Picturing War’s Wounded and Dead

[unhappycamper]

After a battle in June, Navy corpsmen took a wounded corporal to the trauma center at Camp Dwyer in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.


Picturing War’s Wounded and Dead
By C.J. CHIVERS
September 21, 2010, 9:52 am

“For centuries pictures of the dead and wounded have been part and parcel of war communications. Often the intentions were clear, ranging from medical instruction to anti-war protests. The public’s response could coincide with or diverge from the publisher’s intention.”

Anyone who has survived or covered a conflict, and interacted with the people who have suffered grievously from war, would recognize the ringing truth in the third sentence of this statement, which opens the preface to an article in an issue this summer in the journal Medicine, Conflict and Survival.

There is no telling how people will react to realistic images and written reports that show war for what it is. This is the case no matter the population that is exposed to a graphic photograph or unflinching account: the victims of violence and their friends and families, politicians of all stripes, curious citizens, war supporters and antiwar activists, artists and commentators, troops and their officers, veterans, voters, voyeurs. The range of reactions is wide, and often not predictable. Some appreciate what reaches their eyes. Others are outraged, or defensive, or frightened, or filled with sorrow, or shame. Censors and would-be censors creep in, with many motivations, sometimes calling for the people and institutions behind the realism to be punished, or shut down.

~snip~

Enter “War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003-2007,” the extraordinary — and extraordinarily thought-provoking — tome published by the United States Army’s Office of the Surgeon General in 2008. “War Surgery” has been covered at length in the Science Times, so I’ll not repeat a full description of it or its struggles here.

In short, it was published, and at the most basic level it serves as a textbook for surgeons and other care-givers in the American military, a primer for what military doctors will confront on their operating tables during their tours in Afghanistan or Iraq. And many of its images, which are presented clinically and in a medical context, possess, as the journal’s authors wrote, a “ghastly character.”