On Assignment: Afghanistan
By David W. Dunlap

You could call David Guttenfelder the man behind the man in the pink boxers. Mr. Guttenfelder, 40, the chief Asia photographer for The Associated Press, attracted attention two months ago — all the way up to the Commander in Chief — with his photograph of Specialist Zachary Boyd, Specialist Cecil Montgomery and Specialist Jordan Custer returning the Taliban’s fire in Afghanistan. Specialist Boyd was wearing pink boxers and flip-flops at the time. Admirers of this picture saw in it a perfect expression of American readiness and capacity to fight. “Any soldier who goes into battle against the Taliban in pink boxers and flip-flops has a special kind of courage,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said.

So, yes, you could call Mr. Guttenfelder the man behind the man in the pink boxers.

But that would so understate the importance of his work over the last seven years in Afghanistan, even though it typifies much of what Mr. Guttenfelder has brought to the job: a close-up, you-are-there relationship with soldiers and marines in combat or on patrol, undergoing physical and emotional trials, enduring deprivation or isolation, and generally trying to make sense of a hostile everyday existence among mountains and deserts.


“Some people, especially print correspondents, are looking at the conflict from any number of levels and often from 30,000 feet,” Mr. Guttenfelder said last week in a telephone interview from northern Wisconsin, where he was taking a well-earned break with his family after three tours this year embedded with Army and Marine units.

“For photographers, there’s really no other way to tell the story but in the micro way, the intimate level,” he said. “The closer you can get to the company or platoon or squad level, to a few individuals out in the field, the better the work will end up. They allow you in. That’s the only way for a photographer to get down and as close to the ground as possible.”

Santiago Lyon, the director of photography at The Associated Press, said that Mr. Guttenfelder is “an incredibly versatile” photographer who is “capable of photographing things straight up and as they are, as well as applying his creativity to highlight offbeat and interesting perspectives.”

Mr. Guttenfelder spoke with Lens about his tours this year with the First Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment of the Army, in the northeastern Kunar Province, where the Korangal Valley is; and with the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade, in the southern Helmand province (he accompanied the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment and the Second Battalion, Third Marine Regiment).

Slide 1. “Every place where a marine or soldier has had a chance to spend more than a few days, they build a gym,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. “The gyms vary from something we’d see in the U.S. — with treadmills and Stairmasters and proper equipment — to places where they use axles, ammo cans filled with rocks or old sandbags. A lot of them are into body building.” This soldier, on a hillside in Kunar Province, is typical, Mr. Guttenfelder said, though he acknowledged, “I probably chose him for the extra muscle mass.”

Slide 2. In one sense, Mr. Guttenfelder said, the view from a mortar pit is among the most common war photos. But this one — taken deliberately at a slow shutter speed — captures the explosive moment of discharge and conveys something of its concussive force. The photographer was not immune to the sound. Having run to the scene without earplugs, he scoured the ground for two cigarette filters and improvised protection so he could keep shooting.

Slide 3. “This picture really shows how incredibly steep and difficult the terrain is in Kunar Province,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. “The hardest thing for soldiers in the Korangal Valley — besides the obvious dangers — is how hard the basic terrain is. This is a typical pathway.”

Slide 4. “This is their hospital,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. “They’ve gone to great lengths to make it as nice and professional as they can but, in the end, it’s a sandbagged hole in the ground. This guy hurt his leg very badly. The naval corpsman attached to the unit was trying to cut the infection out of his shin. In the photo, he’s given him a local anesthetic. Later, he used a box cutter sterilized with a lighter and an alcohol cloth.” The wounded man was finally evacuated.

Slide 5. “It’s pretty rare to find any soldier or marine that doesn’t have tattoos,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. Besides the baroque inscription on this lance corporal’s back, the photo shows something else — “what happens to a shirt after only four days of hiking with a backpack on,” the photographer said. “I knew he wasn’t going to get a new one for another couple of weeks. They’re going days and days without any normal kind of comfort.”

Slide 6. In a seven-ton troop carrier, the marines were “poking the hornet’s nest” in Now Zad, trying to flush out Taliban posts. At this moment, the hornets struck back. “They were firing mortars that were exploding very close and we were taking a lot of small-arms fire,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. The engineer pictured here is usually the man who is “the first person to step on an I.E.D.” — one of the most dangerous jobs. “He probably would have preferred if I’d sent the photo I took a moment later, where he stood up and bravely returned fire,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. “But this takes you there and makes you feel the way we all felt at that moment.”

