?
“He died fifteen minutes later.”
Soldiers on the FOB had adopted a stray puppy they named Crockett, and Stacy found Crockett and took him to a quiet dark corner and curled up and held him and sobbed, and after a while an officer found her and squatted down and apologized for the way soldiers had yelled at her. And he said, I am sorry, but the mission is critical, and we really, really need to go back out there and get this image, and we need to leave shortly, but I understand if you don’t want to go. Stacy said, I’m here for a reason and I have to work, so that’s fine.
And while they were walking out to the vehicles, a medic came running with the news that Stacy’s battle buddy, a young female combat camera, had been shot on a mission. Usually they had worked in pairs. But this time they were assigned different missions, and as the older of the two, Stacy felt responsible for watching over her.
“Shot? She’s been shot? ‘Shot’ means a lot of different things; the last shot I witnessed ended in death,” she told the medic. It was hours before news came that her friend was wounded but alive. “I carried the guilt from that for a very long time,” Stacy said.
But the death of the captain, and her struggle to accommodate the competing demands of job and heart, tore a hole in her soul that is unrepaired. She paused for a long time when I asked her if she had come to accept that whatever she’d done would always feel half right and terribly wrong. “I still don’t know what to think of it,” she said finally. “I would have given my life for him. You know? If I could I would have traded places with him. I felt devastated for the loss of my friend. And I feel like I didn’t maybe uphold myself to the same standards as any other journalist would have in that situation.”
Stacy was medevaced from Camp Warhorse in Iraq in April 2007 after the second time an IED blew up her vehicle, and eventually she came home to Charleston, where she underwent treatment for her neck injury. That required twice-weekly hospital visits under anesthesia, which meant she couldn’t drive. With her husband still deployed in Iraq, members of her air force unit were assigned to drive her. That didn’t work out well. “There would be mornings they just wouldn’t show up, and I had to take a taxi, and I couldn’t help but think, You guys were really cool when I was able-bodied and I could do everything you wanted me to do, and now that I’m broken you don’t want to have anything to do with me.”
In truth, she probably was more than a little irritable, and she acknowledged that “I probably did myself a disservice by not letting them in on my emotional state. I was not ready to talk.”
One day not long after, she was sitting in the waiting room at the Charleston VA. Probably glowering at the other patients, mostly elderly men who, she felt, were staring at her. At the VA, guys were either mistaking her for a nurse—“Miss? Where’s room one forty-three B?”—or undressing her with their eyes. None of them, she felt, saw her as a fellow veteran. This time, one guy in particular was staring at her. She could see him out of the corner of her eye, looking at her as a sex object or sex toy, thinking about her in “unnatural ways.” She couldn’t decide whether to speak to him or get really angry. Speaking to him won out. “Can I help you?” she asked, summoning her most charming southern belle voice. He brightened. Grinned. Soon he was relating his experiences in World War II, the fighting, the death and camaraderie, the liberation of concentration camps.
Stacy was enthralled, listening hard and thinking to herself, These are good stories. This is a valuable human being whom I almost didn’t get to know because of my own prejudices. Like the soldiers whose portraits she had captured in Iraq, she thought, this guy might not be around much longer. And that’s how the Veterans Portrait Project was born, giving her a renewed purpose as she travels the country capturing images of veterans young and old, men and women who served in World War II and Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and countless places and missions in between.
On the black-and-white images of their faces, the lines and creases of war, the depths of their eyes.
The vulnerability of human beings.