I don’t know what the average age of the American soldier is, but the typical photograph we have seen in recent times suggests that “he” is in his mid-twenties or later. And what such photographs show us are young men who have completed their training as fighting machines; indeed, many such images show us soldiers who have already seen battle and so, as young as they might be, they appear as veterans and far older than their years.  What such photographs fail to show us—and in the process allow us to forget—is how much going to war robs such men of their youth and innocence … and no doubt much more as well.

When I first came across the photograph above I thought I was looking at a group of adolescents “playing” at being soldiers.  Indeed, the shooter in the middle of the image looks rather like “Ralphie,” the young boy from Jean Shepherd’s classic A Christmas Story who pines for a Red Ryder BB Gun only to have a department store Santa tell him, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”  And those around him don’t seem much older as they all look awkwardly out of place in their clean camouflage uniforms and wielding what at first glance appear to be toy versions of automatic weapons.  But of course they aren’t toy weapons, and these apparently prepubescent adolescents are actually recruits in basic training, “prepar[ing] to clear and secure a room.”

The photograph is part of Craig F. Walker’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning, eight part photo-essay “Ian Fisher: American  Soldier,” a report which tracks seventeen year old Ian Fisher (he’s the one on the far right above) from high school through basic training to a tour of duty in Iraq and back home again—a veteran warrior who will carry this experience with him for the rest of his life.  Walker’s photographs are a stark and poignant reminder that those who carry the weight of our military efforts too often (far too often) go off to war as naïve and wide-eyed children—that they only become the adult warriors and heroes we remember in myth and movie after the fact—and those who are fortunate enough to return home will have paid a devastating and incalculable price.

Photo Credit:  Craig F. Walker/Denver Post; The title “The Children’s Crusade” is drawn from the subtitle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade and commented upon in an earlier NCN Post titled “What Peace Looks Like.”

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The Afghan Girl is a photograph deeply etched within the western collective consciousness.  Most probably cannot identify the photographer (Steve McCurry) or the girl’s name (Gula). Perhaps more to the point, I doubt that most who easily recognize the photograph cannot recall the specific circumstances that led to its being taken and featured on the cover of National Geographic, not once but twice:  The first time as the representation of an orphan of Soviet bombings in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s; the second time, seventeen years later, after the once young girl was rediscovered in a refugee camp as a middle-aged woman, the focus being on how her identity was confirmed with “certainty” by state of the art biometric technology which matched the iris patterns in her eyes with the original image.

Marx amended Hegel’s notion that history repeats itself by adding, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But what about the third time?

The above photograph appeared recently in a NYT slide show under the title “An Afghan Voice for American Troops.”  The title does not appear to have been crafted to refer to this specific photograph—referring instead to the first image in the slide show of a female Afghani interpreter working for the US military … perhaps that is who this young girl will become when she grows up—but the presence of the image halfway through the slide show with the title hanging over the photograph makes that a little bit ambiguous.

The resonance between the current photograph and the original Afghan Girl photograph cannot be easily scanted, though differences abide.  Shot here in middle distance rather than close up, the eyes are less pronounced and less haunting, and the effect is to alter slightly—but significantly—the affect of the demand that they issue.  By making the eyes the center of attention in the original photograph the point of identification is with the girl herself—as much a woman as a child—and the depth of her humanity.  By pulling back the camera in the second photograph to show most of the body—as well as the Arabic alphabet primer she appears to be carrying around with her—the locus of identification is shifted from the plight of refugee women to this girl, from the universal to the particular.  No longer a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, we have a child in need; and not just any child, but one rooted in a non-western ideology. And the result is palpable.  The original photograph evokes a clear sense of the depth of human tragedy, but here the structure of feeling inclines more to the conventional sense of pity and compassion one finds in any sort of philanthropic venture designed to help the abject.  While the original McCurry photograph demands that we identify with the tragic affect of the circumstances of Afghan women qua their humanity, this image seems to ask us to donate to the cause.

But what exactly is that cause?  What “voice” does she speak to American troops?  Part of the problem, of course, is that as the war in Afghanistan drags on into its ninth year it is increasingly difficult to remember why exactly we are there (note: it was originally in response to the 9/11 bombings and in an effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden) or what exactly we hope to accomplish.  And in the meantime we have spent nearly 300 billion dollars and counting, suffered over 1,000 U.S. casualties, and inflicted over 12,000 civilian casualties among the Afghanistan population.  The photograph of the new Afghan girl would seem to suggest that we are there to protect her, even though that was never part of the deal in the first place (and since her refugee status is in some part animated by a military occupation its hard to know what positive  effect we’ve actually had here).

It would of course take a great deal of cynicism to imagine some sort of “Wag the Dog” sensibility operative here as a rationale to support our continuing involvement in a war that never seems to end.  But having said that I find myself at a loss to explain the photograph that immediately followed the image above in the NYT slide show in which it was featured:

The caption reads, “A marine gave cereal to a stray puppy at an outpost in northern Marja, Afghanistan.  An Afghan man was detained after being suspected of links to a series of recent roadside bomb attacks against American troops the area.”

The first time as tragedy … the third time as kitsch.

Photo Credits: Muhammed Muheisen/AP; Mauricio Lima/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images

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