[Photo Gallery | Kamber-Hetherington Interview (Audio)]
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A decade in war zones took a physical and emotional toll. In 2007, Tim snapped his leg trying to evade a Taliban ambush in the Afghan mountains late one night. He walked on the broken limb for several excruciating hours to reach safety, sometimes crawling on his hands and knees.
“Tim was wiped out after Afghanistan,” his friend Shoshana Guy told me. “It drained him emotionally, physically, spiritually. He knew he was losing something he would never get back.”
Jeremiah Zagar, a filmmaker and close friend, points to Tim’s conceptual video Diary as evidence of his exhaustion.
“Someone said, ‘Diary is so beautiful.’ No, it’s not, it’s the opposite of beautiful. Diary is about Tim trying to express that he is completely sucked dry by war—a shell of a human being. The end is a dude on the phone with the press, he can’t explain anything of what he’s seen. He’s like, You have no fucking idea.”
When he returned from one trip to Afghanistan, Tim told me he couldn’t sleep. He was disturbed by violent dreams and waking thoughts of death. I told him that violence corrupted our souls, that there was no way we could photograph thousands of dead and suffering people and not have that corruption seep into our conscience. He got a prescription for sleeping pills and went back to Afghanistan to finish Restrepo.
“He believed that this would kill him, he knew it,” Jeremiah told me last week. “I felt for a really long time that he was telling me he did not want to go back to war, he knew he was gonna die. He didn’t think it would happen this fast. But he knew he was gonna die.”
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Tim and I talked often about family and relationships. He was torn between wanting to start a family and the desire to continue his work. Late into the night, between tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, we would debate whether it was possible to cover war—to have a true commitment to war journalism—and maintain a commitment to family. I argued that it wasn’t. Done correctly, the work took everything we had. Many of our colleagues suffered from drug and alcohol addictions; a few had become emotionally unbalanced. (One well-known war correspondent, a neighbor of ours, papered over his Brooklyn windows to protect himself from the ghosts of rooftop snipers.) Under such circumstances, stable relationships were practically impossible—certainly unfair.
Tim once showed me a Facebook post from a military mother denouncing his book as “pornographic and un-American.” A soldier featured in the book posted a reply: “I love pornography, I love America, and I love this book.”
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Coming home was always brutal: the trembling fear and constant vigilance was replaced, a 24-hour plane ride later, by a surreal return to neighbors discussing plans for brunch and “reality” TV. When we were home, we hung out with other journalists, fellow “war dogs.” Enfolded in this familiar cocoon, we had no need to explain ourselves; we were understood. Still, Tim wanted a family.
“Tim, more than anyone I know, was a pathetic romantic looking for love,” Jeremiah said. “Tim would say to me, ‘I need tenderness.’ It was like he was saying, ‘I need someone to touch me, hold me, tell me I’m going to be OK.'”
He met a beautiful Somali-American woman named Idil Ibrahim. Soon after, he began fitful attempts to settle down. “You can get out while you’re ahead,” I advised. “You’ve got a hit movie, successful books; you have galleries and Hollywood directors courting you.”
But, like me, Tim struggled with the pull of violence, the fascination with war. After spending the better part of a decade in war zones, Tim’s entire career, his psyche—even his daily musings—revolved around the intersection of violence, media imagery, and the relationships war created between men.
There was no brass ring in the suburbs. There was no such thing as being “ahead.”
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Tim eventually finished Restrepo. At the 2011 Oscars, he walked down the red carpet with soldiers from the 173rd Airborne. He was ready to get back in the field. He still had a Vanity Fair contract to fulfill, and he and Sebastian decided on Libya. Tim made an initial trip in late March, but photographically it was a disaster.
Tim returned to New York in early April and invited me for dinner on April 4. He talked about the danger of the shoot and the lack of direction in his pictures. He talked of mortars and rockets falling, of being caught in a vicious ambush in a small village.
“Jesus, these look like outtakes from a wire service,” I said when he showed me the photos. They were unfocused thematically—the worst photos I’d ever seen from him.
