Former CNN foreign correspondent Michael Ware reflects on the lives of war photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, who were killed in Libya last week.
Ware knew Hetherington from Brooklyn, where they both lived, and Hondros from the war zones where they both served:
In the field, where, as the soldiers say, “the meat meets the metal,” I’ve found that I gravitate to photographers, the ones who come the closest to revealing the truth, even if we never get to the entire truth. In war, everyone lies; their government, our government, the rebels—even civilians lie through exaggeration or confusion. But what we can get is the shards of truth, like Tim’s photo of a wretchedly filthy, dog-tired American grunt in the Korengal Valley, holding his face in his hand, or Chris’s picture of a little girl with her parents’ blood splattered over her dress, after American soldiers killed them at a Tal Afar checkpoint.
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