Eye of an Angel: Remembering David Gilkey
One of the world’s great news photographers died in an ambush this summer, my friend and frequent traveling companion David Gilkey. He and NPR’s fixer and interpreter, the Afghan journalist Zabihullah Tamanna were killed by Taliban fighters in an ambush on the road to Marjah. A bad day in southern Afghanistan. Game over.
I’ve been forced in recent days to try and come to grips with the reality of it. Nothing like writing a eulogy to make real a death.
It was easy to stave off accepting David’s death for the first couple weeks, impossible not to — despite the phone calls, through hugs and tears. Even after our crowd of shattered friends drove out to Dover Air Force Base to witness his flag-draped casket come home, and laughed and cried through line dancing and kind tribute at a country bar just outside the base afterwards.
David covered disasters and wars and events mostly overseas for more than twenty years. He’d been in South Africa, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, Haiti, and endlessly Afghanistan — all over Asia, and elsewhere during conflicts and in the wake of earthquakes and typhoons. He’d won many awards for that work, but had also covered sports and fashion, and rock and roll.
I’d like to tell you a little about him.
In 2014, David and I travelled with a reporter to Sierra Leone during the height of the Ebola outbreak. A week in, we visited an Ebola clinic, and in this one area, I saw a bunch of people waiting to be released. The patients ranged from little kids to the elderly, smiling but still scared — recovered, but not cleared, corralled behind blue plastic barriers. I’m a radio producer, but I shoot photos too, and I got what I thought were some pretty good pictures… and then I called David over. He was only annoyed for a minute that I’d noticed a good scene first, and then he started shooting.
One of the first things David taught me about getting good images is to shoot a lot. I used to snap the shutter like I was trying to swat a fly — sneaking up quietly on an image, trying to time it perfectly. David wailed away like a bebop trumpeter, fast and smooth, rattatat. Confident and yet organically blending into the scene.
That night at the hotel, looking over my images and his… I could hardly believe it was the same hospital. Everything in his pictures was so beautifully framed. The colors jumped. Somehow, the people looked… more human.
I didn’t usually find scenes before he did. David scanned non stop — always sizing up the situation. He knew how to be in the right place. Our third trip to Afghanistan, out in the east at a little US base near the Pakistan border, we came under mortar fire. David got his shit on first — body armor and kevlar helmet and cameras — and headed out of the shelter. I took an extra minute, throwing new batteries into my field recorder, then went out looking for him — and looking to get some sound.
Almost immediately, a long whistle, and a massive blast hit about thirty yards away on a hill behind me. Most everyone else was doing the smart thing, hunkering down inside concrete bunkers, but I scrambled up to where I could tell the American soldiers were returning fire from, and damned if David wasn’t already there, smiling like, “Hey man, what took you so long?”
Gilkey could be tough to take at moments. He felt slights acutely. He could be gruff. Even cruel in assessing assholes. He would often bitch, or just stew silently. Almost always for good reason — it’s not easy or convenient, covering war. But he was also a hilarious storyteller, with a tack-sharp sense of detail and dialogue.
He had a goofy laugh, a thousand-mile stare, a nerdy obsession with faster, lighter, cooler cameras, helmets, packs, plate-carriers, knives, boots, pants, belts. You’d know he was always carrying a nasty bottle for spit — his lip perpetually packed with dip. He could be sweet and sad, agonized and holding onto a finished marriage far too long. I valued his good guidance on safety issues, his enthusiasm about getting outside the wire, even when it turned to frustration with the inevitable falling apart of well-laid plans. He’d keep me entertained with movie quotes and weird war zone anecdotes. We happily endured his humble-brags about frequent flyer status, his meet-you-for-breakfast-at-8-and-when-you-arrive-on-time-he’s-already-finished-eating… He was a fantastic travel companion, and he was my friend, and I loved him very much.
A lot of folks have written beautifully on social media about David, but something our friend the reporter Nancy Youssef wrote resonated with me, and she said, of David’s work,
“Each photo challenged the viewer to think about the person on the other side of the lens. That he believed, until the very end, that we could connect to someone living a life we didn’t know, reminds me he had faith we could understand each other better — that the human condition connects us all.”
And Nancy’s line made me think about this piece of paper — a quote I carried around in my wallet for years from the writer John Gardiner, who said, slightly abbreviated,
“Art begins in a wound, and it is an attempt either to live with the wound, or to heal it. It is the pain of the wound which impels the artist to do his work. And it is the universality of woundedness… which makes the work of art significant.”
