Peter van Agtmael Won’t Deny the Strange Allure of War

Thus far, photographer Peter van Agtmael’s career has primarily focused on documenting the effects of America’s post 9/11 wars both at home and abroad. Before traveling to Iraq in 2006, however, he covered certain issues surrounding HIV-positive refugees in South Africa, and the Asian tsunami in 2005. After starting work in Iraq, he went on to win numerous awards, work in Afghanistan—both embedded and unembedded—and documented injured servicemen and their families. Oh, and he also shot the photo in the table of contents for this month’s issue of our magazine. We spoke to him about the mysterious attraction of conflict, and the realities of censorship and care for a country’s wounded.

VICE: You graduated in history with honors from Yale. What specifically did you study?
Peter van Agtmael: I studied a pretty general curriculum, that being the expectation. By the time I wrote my thesis, I had decided to write it on how the iconography of WWII Yugoslavia, of opposing forces like the Chetniks and Ustaše, was renewed in the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. How it was used to stoke fear and exploited by the power brokers to wage a civil war.

Do you think that your education led to you working as a photographer in a warzone at the age of 24?
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Those suburbs are like suburbs anywhere. It’s easy to want to dream about more exciting places. When I was a kid, I was always very into pictorial history books—especially ones about WWII. I found it all very exciting and romantic, in its own way.

Obviously, you get older and the reality of these things kicks in, but the romance doesn’t go away, even when you get caught in the midst of it; that’s the strange and scary thing. I have had depraved and scary experiences in the last decade, but I’ve had beautiful ones, too. The fact is that when you get caught in the middle of these things, in these places there’s an indescribable merit somehow to feeling involved, to be making a record for history, it is satisfying a certain natural curiosity—one with certain useful impulses, and certain dark impulses as well.

Do you think that built-in fascination with conflict applies to most soldiers, too?
I think it’s across the board. If you have read Michael Herr’s Dispatches, he puts it really well—though it may be a dated reference in some ways. He essentially said that you can’t take the romance out of war. It’s sort of innate. It’s a genetically hardwired part of the experience. We all objectively realize the awfulness and brutality of it, but also for a lot of young people —especially men—there is this draw to it, not at all based on logic or rational thought. There are a million ways to try to intellectualize it, rationalize it, and break it into its tiny component pieces, but at the end of the day there’s a pull that can’t really be described or explained away. At least not for me. I envy people who aren’t drawn to war in a lot of ways. I’ve had a good and interesting life so far, but at times I wish I had made different choices.

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‘Magic Wand’ Bomb Detector Creator Found Guilty of Fraud 

The bomb detector that 56-year-old British millionaire James McCormick peddled sounded too good to be true. It could sense C-4 at a range of 600 yards. And it could be programmed to root out other contraband, too. The pistol-sized device’s simple metal antenna would magically point to where explosives, ivory, even $100 bills were hidden. Authorities in countries like Georgia, Romania, Niger, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, where McCormick was able to sell the detector, could, with a flick of the wrist, stop smuggling, organized crime, and deadly terrorist attacks.

Guess what? McCormick was full of shit. His device, dubbed the ADE-651, was bogus. Earlier incarnations of the detector, produced under the brand name ATSC, were based on $20 novelty golf ball detectors, the kind of plastic gag gift you’d give your argyle-wearing uncle whose slice off the tee is worse than he’d ever admit.

Sadly, it turns out the joke was on the Iraqi people. McGormick sold over 6,000 of these “detectors” to Iraqi government officials (after bribing them) to the tune of over $45,000 PER DETECTOR. And they were used at checkpoints throughout the country—actually scanning vehicles for explosives during the height of the insurgency that would see an average of 30 attacks a day.

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Don’t miss episode 3 of VICE on HBO, tonight at 11PM!

Watch: VICE on HBO - Congressman Jim McDermott on Depleted Uranium in Iraq

For VICE’s upcoming piece on post-war Iraq, premiering on HBO tomorrow night at 11, we interviewed Congressman Jim McDermott of the Seventh District of Washington State. Congressman McDermott has been one of the only experts and advocates in the US government on the issue of depleted uranium in Iraq. We sat down with him to get a firsthand account of the military’s history of using depleted uranium munitions, the legacy it has left behind in Iraq, and why the US government refuses to do anything about it.

Watch more over at hbo.vice.com and tune in tomorrow at 11 PM on HBO to watch the full episode.

Also, earlier today, VICE producers Eddy Moretti and Jason Mojica, along with Congressman McDermott, were guests on HuffPost Live to discuss the rise in birth defects and abnormalities in Iraq. Watch the episode here.

“They hid the guns when they saw an army helicopter,” the interpreter says. “They say they need the guns to protect the remaining tower. They knew we’d take their guns if they told us they had them. They are sorry for this. They want to know if they can keep the IED and show it to their employer.”

“What the fuck kind of question is that?” the lieutenant says. “No they fucking can’t keep it.”

