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Looking Back To Move Forward: 13 Years Of Photographing Afghanistan

Editor's note: On his most recent trip to Afghanistan, NPR staff photographer David Gilkey shot this personal iPhone photo essay in his downtime. You can find some of his reportage photography here, here and here.

Retrograde. It seems an unfitting term for America's longest war, but it's the word of the moment for the U.S. military when it talks about Afghanistan. In plain terms, it means something like moving backward as other things move forward — or just opposite the normal flow.

For almost 13 years I have been in the normal flow of journalists — and later the military — to Afghanistan, covering the war that followed Sept. 11. When I first arrived in the fall of 2001, there was no such thing as being "embedded." Journalists depended entirely on local Afghan drivers, fixers and translators.

The official military embed program really began in 2003 with the start of the Iraq War. And from that point on — for better or for worse — that was what you did if you wanted to cover combat operations involving U.S. forces. Cumulatively, at this point, I've spent nearly four years living with soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And on an embed, you really do live with them. Every aspect of your daily life is the same as it is for the troops you are covering. They dig a hole in the dirt to sleep in: You get in, too. They eat a two-year-old MRE (Meal Ready to Eat): bon appetit. Maybe the only difference is that as a journalist, you don't carry a weapon.

So we journalists, too, became a part of the bigger bureaucratic system, coming and going from the intimacy of the smallest mud-walled outposts to the anonymity of beehive bases like Bagram and Kandahar Air Field.

Year after year, I've watched the bases change just like the men and women occupying them. The pace at which they have been built — and then expanded before even being finished — has been astonishing.

A double exposure and self-portrait at a combat outpost in southern Afghanistan.
David Gilkey / NPR
/
NPR
A double exposure and self-portrait at a combat outpost in southern Afghanistan.

But my most recent visit was different. The bases are shrinking, retrograded for their next occupants: Afghans who have almost none of the resources that their predecessors have. Many bases will be abandoned entirely. Some will be razed and returned to the desert or farmland without a trace. This retrograde includes weapons, vehicles, people, everything.

I suddenly realized: I will have to retrograde as well. I will retrograde my 13 years of work in Afghanistan. Retrograde my memories. Retrograde my life. But by definition it means moving backward as other things move forward. It seems illogical, but these photos are for me a start: I'm keeping a little piece of the past so as to better move forward.

I photographed the little things I had stopped seeing. All the things that made life so miserable. I want to remember that. Not for journalistic or historical purposes, but because these places have become so personal.

Hot water and hot rocks — key ingredients for survival in the desert.
David Gilkey / NPR
/
NPR
Hot water and hot rocks — key ingredients for survival in the desert.

Life in a rock pile. The view of nothing. Hot water, not for showering, but for drinking. Dirt walls, cement walls, mud walls. Never flushing a toilet. The blue sky over a gray world below. Coming and going. The simplicity of it all can actually be charming.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

David Gilkey and NPR's Afghan interpreter and fellow journalist Zabihullah Tamanna were killed June 5, 2016, near Marjah, in southern Afghanistan.