David was an artist. It was not bullshit when he talked about sending “art” back to NPR. Nor the way he always talked about “making pictures” rather than “shooting photos”… He was always composing, he was framing, he was working with the light and depth — even if he was sometimes doing it on the run, or at 6 frames a second right in some warlord’s face while capturing a portrait.
And he was wounded.
I think he was deeply wounded. Maybe that’s one of the things that drew me to him. He was interesting. And — he saw that I was wounded too, and he was like, “You get it.”
It was one of the things that let others connect to him — including people whose pictures he took.
Years ago, I had the Canadian photographer and reporter Paul Watson on a radio program I produced out of Boston — we were talking about the power of photojournalism. Paul is an amputee — he’s missing one hand — and he said he thought his disability actually helped him to really connect with people who were in desperate circumstances—they’d see it and know that he could maybe understand what they were going through.
People connected with David the same way. They could see that he was kind of… damaged, like them. And he connected with them too. He really cared about their suffering, and wanted to be a conduit and a catalyst.
I don’t know what lay at the heart of his injuries. But I know the well of wounds was constantly replenished in the field. There’s more to “bearing witness” than what most folks take in as their eyes skim past the phrase.
Consider those words: bearing witness.
David took a lot in through those lenses, and his blue eyes. Took the wrecked bodies of children onto his broad shoulders. Frightened and sometimes injured young soldiers, shopkeepers burned, mothers drowned, homes flattened, he carried the heavy stink of death and rot and the panic of riots and disease.
David took this on for a variety of reasons, I’m sure. There is a sense of purpose that folks in the conflict journalism tribe feel — a sense that *somebody* has to tell people what’s going on out there. To remind the rest of humanity back in “the world” what’s happening on the fringes, and perhaps to urge them to action. He talked about that.
It was also his job. NPR paid him to go to these places, meet these people, document the events, and to suffer and accept the inevitable and known consequences of prolonged repeated exposure to trauma, danger, darkness.
David saw and photographed a lot of joy in the field too, and I’m sure it was an antidote at times. Hardships overcome, and wide smiles, and the comfort of finding shelter and fellowship amid chaos. He enjoyed exotic air, and the ever fresh surprise at how goddamned nice folks generally are no matter how supposedly hostile the destination.
He loved to travel. At NPR’s memorial for him and Zabi, David’s stunningly kind and composed mother Alyda Gilkey shared that when she first met him as an infant, and brought him on an airplane to his new home, he was happiest when he was in the air — bawling and cranky every time they touched down, foreshadowing his million-mile frequent flyer status.
One of the news accounts about his death passed on a co-worker’s story that David was called “Smiley” around the office because he so seldom lightened up, but I never heard that nickname. He smiled a lot, and loved a sharp line. He remembered funny stories and would tell them over and over.
One of his favorites was from an assignment in Afghanistan in spring of 2011 — I and our reporter had headed back stateside, and David was solo with US Marines in the Sangin area of Helmand Province, just north of where he eventually died.
Someone back here thought it’d be good to find out how the soldiers reacted to the news that Al Qaeda’s leader had been killed. David reported back — played tape of one of the officers all excited and proud. He demurred on air a bit about the mood of the grunts, saying they hoped people back home might now understand why they were out there fighting, but told me the raw story later on:
David had been out on a long, dirty, sweaty patrol on IED-encrusted roads and paths, a squad of Marines looking for signs of Taliban activity, trying to win hearts and minds, interviewing farmers, going through canals and over mud walls, avoiding choke points along the way. In recent months, guys had been getting blown up left and right. Lots of amputations, double amputations, deaths.
Soaked and exhausted, they retuned to base and their dusty bunks, started stripping off their eighty pounds of body armor, ammo, rations, and the rest. A bubbling lieutenant pops his head inside the tent and says, “I got some good news — did you guys hear?”
“Hear what?” asks one lance corporal.
“We got him. We got Osama bin Laden!”
“No shit, sir?”
“No shit. They clipped him in Pakistan this morning. Big raid.”
“Well, that’s great. That’s just great, sir…” the Marine paused, “So, does that mean we get to go home?”
“No, we don’t get to go home. We still have a mission to do here.”
“Well, then I don’t give a fuck!”
David thought that was the best summation of the war he’d ever heard.
He fit in well with the military in ways, or at least blended in. Blending in was David’s MO — low-profile 24/7. And with his bald head and scruffy beard, half the time when we were on a base or on patrol, people would mistake him for a stray Green Beret, or some CIA guy, or at least NPR’s hired security.
