Jayel Aheram, from one of the emails sent to his stepfather while stationed at Combat Outpost Rawah in the Al Anbar province in Iraq.
Thank you for sharing this.
Jayel Aheram, from one of the emails sent to his stepfather while stationed at Combat Outpost Rawah in the Al Anbar province in Iraq.
Thank you for sharing this.
I made it back to the capital. And, like most war correspondents, soon considered the experience a great cosmic joke. I drank away the fear in a seedy bar in downtown San Salvador that night. Most people, after such an experience, would learn to stay away. I was hooked. Drawn into the world of war, it becomes hard to escape. It perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to your own annihilation - spiritual, emotional and, finally, physical.
I covered the war in El Salvador from 1983 to 1988. By the end, I had a nervous twitch in my face. I was evacuated three times by the U.S. embassy because of tips that the death squads planned to kill me. Yet, each time, I came back. I accepted with a grim fatalism that I would be killed in El Salvador. I could not articulate why I accepted my own destruction and cannot now. There came to be a part of me, maybe it is a part of all of us, which decided I would rather die like this than go back to the dull routine.
During the war in El Salvador, I worked with a photographer who covered the war, had a slew of close calls, and then called it quits. He moved to Miami and took pictures for one of the newsweeklies. But life in Florida was flat, dull, uninteresting. He could not adjust and soon came back. From the moment he stepped off the plane it was clear: He had returned to die. Just as there are some soldiers or war correspondents that seem to us immortal and whose loss comes as a sobering reminder that death has no favorites, there are also those in war who are locked in a grim embrace with death from which they cannot escape. He was frightening to behold, a walking corpse. He was shot through the back in a firefight and died in less than a minute.
"Angel Harris returned from Afghanistan eight years ago pregnant and — like thousands of other female veterans — with a case of PTSD, a disorder that took six years to diagnose. The military has only recently begun to offer women the same PTSD benefits as men.
Photo: Angel Harris is one of more than 230,000 women to serve in Afghanistan or Iraq since 2001, about 15% of the U.S. forces to be deployed there. Credit: Matthew Ratajczak
“I was one tough broad,” says Harris, 34, who did a tour in Kosovo and one in Afghanistan, where she was the first female combat photographer deployed by the Army. “I was a bartender. I bounced people. I had no fear. Now, sometimes I’m afraid to leave my house.”