Slide 7. This building had served as the headquarters for the corrupt police force in Aynak that the marines had driven out. They had taken it over as their central forward base. “This was the first morning we woke up in this place,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. The marine at left was earliest to rise. The photographer was not far behind, capturing this unexpectedly tranquil interlude.

Slide 8. “I’m standing in an observation post. In front is a 50-caliber machine gun. We had — I guess you could say — very much front row seats for an air attack. It’s kind of an unusual war photo to see a bombardment like this.” The helicopters were marking the location of the Taliban with phosphorus and then launching Hellfire missiles at the targets.

Slide 9. This is Specialist Zachary Boyd, from a new angle. “I noticed him from the first moment,” Mr. Guttenfelder recalled. “He was one of the bravest soldiers I met.” And this moment was one of the scariest the photographer faced. A group of 75 men had been flown on to a ridge in the middle of the night to assume ambush positions. “In the first hours of daylight, we were spotted by a local herder and his wife and children. We were compromised. We had to sit in this hole listening to intelligence that the Taliban was gathering to attack us. After we’d been there 12 hours, they opened fire. They had a bead on all of us. At this moment, we were waiting for rapid-reaction helicopters to come and scare away the Taliban so we could be extracted.”

Slides 10, 11 and 12. This series, from Now Zad, documents a marine assault on a Taliban compound. “We blew a hole in the wall of the compound and went inside,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. “As we entered this alleyway, one of the marines saw three Talibans pop out from around the corner and open fire. This was certainly closer combat than I’d ever seen in Afghanistan. They were 15 to 20 feet away from one another.” The second picture shows a marine throwing a hand grenade in the alley. The third shows a marine who broke his ankle in the firefight being helped out of the compound.

Slide 13. These aren’t graves. They’re beds. “This is typical of the photos I like to shoot that just show the daily life of soldiers and marines,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. “After a long, hard, exhausting day, you’d pull out your little shovel and dig the hole in the ground where you’d sleep. We all did it, to protect ourselves from incoming mortars.” The photographer made a point of waking up early enough to catch the men still asleep, remembering that a picture like this can convey a lot of information to viewers looking on comfortably in the United States.

Slide 14. “We were waiting to be extracted from a mountainside,” Mr. Guttenfelder recalled. “It was very late in the day. The helicopters would not come until dark. We were sitting as quietly as possible, trying not to be heard. It was one of those times when — despite all the dangers — everyone was sort of meditating on the scenery and the landscape around them.”

Slide 15. “This is the main base in Helmand Province; the closest thing you have to a stable, working environment in all of Helmand,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. “It’s just a constant sandstorm. There’s sand in your ears. Your teeth. Your toothbrush. It blows in through the cracks in your tent. This is considered the luxury spot in Helmand Province, it’s so far in the rear. But this is what it looks like all the time.”

Slide 16. Using a wide-angle lens to give the broadest point of view, Mr. Guttenfelder recorded an American air attack on a Taliban position that had just fired a missile at the vehicle he was riding in. After coming under fire, another man in the vehicle said, “If that missile had been any lower, we’d have had to cancel Christmas.”

Slides 17 and 18. Take a second look. This bowed-down figure is not some ancient villager. It’s a young marine — a mortarman, with the base of the mortar at the top of his backpack — just before Independence Day, on a 50-mile march through Helmand Province. “He weighs 125 pounds, the pack weighs 130,” Mr. Guttenfelder. In this operation, a company of marines was dropped off into no-man’s land with the aim of moving from town to town to find a good location for a base. “We ended up walking nine days,” the photographer said. The result was heat stroke and twisted and broken ankles. In the second picture, a marine who collapsed with a 107-degree fever, after walking about 10 miles with a 100-pound backpack, is evacuated.

Slide 19. About this photograph of a marine in Now Zad, facing a horizon that is at once distant and formidable, Mr. Guttenfelder remarked, “I don’t really know what to say about it except to say that this is how it feels to be in Afghanistan sometimes.”

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http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/assignment-4/

Ellie