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The military’s bitterness toward the media was in no small part a legacy of the Vietnam coverage decades before. “Let me say up front that I don’t like the press,” one Air Force officer declared, starting a January 1991 press briefing on a blunt note. “He was trying to get out of that truck.” “He was fighting to save his life to the very end, till he was completely burned up,” Jarecke says of the man he photographed. “When you have an image that disproves that myth,” he says today, “then you think it’s going to be widely published.” All of this surprised the photographer, who had assumed the media would be only too happy to challenge the popular narrative of a clean, uncomplicated war. Many months later, the photo also appeared in American Photo, where it stoked some controversy, but came too late to have a significant impact. The Observer in the United Kingdom and Libération in France both published it after the American media refused. By deciding not to publish it, Time magazine and the Associated Press denied the public the opportunity to confront this unknown enemy and consider his excruciating final moments. In the case of the charred Iraqi soldier, the hypnotizing and awful photograph ran against the popular myth of the Gulf War as a “video-game war”-a conflict made humane through precision bombing and night-vision equipment.
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Sometimes though, omitting an image means shielding the public from the messy, imprecise consequences of a war-making the coverage incomplete, and even deceptive. Last month, The New York Times decided-for valid ethical reasons-to remove images of dead passengers from an online story about Flight MH17 in Ukraine and replace them with photos of mechanical wreckage. Not every gruesome photo reveals an important truth about conflict and combat. Some images, such as Ron Haeberle’s pictures of the My Lai massacre, were initially kept from the public, but other violent images-Nick Ut’s scene of child napalm victims and Eddie Adams’s photo of a Vietcong man’s execution-won Pulitzer Prizes and had a tremendous impact on the outcome of the war.
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But sanitized images of warfare, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf argues, make it “easier … to accept bloodless language” such as 1991 references to “surgical strikes” or modern-day terminology like “kinetic warfare.” The Vietnam War, in contrast, was notable for its catalog of chilling and iconic war photography. It’s hard to calculate the consequences of a photograph’s absence. Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices. The image, and its anonymous subject, might have come to symbolize the Gulf War. Jarecke took the picture just before a cease-fire officially ended Operation Desert Storm-the U.S.-led military action that drove Saddam Hussein and his troops out of Kuwait, which they had annexed and occupied the previous August. Or he might have been an unlucky young man with no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad. He might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait and fight the Americans. He’d fought in Saddam Hussein’s army and had a rank and an assignment and a unit. At one point, before he died this dramatic mid-retreat death, the soldier had had a name. On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him.
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Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck.