War .. What Is It Good For?

"I liked it. The excitement. The adrenaline. Never knowing what's going to happen. Now it's nothing. You just watch the news or you watch the war movies on TV."

"Nobody really knows what the soldiers are going through. They see on TV, oh yeah, two soldiers got wounded today and they think yeah he'll be all right. But that soldier is scarred for life both physically and mentally.
They ask stupid questions like, 'Was it hot? Did you shoot anybody?' They want me to glorify war and say it was so cool. The reality of it is, seeing all that crap fucks you up in the head, man. I can't sleep at night. It sucks. It really sucks."

"I lost my leg just below the knee. Lost my eyesight. I have shrapnel in pretty much every part of my body. I don't have any regrets. It was the best experience of my life."


An exhibition by photographer Nina Berman at New York's Jen Bekman Gallery, features portraits of US soldiers wounded in Iraq. Berman began taking the photos shortly after the 2003 invasion, choosing to shoot them not in hospital wards but in their homes, often in small town America, far from the media glare.
Berman said she was first spurred into taking the portraits out of frustration, sickened by the early media coverage of the war.
"I started working on it out of exasperation at not seeing any visual representation of the human cost of war. In the press you kept hearing reports or reading reports about wounded but never seeing any images," she told AFP.
Berman said she was most interested not in her subjects' physical wounds but the psychological scars hidden beneath.

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