The Medium Is the Message
Since 2001, more than 1,500 U.S. military personnel have lost limbs to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 1995, the International Committee of the Red Cross alone has supplied 109,303 prostheses to replace Afghan arms and legs.
Giles Duley lost limbs in Afghanistan. Three of them. But he wasn't an American, nor an Afghan. He wasn't even a soldier. And to say that he was a civilian doesn't quite capture his story.
For 10 years, Duley was a music and fashion photographer, shooting the likes of Oasis, Marilyn Manson, and Lenny Kravitz for GQ, Esquire, Vogue, and other publications. Then he threw his camera out a window, burned his film, and resolved never to shoot a photo again. But that decision didn't last. Instead, he followed a circuitous path back into photography, one that led him into conflict and crisis zones like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and Lebanon.
In 2011, while on patrol with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he stepped on an improvised explosive device that nearly killed him and left him with just one intact limb, his right arm. "At first, I was devastated by what had happened, obviously," he said in a 2012 TED talk.
"I thought my work was over, I thought -- everything didn't make sense to me. And then I realized: I never set out to Congo, to Angola, to Bangladesh to take photographs. I went to those places because I wanted to make some kind of change, and photography happened to be my tool. And then I became aware that my body was, in many ways, a living example of what war does to somebody. And I realized I could use my own experience, my own body, to tell that story."
War stories like Duley's have been written on so many bodies. They have been written on the faces of one-eyed women and men whose features were melted by incendiary agents. They are told in the very existence of one-armed children and legless men.
As Abdul Hamid Frefer recounted detail after detail of that distant July 8th, a smile slowly crept across his face. "I was just about dead when I got to the field hospital," he told me. "The doctors were amazed that I was still alive -- and conscious." He felt lucky, or rather blessed, he said, to be alive. "It's all God's will" was a phrase he kept repeating.
For him, that July day eight years ago is always present -- as similar days are for so many other victims of armed conflict. Frefer's body tells a story of one war, one day, one rocket, three miles of being dragged, three years of becoming mobile again. His is the story of one life built on the corporeal wreckage of war. But it says something larger, something more universal, too.
"I'm never going to be well. I still have pain," Abdul Hamid Frefer told me as he rubbed what's left of his right leg. His is a war story written on his own body in both absence and trauma. That limb, what remains of it, and its phantom half most certainly tell, as Duley put it, "what war does to somebody." But Abdul Hamid Frefer's body, just like Duley's, says something more. It tells not just a story but perhaps the story of war. "My legs are gone," said Frefer wincing and gritting his teeth, "but the pain remains."
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch. He reported from Libya for Yahoo News in partnership with Type Investigations. He is the author of Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and the award-winning Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2019 Nick Turse
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