The Portuguese Patient

I picked this photo after reading today of a photographer for the NYTimes, Joao Silva, who lost both legs when he stepped on a landmine last month in Afghanistan. Somehow picking a beautiful landscape photo or a montage with a giant rabbit seemed absurd after reading about someone else who likes to take pictures in much riskier settings; I saw his work - along with other harrowing photographs of war and suffering - last summer during the World Press Photo exhibit here in Amsterdam. 

In the foreground stands a ghostly version of my nephew, Freeman, who does EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal). You'll be familiar with the tension associated with this line of work in the form of Kip (if you've read The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje) or Sergeant James (in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker). At his feet lies one of many explosive devices scattered around the EOD school, from which he graduated in January, 2007.

He recently returned from 6 months in Iraq, with all limbs intact. The only color I've left in the image is to highlight the legs of the 3 women in the background, one of whom is his mother. Ann is a solid Leftist at heart, and had a rough time with Freeman's decision to enter the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but made her peace with it by adapting a typical argument "If more good people were lawyers, then there wouldn't be so many bad lawyers around" to "The military could use someone with a good heart, like Freeman." Indeed though he is rumored to have enjoyed a boyish glee with blowing up stuff during training, his interest lay in helping get rid of all the unexploded ordnance laying around the world.* I hope when he finishes his contract soon, he'll move quickly in that direction.

A website has been setup to help raise money for Joao's recovery. You can do a direct donation or purchase his photography.

*According to Unicef, there are an estimated 110 million landmines scattered around the globe. And he U.S. military dropped more than 1.6 million tons of bombs on Laos during the war in Vietnam - more than it dropped on all of Europe during World War II - with about 30% of these still lying around [Boston Globe et al]