Wounded Soldiers
Lynsey Addario
Corbis
Fujifilm Young Photographer’s Award 2005
The quiet moments of war in Iraq are usually found beneath the drone of choppers coming and going with fresh patients. Doctors work around the clock to tend to the wounded soldiers as they are flown in from the field, and eventually sent on to Germany for further treatment. Most military personnel on the frontlines in Iraq are barely men – 20 years old, their faces still ripe with innocence, many whose hearts are full of an insatiable desire to get back to the fight.
Preview
They constitute a new kind of war casualties since the days of Vietnam: medical treatment so advanced, so efficient, almost everyone survives in one form or another. These photographs document five days in the Air Force Theater Hospital at the Balad Air Base, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. The images trace an often censored facet of the war during a slice of intense and protracted fighting during the siege of Fallujah, then onto the plane to Germany, and eventually home.
This coverage of combat trauma during the war in Iraq was originally commissioned by Life Magazine and eventually published by The New York Times Magazine on March 27th, 2005.
