Here is Bowe Bergdahl,
a soldier who left this place
and was captured by the Taliban and held for five years.
[Developing News]
If I say “Hi, I’m Sean,”
it sounds like
You can say, “I’m Sean.”
I'm Sean Smith. I'm a staff photographer and video maker
for
I went to Iraq for the first time in 2003, in January,
so Saddam Hussein was still in power.
There was an enormous feeling of foreboding and doom.
And then it started.
So the first night of the bombing,
all the way to the pulling down of the statue of Saddam.
People say the situation was dangerous.
Yes, it was, but you had a choice to be there and I wanted to be there.
It’s far worse for the people living there, whose whole lives...
have been turned upside down.
I guess one of the things I would like to do with pictures,
is to get away the separation of the narrative
between the political rhetoric and the military consequences of that.
It’s completely connected.
Those words someone says in parliament,
you know, end up with someone shot a thousand miles away.
This photo was taken in Anbar,
in a thing called Operation Steel Curtain,
and these were prisoners.
The Marine leading them,
you can see on the wrists these zip ties,
and then the blindfolds were supposed to disorientate them.
I think they were probably just you got a hold on one to the other.
There was nowhere for anyone to run away to.
This way and this is way was sand.
You can see a bit of this very small encampment.
I didn't know exactly what would happen to the prisoners.
It was an ongoing process and the war had a long way to go.
People get lost in the system.
It was almost like someone had dropped this painting in front of me
from the medieval picture of the blind leading the blind.
This photo was taken in 2006
near the home village of Saddam Hussein,
and was seen as an area financing the insurgency.
This was part of a series of raids by the 101st Airborne.
The gentleman here being zip tied and then a sandbag put on his head.
This one frame, where it’s quite difficult getting the helicopter in
when it just came buzzing round,
didn’t last that long.
I was trying to emphasize the contrast between
the helicopter, the technology,
and everything that goes into that.
All the time in Iraq you’d have two sounds,
generators and helicopters.
Certainly for him, you don’t know what’s going on.
Quite often you would have helicopters tracking them.
Eyes in the sky.
Yeah, with guns.
This was taken in 2009 in Afghanistan,
and it’s of an observation post.
So this is a dug-out. This is a machine gun.
There isn't much else there.
There’s just these one, two, three, four, five, six guys
and myself eating their food.
If you were awake and using your binoculars as that guy is,
you should see anyone approaching it.
At the back of this,
you can’t quite see there’s two beds in the hole.
That's where they were sleeping.
So you’d have three guys sleeping at a time.
It’s hot.
It’s about over 40 centigrade, maybe up to 50.
This was actually dug into an Afghan graveyard.
So there was a question
whether they should have been dug in right there,
and I know they were all talking about it.
The relatives of people lived down there.
But here is Bowe Bergdahl,
the soldier who left this place and was captured by the Taliban
and held for five years.
This is a week or so before
he walked away from the observation post.
Why exactly he walked off there’s been a debate about.
He was tried for desertion.
From what I saw of him, and the others were saying,
“You know, these people just want to be left alone
and do their fields, look after their crops.
They don’t want us here,
it’s like Vietnam.”
I think the main thing was
he became a totem for people to argue over the war
rather than an individual case
where something extraordinary had happened.
Bowe’s smoking a pipe there.
One of the senior officers said,
“Can we get-- you know, we can’t have this guy smoking a pipe.”
And it was like everyone that smokes, most of the guys were smoking.
What that was about was he had left by then and was captured.
I didn’t know that at the time.
They just wanted a picture with Bowe Bergdahl down.
If you were in an army,
you sign up and you do what the government instructs you to do,
and it’s not really for you to decide whether the government’s
right or wrong in doing it.
But as someone who isn't a soldier,
then perhaps we should complain a bit more about it.