Here Are The Young Men

Marines’ Faces Before, During, and After Serving in Afghanistan

How do life-changing experiences concretely impact the way we look? Does tragedy truly show up in our eyes and brow? These are questions that fascinate Claire Felicie, who photographed the faces of 20 Dutch Marines before, during, and after their tour of duty in Afghanistan. From first photo to last photo, only 12 months passed, but a great deal happened in these young men’s lives.

Yes, some of the shifts in appearance are environmentally induced; there’s nothing other than the scorching Afghan sun to blame for those new freckles and bronzed noses. But there is something else in that third picture; a dullness to the eyes, a stiffness to the jaw. Isn’t there?

What’s interesting about this project is that you can convince yourself that someone changed dramatically from middle to right, only to compare right to left and talk yourself out of it. It must just be angle or lighting, you say. But even after you’ve concluded that wrinkle isn’t really any bigger, it’s undeniable that there is a difference. No this was not a perfectly controlled scientific experiment, but there is no science to walking into a room, looking into a friend’s face, and immediately knowing that something has happened. It’s not about the obvious clues like a frown or matted hair, but something far more nuanced.

Felicie came up with the idea for this project when her 18-year-old son decided to join the Marines. He was eager to go to Afghanistan and she spent lots of time thinking about how the experience might change him. In the end he never went— instead getting stationed in the Caribbean—but she did. Through one of his friends, she connected with a squad that was being sent to Afghanistan. She photographed them first while they were still on base in the Netherlands; a lingering shoot full of stories of their families and eagerness to depart. Nine months later, just six weeks after they lost two of their men to an IED blast, she met up with them in Afghanistan. The photo session was rushed. The men had just returned from patrol, drenched in sweat, and were eager to shower. She had time for just one portrait of each Marine. She caught them again three months later, when they’d returned to the Netherlands. Again, they had plenty of time, but something was different.

“They were saying they were good; they were fine,” Felicie says. “But then I let them sit and look through the camera. When they sat down they said nothing and I said nothing also, it was then I saw, their faces had changed.”

The series ‘Here are the young men’ is divided in three subseries:

‘Marked‘: black and white triptychs of marines before, during and after their tour of duty to Afghanistan.
‘Armoured‘: black and white portraits of marines back from patrol and photo’s of their good luck charms.
‘Committed‘: colour photo’s of marines on their base Combat Outpost Tabar in Uruzgan, Afghanistan.

Source: http://clairefelicie.com/

The AK-47: 'The Gun' That Changed The Battlefield

Her grandson Denis hands Aleksandra a Kalashnikov. Aleksandra (2007)

Taking aim, she pulls the trigger, click. "It's so easy".

The AK-47 was designed after World War II by the Soviets, who issued the guns to the communist army's conscripted forces. In the past few decades, the AK-47 has become one of the weapons of choice for many groups — and one of the most commonly smuggled weapons in the world.

One of the first true assault rifles, the AK-47, or Kalashnikov, was designed for soldiers who have to endure terrible conditions on the battlefield: It's light, it can carry a lot of ammunition, and it can withstand harsh weather and poor handling. The gun's design and ubiquity also have made it popular among small-arms dealers — as well as insurgents, terrorists and child soldiers.

C.J. Chivers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for The New York Times, has encountered the Kalashnikov while reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq. His new book, The Gun, traces the migration of the AK-47 across the world, detailing the consequences of its spread.

"It's pretty hard in many parts of the world, particularly in Afghanistan, to go [into] territory under insurgent control, and not be ambushed by Kalashnikovs," says Chivers. "Their numbers are so outsized that this is quite a common experience."

One estimate by the World Bank suggests that 100 million of the 500 million total firearms available worldwide are variations of the Kalashnikov.

"There's a lot of measures of a weapon, and one of them is how they work against a conventional foe, like the United States military," he says. "That's not the best measure. The best measure is how they work against a larger set of victims: how they work against civilians, how they work at checkpoints [and] how they work in the commission of crimes for all of these things. It's a [terribly effective] weapon."

Chivers has covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya and served as the Times' Moscow correspondent from June 2004 through mid-2008. He also served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps from 1988 to 1994. He received the Livingston Award for International Journalism for his coverage of the collapse of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his dispatches from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130493013

CJ Chivers Blog: http://cjchivers.com