And despite all that… because I knew you didn’t need to scratch too deep to get to a very thoughtful and in so many ways vulnerable soul… I just always felt like — I wanted to protect this guy, you know? I wanted to make sure he had the space to do his art, to do his work, and to not get into anything too stupid. He really needed that.
The thing was, David never felt right, he never felt happy — on a trip until he’d sent home some really good “art.” I saw it over and over… he’d say, “Man, this sucks! We might as well just go home!”
Some of that was just internal drive to just do something great. But I know that he worried that if he didn’t send back some pictures that were extraordinary, the next trip might not be approved. And it was incredibly important to him to keep getting out there. Especially to Afghanistan, where he’d spent as much or more time than any other US journalist. He’d been there before the US invasion, even had a Taliban visa in his passport, and had re-entered from Pakistan in September, 2001 — linking up with the Northern Alliance and traveling with them, sometimes on horseback, as they fought their way south and into Kabul.
David was proud that we’d been able to continue to cover it over the years, even after so many news outlets shuttered bureaus, committed resources elsewhere, and in many ways abandoned the war. A mutual friend told me David feared this might be his last trip there. It had been hard to get approval. It’s an expensive story to cover, in time and money. In sweat and blood too.
He wasn’t foolhardy. He wouldn’t go to Syria once everyone started getting kidnapped, and he’d declined to travel to Libya at a certain point, telling me it was too dangerous. Maybe he just had a bad feeling. He was crushed when his friend the photographer Chris Hondros was killed there along with filmmaker Tim Hetheringon.
David was on assignment in Afghanistan when he got the news about those deaths. He talked with the Morning Edition hosts about it, saying in part, “We all know the risks when we go into situations where there’s gunfire, mortars… you know, an active war zone. It’s a very hard thing to put into words, the peace you sort of make with what you’re going to be doing. I’m not saying you walk into these things, and you’re fatalistic about it, but you also are preparing and making decisions based on sort of the level of threat that’s there.”
He said what he was doing at the time, with US troops, was different, “Working in Afghanistan, especially when you’re embedded, the one thing you always know is if something goes wrong, if you’re hit or you go down, that you’re with US forces, and there’s a medic right there, and you’re going to be medivaced within a half hour. You know that somebody’s got your back.”
In fact, David Gilkey’s final patrol was much further on the edge. He was in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan: Marjah.
Marjah is a lightly populated, canal-laced farming area the size of DC — the heart of opium poppy growing, and home turf for the Taliban. This place, even after an entire brigade of US Marines had been there for a year in 2010–2011 was still seeing firefights and daily emplacements of new IEDs.
By this spring, the Marines long gone, the Taliban again assumed control of their breadbasket. The ANA, Afghan National Army, legendarily undertrained and overmatched, is fighting them back in fits and starts, and had supposedly just secured the main road between the provincial capital Lashkar Gah and the cluster of mud brick buildings and shops that passes for a village in Marjah.
A small convoy of three uparmored humvees headed down that road, carrying NPR’s four-person crew, an Afghan general, and a handful of Afghan commandos. No real overwatch, no competent medics, into what turned out to be an ambush.
Someone had tipped off the Taliban.
They were waiting. Overwhelming small arms fire. Rocket propelled grenades. David and Zabi’s Humvee was blasted open. The hope is that David died instantly. What is known is that he died with a silk flower clenched in his hand.
I don’t know why he went on that patrol. There were red flags. There was little operational security. But it’s impossible to say. He’d been in country for weeks with little to show for it — planned embeds with US special forces had fallen through. I’m sure he felt frustrated, and I’m concerned he felt pressure to get something more.
His friend and fellow photojournalist Chip Somodevilla told me that his last gift to David is to trust him on that decision. He was a grown man, and one of the most experienced conflict photographers in the world.
He was where he wanted to be, doing what he wanted to do.
A couple weeks ago, a Marine named Bert Sanders wrote to me. He’s a grunt from a military family —we first met him in 2009 in Helmand Province. When he learned that David had been killed by the Taliban, Bert sent me a really kind note. I told him how completely wrecked I was. And how much I missed him. And Bert replied,
“It’s good to miss people. It means they meant something. Honestly, Graham, you were the first adult men I ever experienced outside the military. It was eye-opening. To see the way y’all viewed the world… Y’all voluntarily went with us into every man’s worst nightmare. No training, no brotherhood. Just to share a story. I was shocked, and perplexed. It taught me that civilians can be warriors too. Plus — dude had the fucking eye of an angel.”
