The Power of a Photograph -- A.J. McCarthy and Chris Wade, Slate
A snapshot that changed United States military policy. Slate has partnered with Brooklyn Brewery and RISC to bring its hit war correspondent interview series to our readers. In this third installment, Steve Hindy, founder of Brooklyn Brewery and a former Associated Press foreign correspondent, sits down with three of the people closest to Chris Hondros, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated photojournalist who was killed in Misrata, Libya in 2011. Testament, a collection of Hondros' photography and writing, was released posthumously this year.
On Jan. 18, 2005 in Tal Afar, Iraq, a car approached an American patrol on a dark street after curfew, spooking a unit already on high alert. Warning shots were fired to no avail, and, when the driver failed to slow down, the unit opened fire. The two passengers in the front of the car—a civilian mother and father—were killed instantly. In the back were six children, one of whom was badly wounded. It was a family, not insurgents, in the vehicle. Hondros—who had been embedded with the unit and was out on the patrol—captured the complete events on camera, providing heartbreaking images of the tragedy for the world to see. In the clip above, Sandy Ciric and Todd Heisler relay the events of that night, and discuss the tremendous impact that those now-famous pictures had on the lives of those involved, and on military policy in Iraq in general.
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My Comment: Heartbreaking. No happy endings in this story.
4 comments:
Godwin can GTH!
If the Germans had been using children for suicide bombers in WW2, would anyone but those on the left castigate American soldiers for shooting them?
I have not heard anyone criticise P51 pilots for shooting women and children on horse drawn carts especially when they subsequently (mostly) blew up.
The Russians killed lots of chiddren in the Battle for Berlin. There were a lot oh Hitler youth. The 1st day of Battle was horrendous for the Russians. They lost a lot of tanks inside the city. It was too costly. So they changed tactics. They fired (blasted everything) and then moved. With the tank losses of the 1st day who could blame them.
But then the Germans were also killing child soldiers. About the time that Hitler was declaring fortress cities a lot of soldiers had had enough. Well actually they had enough by mid 1942 to mid 1943. It is intimated in the book "The Good Soldier" that some German soldiers killed Hitler youth because they were filled with so much zeal. They would have prematurely drawn fire on positions or shot at Germans soldiers surrendering. So German soldiers shot them (fragged them) first in some cases.
Outside of the embedded journalists no one is walking in these soldiers shoes.
I have seen at least one video where soldiers light up a vehicle and it exploded Obviously it was VBIED. No one criticising the soldiers have been there unless they were a soldier, embedded soldier or an Iraqi.
What were they doing out past curfew? Were they force to travel? How did they not know there was not a curfew?
People have been forced to be suicide bombers. why not the same jihadis doing this forcing forcing people to be guinea pigs and force them to break curfew so as become casualties & to get the American military citicised. Such tactics are in the Al Qaeda military manual.
Another good book Aizino is (if can remember this right) "The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer.
I met an Anglican priest
who talked of fighting in
South-West Africa (now,
Namibia). He was manning
a checkpoint when a
woman with a toddler and
an infant in her arms
approached after curfew.
An officer ordered the
men to shoot her. There
was push back, but when
they finally shot her,
she blew up because the
infant in her arms was
a bomb.
ofs
James
Wrote it down so it is on my list.
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