Northern Afghanistan. October 2001.
This incident took place near a village called Dasht-e-Qala.
At the time it was the front line between the forces of the Taliban government of Afghanistan and the Northern Alliance fighters attempting to overthrow it with the help of the U.S. military.
A group of journalists were at a fortified position, behind a Russian tank operated by the Northern Alliance fighters.
They hear a crack in the distance. It’s a Taliban mortar round heading for their position.
The concussion of the mortar explosion blows them off their feet. But that’s not all.
Shrapnel slices into the thigh of a National Geographic field producer.
A freelance reporter working for NBC News captures the scene on video tape.
The network reporter continues to videotape, is even urged on by the wounded man, “shoot this, I’m bleeding,” he says.
However, if the shrapnel sliced the femoral artery, the producer could bleed to death in just four minutes.
The network reporter is conflicted, but continues videotaping for another minute or two.
Finally, he puts down the camera, takes the producer’s scarf from his neck and binds the wound, but he lets the camera continue to roll.
They retreat from the frontline position to a safer area in the rear.
The producer is taken to a local Afghan hospital and treated. He survives his injuries.
The videotape becomes dramatic evidence of the first on camera casualty in the U.S. sponsored fight to overthrow the Taliban.
Behind the scenes, however, some colleagues criticize the reporter for not putting the camera down right away and tending to his colleague.
That freelance network reporter was me.
Twenty-three years later I still think about that incident.
And I STILL feel I did the right thing.
I had enough medical knowledge to suspect it wasn’t an arterial wound, because the blood wasn’t bright red and spurting in time to his heartbeat.
I also knew that people rarely saw the actual casualties of war anymore. It was my job to show them. The very reason I was there.
Bloody images were no longer published and circulated the way they were in the Vietnam War era.
Everything felt sanitized now. I wanted to make sure our viewers saw the truth.
The truth of what happens when hot metal meets soft human flesh.
So what would you do?
Was the shot important enough to delay treatment?
What if the producer had died?
Is capturing an image or video that could inform MANY people worth risking the life of a SINGLE individual?
(Text, video and photos by Kevin Sites)
Kevin Sites reported the war in Afghanistan from 2001 - 2013. His award-winning book,Swimming with Warlords, documents that odyssey. You can find it at the link below.
https://amzn.to/4ci0ASn
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