We talked for hours. He made me dinner and we scrolled through his pictures. Two things emerged. First, he came across a photo of an extremely fat man in civilian clothes parading an ammunition belt through the streets. The photo was absurdist theater, farce. Tim was mesmerized by its implications—men playing at war, trying to live out something they had seen in a movie.
He talked about the role of the media in the war machine, how some images quickly became propaganda for one side or another. It was this fascination that led him back to Libya, to his death. He envisioned his next big project in Libya, in the the Arab spring: a series of photos inspired by the fat man. Maybe I’ll call it “Theater of War,” he said.
And then he said these fateful words: “I’ve been out of it for a while, and when I went back, I found that what I’m really interested in is war. This is what I want to do.”
He asked me to come with him.
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When I got the news, I was at the bedside of New York Times photographer Joao Silva, the most hardcore son of a bitch I’ve ever met. He was terribly wounded by an IED in Afghanistan in October; at the time of this writing, he is still hospitalized. Idil, Tim’s girlfriend, called me first. She’d heard a house with some journalists had been hit in Misurata. Joao made some calls, confirmed it, then held me as I cried.
Tim, with my friend and colleague Chris Hondros at his side, had spent the morning of April 20 shooting some of the most close-quarters combat imaginable. Tim filmed inside a cramped, bombed out office building, shoulder to shoulder with rebels, as they tried to kill loyalists in the next room. As a stairwell blazed with flames beneath him, Tim shot footage of the rebels firing blindly around corners. Bullets struck just feet away. There was shouting as the rebels tried to roll burning tires into the rooms, in an attempt to burn the loyalists out. Tim filmed with the calm professionalism that was his trademark, capturing small details among the chaos.
Reports say that Tim, Chris Hondros, and two other photographers piled into two pickup trucks and headed into Misurata’s open town square with militiamen, who fired a mortar in the general direction of Qaddafi’s forces.
The response was immediate: incoming fire, probably more mortars. A French journalist nearby saw an explosion where Tim and the others had been standing. A rebel ran out of the cloud of smoke shouting “Sahafi” (“journalist” in Arabic), miming a wound. Tim and Chris were loaded into a pickup truck and rushed to a hospital.
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It seemed some bizarre, cruel joke: after Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and a dozen trips to Afghanistan, for Tim’s road to end in Misurata, Libya. He didn’t even have an assignment. But maybe that was the point: he was there because that’s where he wanted to be.
Sebastian believes Tim was calling out for help, that he was conscious and knew he’d been wounded.
During the early years of the Iraq war, he and I would drive for hours over the heavily mined roads and I’d fight off sleep. If the explosion came, I wanted to be awake, to feel my own death. Tim was awake. He experienced his own death. It must have been excruciating, frightening.
What did he think as he was lying in the back of that truck?
Tim, I imagine, would have wanted to experience his wounding, his slow bleeding out. It was the ultimate experience for an unceasingly curious man who devoted his life to exploring violence. Maybe I am callous in this, maybe I tell myself this because I need to take comfort in it. The truth is, I’ll never know.
I don’t know why the universe chose that moment in time, that confluence of events—the trajectory of a mortar tube, Tim’s decision to run down that street, the perfect spray of shrapnel. Any degree of change and his life would have been spared. Of course, any degree of change—in the angle of a gun in Liberia or Afghanistan—and we could have lost Tim long ago. The first rule of war is chaos. Tim knew that rule well.
I respect Tim’s work and the life he built; I have to respect Tim’s choice to take a boat to Misurata, a small besieged port town where artillery was falling, a place where his life was not in his hands.
Tim spent years in Liberia. Fighters there had a saying: “Bullet knows no name.”
I know there is no “they” who took Tim’s life. Someone a mile away dropped a mortar into a tube. A few seconds later a small piece of shrapnel ripped through Tim’s flesh. This is how it happens.
Now I lay awake at night replaying scenarios. I could have done things differently: I could have insisted Tim not go, gone with him and stopped the bleeding, turned him down a different street at a different hour. I know many of our friends are having the same tortured thoughts.
We are left with memories of a man who was changing our world—teaching his friends about intimacy and communication, translating history’s deeds for an international audience, leading a generation of image makers down new roads.
Tim Hetherington was a giant of a man.
