On Aug. 31, I listened on my radio to President Joe Biden speaking at the White House. “My fellow Americans, the war in Afghanistan is now over.”
I am the daughter of a career soldier and Vietnam veteran. I am also a former war correspondent. I know that war is never truly over.
In January 2002, I was a staff photographer with the Associated Press, assigned to cover a press conference at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Seattle.
I joined a phalanx of press people with their lenses, lights and microphones trained on the parents of Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Chapman, the first American killed in Afghanistan. I felt ill, and ill at ease.
At the end of the presser, I approached the public affairs officer. I asked to speak to the parents—adding quickly: not as a member of the press, as a human being.
I set aside my cameras and walked to Chapman’s father. I knelt beside him.
“Sir, I was in second grade when my father left from this base for his second tour in Vietnam. I was lucky. My father came home. I am very sorry your son didn’t.”
As the American evacuation began last month, I sent a message to a soldier who’d been in the infantry unit I’d embedded with in the winter of 2011-2012. He’d joined the military after 9/11 and had done multiple tours in Afghanistan.
I asked if he were back in Afghanistan. No. I told him I’d had a straight-up walking-dead nightmare a few nights before. He wrote back: I’m having them every night now.
The war is not over for him.
In March 2020, just before the lockdown, I traveled to Colorado to attend the memorial service and military funeral for a soldier in his platoon, who died by suicide that February. A soldier who’d walked in front of me on nearly every patrol. And when he wasn’t keeping an eye on the journalist in their midst, he often walked point, sweeping for IEDs.
The war is not over for his wife and their three young children. Not for his sisters, his mother. Nor for his brothers in arms.
On June 5, 2016, my dear friend and colleague photojournalist David Gilkey and his Afghan colleague and translator, Zabihullah Tamanna, died in a Taliban ambush in Helmand Province. Gilkey had covered the war nearly every year since 2001.
The war is not over for his mother. His sister. His friends. His colleagues. Nor for Tamanna’s family.
Soldiers and journalists choose to go to war. Civilians, usually the women and children, the elderly, are caught in the crossfire. They pay the heavy cost of conflict. Their homes destroyed. Uprooted and displaced in their own countries or exiled to foreign lands.
Some who are fleeing Afghanistan may soon call Rhode Island home, when as many as 250 Afghans resettle here. As so many have done before them, they’re fleeing war and violence, seeking safety and a better future for their families, their children.
The war is not over for them.
I remember my first war, the civil war in Liberia. The roadside was littered with the husks of sugar cane, jettisoned by the long line of displaced people who’d been caught between the rebels and the government soldiers as they fled, seeking shelter and safety. They had nothing but what they could carry, often a child and a few belongings.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, after the Gulf War, I photographed a mother at the grave of her just-buried infant in the cold soil in the mountains near the Turkish border. She wailed as she ran her fingers through the fresh, loose dirt, as if she were running her fingers through her baby’s hair.
In Somalia, I photographed a mother as her starving child died at her breast, too weak to feed.
In 1999, I traveled to the trenches on the front line at Tserona, in Eritrea. The fighters showed me a mass grave, where Ethiopian soldiers had been buried. After the rains, the bones of the dead had percolated up through the soil, resurfacing. I photographed a pair of leg bones with the boots still attached to the feet.
That image remains for me a most compelling image of war. Those bones and those boots belonged to someone’s son, father, husband, brother. Someone likely conscripted to fight, who died far from his family, in an unmarked grave. In a part of our world where war still returns and rages.
War has a long half-life. I know I carry it in my body. It has taken root deep in my mind. It lingers, lurks, stalks, quietly. It travels across time, catches me with the smell of wood smoke or road kill. It sneaks up on me in dreams.
The past percolates into the present.
The war is not over.
