Toppling Saddam and a War’s Coverage

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Broadcast live to millions around the globe, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square seemed to be the defining visual moment of the Iraq war. To viewers and commentators, it was gripping proof that Iraqis were celebrating the triumphal arrival of the Marines.

But it was not so apparent to some of the journalists who were actually there.

The photographer Gary Knight saw more journalists and Marines than actual civilians. And those Iraqis he saw, he said, seemed to be “doing it for the benefit of the cameras” at what amounted to little more than a media event. Just beyond the view of he cameras, the square was mostly empty. Lt. Tim McLaughlin, the Marine tank commander whose American flag ended up briefly atop the statue before it fell, drily observed that it was hardly a turning point, just “an event that for me occurred probably between 4:10 in the afternoon and 4:25 in the afternoon.”

Ten years after the invasion, it is clear that the moment hardly heralded a clean and decisive victory. If anything, the news coverage raises questions about the role the news media played in the run-up to the war and the toll it took on soldiers and civilians.

Mr. Knight hadn’t taken any photographs that day in 2003 when his Newsweek photo editor, watching a live television broadcast in New York, called his satellite phone and anxiously asked if he was shooting the crowd pulling down the statue with cables. Mr. Knight half-heartedly squeezed off a few frames while on the phone and tried to explain what was happening.

“I saw this for what it was â€" this wasn’t Iwo Jima,” he said. “It was probably the most trivial thing I had seen in five weeks. And I recognized what the press, the live TV cameras who had been starved of a story, were making of it. But I thought to myself, I’m not going to flatter this by making it into something that I know it isn’t.”

Peter Maass Gary Knight in Iraq.

Needless to say, other photographers had more artful images than Mr. Knight.

Peter Maass, a reporter covering the invasion for The New York Times Magazine, had taken the dangerous journey north from Kuwait as an unembedded journalist alongside Mr. Knight. While standing in Firdos Square during the two hours it took to topple the statue, Mr. Maass did not see it as a defining moment. He took a few snapshots for himself. Later, in 2011, he wrote a detailed account of the events of that day for The New Yorker.

His clear-eyed take, along with pictures and recollections by Lieutenant McLaughlin and Mr. Knight, are at the heart of “Invasion: Diaries and Memories of War in Iraq,” which opened last week at the Bronx Documentary Center. The exhibit features Lieutenant McLaughlin’s handwritten diaries, Mr. Knight’s black-and-white photos and Mr. Maass’s words, along with snapshots by all three and Wesley Bocxe, an American photographer based in Mexico. The show is a stinging rebuke of the news media’s early unquestioning coverage as well as a window into the nature of war.

“I worry that most people don’t understand the unforgiving violence of my Marine Corps experiences,” Lieutenant McLaughlin said at the show’s opening. “Shoot a few seconds too soon and you kill a civilian. Hesitate, and another Marine dies. There are no second chances. Killing people is ugly, brutal and abrupt. It is final, and it stays with you for a lifetime. It’s done because that’s what your country asked you to do, yet most Americans will only experience war through cable news, politicians and Hollywood. It’s a flag on a statue, a talking point and a movie.”

Lieutenant McLaughlin had joined the Marines during peacetime and was stationed at the Pentagon when it was attacked on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. For part of the push north across Iraq, his was the lead tank of the Third Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment.

There were no other American military units ahead of them.

Mr. Maass and Mr. Knight, on the other hand, were in separate SUVs rented from Hertz in Kuwait. Mr. Knight smashed through a barricade on the Iraq border at the start of the war on March 20 2003. He assumed â€" correctly â€" that the Kuwaiti border guards were unlikely to pursue him into Iraq.

Courtesy of Peter Maass Peter Maass in front of a mural of Saddam Hussein on which Marines had spray-painted, “Bravo Tanks,” the designation of Lt. Tim McLaughlin’s tank company.

Along with several other photographers who rode with him, Mr. Knight joined Mr. Maass and other journalists trying to cover the invasion on their own â€" unilaterally â€" not embedded with the United States military.

Mr. Knight wanted to have access to the Iraqi civilian side of the war. It quickly became apparent to him that this was an extremely risky strategy and that he needed to find an American military unit if he was going to make it to Baghdad alive.

Fortunately, a blinding sandstorm led Mr. Knight to rear-end a marine Humvee. The battalion’s commander graciously allowed him and his companions to travel alongside the battalion. After some difficult combat, the Marines arrived in Firdos Square â€" mainly to rescue journalists who were trapped in the Palestine Hotel.

The exhibition’s three main participants say that the tight shots of the statue that were broadcast and published in newspapers showed only the people beating and toppling the statue and not that the square was mostly empty. If anything, they say, the event was more symbolic of the news media’s failings.

“It is a really serious problem,” Mr. Maass said. “It’s kind of a continuation of the problem the media had with the weapons of mass destruction and the whole coverage of Iraq.”

Even 10 years after the invasion, it is difficult to calculate the extent of the war’s toll.

Mr. McLaughlin is now a lawyer in Boston and the president of Shelter Legal Services, a nonprofit group that provides free legal advice to homeless and low-income veterans. He has had a difficult time since returning from Iraq in 2003. Although he overcame a drinking problem, he said, he still has trouble in social situations and has constant nightmares.

“The Department of Veterans Affairs says I have post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “I don’t have a disorder. It’s a natural reaction. It would be a disorder if I was unaffected.”

Courtesy of Tim McLaughlin A destroyed Iraqi T-72 tank

Much of the material is available on a free iPad app and on a Web site dedicated to the project. Mr. Knight’s account of his Iraq war experiences are in the book “Photojournalists on War,” published this month by the University of Texas Press.

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