Watch: In Saddam’s Shadow, Part 2

VICE founder Suroosh Alvi returns to Baghdad ten years after the US invasion. In part two, we witness an awe-inspiring outdoor group prayer and get a glimpse of metal band Acrassicauda’s former practice space that was destroyed during the war.

What the Hell Was That: Happy Tenth Birthday, Operation Iraqi Freedom - by Gideon Yago

(Photo by Cpl. Jonathan K. Teslevich, US Marine Corps via Department of Defense)

I got an @ reply the other day from a guy I met ten years ago in Fallujah, where I was working as a reporter for MTV: a young captain in the 82nd Airborne who was part of the moveable feast of infantry interviews that made up my life at the dawn of the Iraq War. It was a welcome ping from the past. The guy, Captain (now Major) Craig, was funny, thoughtful, professional, humane. At the time, I was 25. He was a couple of years older. We shared instant coffee one morning watching his grunts play pick-up football in between a row of innocuous looking pup tents on a corner of the 82nd’s base in a former Iraqi prison. It was Thanksgiving morning back home in the states and my cameraman shot the pick-up game for color b-roll because it was fun. The visuals were sure to make it to air: a bunch of athletic, all-American kids in camo joking, tackling, laughing. Even though it was early in the war, eight months since the invasion, it was already a challenge to capture aspects of the conflict that weren’t going south. Guys getting shot at on patrol, panic in the streets, heavy weaponry overhead, and chaos on the ground was the norm. My cameraman and I didn’t notice that the tents bounding the end-zone in this game were full of hooded, plastic-cuffed, freezing Iraqis lying in cold, damp sand. I remember being caught by surprise when a pissed-off NCO came over screaming, hand on his sidearm, accusing us of violating the Third Geneva Convention,  which prevents prisoners of war from being appropriated for propaganda purposes and/or exploited by “public curiosity.”

Believe me when I say that my cameraman and I were absolutely oblivious to the POW’s in the end zone tents. In the thin light of dawn, we couldn’t see that the pup tents were sewn up against the cold. Some squad had picked up the detainees during weapons cache sweeps in Fallujah the night before. Nobody had notified the guys we were with. The forward operating base was cramped, and the space between the pup tents was the closest thing they could find as a field. As we peeked inside at the stacks of guys, heads-in-bags and huddling together for warmth, we were shocked to find that not only was the NCO right about the tent contents but, in reviewing our tape, we had gotten the detainees on camera. In one shot, one of the 82nd grunts did an epic,SportsCenter-worthy dive for the end zone where he tripped over a tent rope and pulled open a flap just enough to reveal the detainees within. But he made the catch, happy and oblivious to the Iraqi dudes at his feet.

Who knows whether or not the Iraqis in those tents were insurgents. All the 82nd guys could tell us is that they would be sent to Abu Ghraib down the highway to be processed. But that digital freeze frame in the camera sunk my stomach: the look on the soldier’s face, so stoked to score, the phantom hoods of these Abu Ghraib-bound detainees, all of it all at once. It was everything about the Iraq war for me in one shot—innocence, confusion, violence, power, disarray, joy, terror, America, and Iraq. When the NCO saw the footage, the conversation ceased, and he simply took our camera and began rewinding to erase our tape.           

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In Saddam’s Shadow - Part One

Bradley Manning’s Court Testimony—Leaked 

When Army Pfc. Bradley Manning spoke before a military judge at length for only the second time ever last month, the media gallery next to the Fort Meade, Maryland, courtroom was arguably the most crowded it has been since the 25-year-old army private was arraigned one year earlier. Clearly, I was not the only one in attendance that morning weighing whether or not it was worth risking my career, my reputation, and a possible military reprimand by recording the soldier’s testimony: this morning, audio of his guilty plea was leaked to the web by an anonymous source.

The significance of Pfc. Manning’s statement doesn’t begin and end with what he said last month. Yes, the army-intelligence officer admitted for the first time ever during the roughly hour-long reading that he did, in fact, cause the biggest intelligence leak in the US history. And, yes, as many assumed, he did supply the whistleblower website WikiLeaks with a trove of sensitive documents that he thought would embarrass the very country he swore to protect. His words weren’t the only ones that mattered, though.

By finally admitting to sharing war logs, State Department cables, and hundreds of thousands of protected files, Pfc. Manning was no longer the “accused” WikiLeaks source or the “alleged supplier” of some of the rawest evidence of American misdeeds in the Iraq and Afghan wars. He owned up. Yes, he did it, and a few dozen members of the press were hearing with their own ears why. Those members of the press have painstakingly referred to Pfc. Manning as, largely, anything but the proven WikiLeaks source since his military detainment began over 1,000 days ago. Now, however, he can be properly credited. And he should be.

Pfc. Manning said he leaked video footage of Iraqi civilians being murdered by Americans to spark debate. And sharing State Department cables, he said, was to show the world what the United States was really doing abroad. It was the first time I ever heard his voice, and it was a moment I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

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