Iraq War: Love and Personal Loss [Photo Essay]

By Nina Berman, AlterNet. Posted September 27, 2007.

Andrew Lichtenstein's new book, Never Coming Home, shows the faces behind the daily casualty statistics in the Iraq war. Each week, these men and women killed in Iraq are buried and mourned, privately and publicly, in deeply personal scenes of love, loss and remembrance.

AlterNet is pleased to host the above slideshow of images from Never Coming Home, followed by an interview with the photographer, Andrew Lichtenstein, conducted by AlterNet's Nina Berman.

Nina Berman: From the outset of the war, images of flag-draped coffins were conspicuously absent in the national press. In part, this was because of a Department of Defense ban on all media coverage of bodies leaving Germany and arriving at Dover Air Force Base. Only when Russ Kick of the Memory Hole.Org won his Freedom of Information request on April 14, 2004, did we get a look at the loads of flag-draped caskets lying in Air Force hangars, ready to be dispatched.

Those initial images worked well as evidence of the dead. But they were anonymous and cold. Your work takes us into the lives of those who must confront the reality of the war every day. You traveled all across the country attending, by your own admission, 50 to 60 funerals from November 2003 through the end of 2006. Why did you do this?

Andrew Lichtenstein: It was really anger. I started during a time of "victory," when the war was popular, its motivations largely unquestioned in the media. But I see war as the absolutely last choice, when every other option has been exhausted. From the beginning, I felt the Bush administration had been lying, had not made a case for war other than their own desire to wage it. So whether the number of dead was 200 or 4,000, both meaningless numbers really, I felt that not a single soldier should die in a war started by the Bush administration. Each funeral was an individual, usually a very young man, someone with the world ahead of them, a whole life still to be lived.

Berman: How did you find out about the funerals, and what was the reaction of the families when you would appear?

Lichtenstein: I simply signed up on the Department of Defense website for death notices, which were emailed to me directly once the family had been notified. Anybody can sign up. But even if I hadn't, dozens of newspapers take the same lists, compiled by the American military, and publish them on a daily basis.

As for the reaction of the families, I did not usually approach anyone the day of the funeral. I figured that grieving relatives had more important things to deal with than a photography project. Sometimes I was the only photographer there, sometimes there were a dozen news organizations. But each family reacted differently. There were times when I was welcome, where I met the families and sent them photographs. There were other times when I did not feel comfortable, and erring on the safe side, never took the camera out of the bag [and] left without a single picture.

Berman: A funeral of a deceased military person is both an intensely personal and intensely public event. The rituals of the State -- the symbolism and choreography -- are imposed on a private family, which can either embrace them or reject them. While the military rituals tend to depersonalize in order to enforce the notion of death for a greater purpose, your pictures show deeply personal experiences.

Can you talk a bit about how the relationship between the civilian and military plays out both within your images and in the construction of the book?

Lichtenstein: The military funeral is a very short and scripted event. But it is just the outlying structure, and every funeral somehow managed to be different. I think it is similar to weddings -- the rituals remain the same, but how each family interprets them leaves a lot of room for variety.

The war in Iraq has, from the very beginning, been seen as a civilian war. That is a war that was started, pushed for, by civilian leadership, often over the objections of more practical military officers. Unlike the Dr. Strangelove Cold War portrait of a military eager for conflict, there is now a sense that those who have known war are sometimes the most hesitant to pursue it again.

See more stories tagged with: death, soldiers, casualties, war in iraq, mourning, andrew lichtenstein, slideshow

Nina Berman is a photographer and the author of Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq.

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