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Hey. I tried to follow Tim’s story while I was in Libya and I had a lot of luck. I met the doctor who drove him back while he was dying. I learned why he died. It was a stupid reason. Lack of a chest needle. He should have had one in an IO kit.
http://youtu.be/vlQELJnc_5U
http://youtu.be/QQwcK0JswkA
http://youtu.be/tFnxAbD6oc4
http://youtu.be/8q5biOaKFB8
This video has Dr Tameem, a doctor who worked at an aid station on the Dafniyah front talking about his encounter with Tim Hetherington after he had been mortally wounded
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=tFnxAbD6oc4#t=88s
Kamber, this was such a touching tribute to Tim. Men like you and Tim are often misconstrued as the enemy by soldiers and families. I’ve made that mistake myself as a younger soldier. You both are heroes and patriots in helping everyone visualize and feel the humanistic truths about war and revealing also its terror and destructive capabilities on ones soul. I wish I had the chance to meet Tim. My heart goes out to his loved ones. Keep fighting the good fight, Mike.
thank you for sharing this. Thank you for sharing your thoughts as to why tim was and had to be where he was… thank you for sharing what was going on in his mind… I hadn’t seen him in a while. and thank you for sharing these lovely photos.
I’ve struggled with my own ghosts around tim, they’re here, in case they help bring some closure
http://onmotherhoodandsanity.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-on-tim-and-things-worth-dying-for.html
and a lovely picture of his rackous laugh
http://onmotherhoodandsanity.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-tim-aid-work-and-dying.html
beautiful piece mike, thanks…
Michael, What a wonderful article. You were so lucky to have been his friend for so long. We all have the similar thoughts. There’s not a soldier –or me, a military wife married to an active duty deployed Army surgeon, who hasn’t thought of a how it was “supposed” to turn out. There would have been intel, there would have been a medic, tourniquets, radios, air support, a medevac, and at the end of it, my husband would have been at an FST waiting to save his life. That’s how it runs in my mind –and other soldiers I have… Read more »
Mike,
A haunting and meaningful as your photos are, so to is this tribute. Everytime I hear of a journalist in peril, I say a silent prayer that it is not you. I can feel your pain and sorrow, thanks for sharing it and your insights with the rest of us! Be safe!
I agree 100% with you LIsa. I couldn’t have articulated better words to attribute to the piece. I know for me, it’s a very personal look into the part of photojournalism I really don’t think about on a regular basis. We see the images but we don’t always see the people behind them or their own stories. I was not aware of Tim’s work until his death was reported but the first time I saw his image, I was captivated by a pair of soulful and passionate eyes. It’s clear that same soufulness and passion reads in his work through… Read more »
A truly amazing tribute. Michael Kamber, and now, through him, Tim Hetherington, changed me. They made me realize that instead of trying to ignore the realities of war, you can bear witness to the truth about it in a way that is meaningful.
Beautiful, haunting, poignant and meaningful.
My condolences to his family and friends. God rest his soul.
Wonderful tribute Michael. Beautifully written. Hope our paths cross again sometime in the future. Stay safe.
Mike,
This is such a wonderful piece and tribute! Thank you for sharing these pieces of life and difficult experiences.
I am deeply sorry for your loss.
Pls be safe!
Regine
Michael, Thank-you. I read and watched Restrepo, and watched “Sleeping Soldiers”, which, as a Mom, continues to haunt me today. It felt strangely personal and familiar, though I am personally ‘unrelated’ to war. Tim was onto something and when you get that close to the contradictions of war I guess it is often literally and eventually all-consuming. I think those of us watching from the sidelines vastly underestimate the real costs of war to not only family and friends but to what might have been. The loss of your friend is a loss for the world. Thank-you for letting us… Read more »
Holy shit. I mean…holy shit.
Having known many photojournalists, some of them who have been in war zones, the one thing I know is you could not have done anything to stop him. That is who they are and what they do. And they only stop when/if they want to.
I’m sorry for your loss, but thank you for writing this. It was truly incredible.
Michael, this piece was so well written. I found myself being transported to the events and now I feel like I’ve lost a friend too. Great job and sorry for your loss.
Rup