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Wounded U.S. Marine Sgt. Ty
Ziegel and Renee Kline have their
portrait taken before their wedding.
© Photo by Nina Berman/Redux |
Look at this photograph by Nina Berman. Look carefully. Pause. Think.
Realize you are seeing something unique, something rare. It is a photo
of war. There is no combat in the picture. Look at the picture taken
in a studio before the wedding of former Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel and his
fiancée Renee Kline that took place Oct. 7, 2006. In many ways it is a
typical wedding day photo, except the image is less than what one
might expect on a wedding day. The young bride is perfect in her
beautiful wedding gown. She holds a lovely bouquet of flowers. The
groom is, well, nearly perfect in his Marine dress blues, replete with
war ribbons from his service in Iraq. But look closely at the photo.
There is something wrong. Sgt. Ty Ziegel is horribly mutilated, a
victim of a suicide car bomber in 2004 in Iraq. He was in recovery for
19 months at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. Despite his wounds,
he and his childhood sweetheart married in the face of what could be
major problems in the future. Does the bride know what she is getting
into? Look at her face. I see fear and shock. We cannot tell what Sgt.
Ziegel is thinking because his face is unrecognizable. It is
impossible to know what anyone thinks, especially in a photo, but do
the bride and groom really know what the future holds?
"Wounded Marine Returns Home From Iraq to Marry" is the title of the
photo. We need read nothing more. Nina Berman says she believes her
picture "shows how war has crept its way into the most common phase of
daily life." Her assessment is right.
No one can learn about war unless he or she understands its results.
By that I mean, the casualties of war, especially from Iraq, where
almost 96 percent of the wounded survive -- the highest number of
wounded survivors of any previous war. News organizations, principally
TV, sanitize what we see from Iraq, and especially what we see at
home, meaning the men and women going through rehabilitation and how
their condition will affect the rest of their lives. The end of
February saw the return of Bob Woodruff of ABC News to reporting as
well as hosting a moving and thorough hour-long special broadcast
about those with serious brain injuries, of course, including himself.
Woodruff says he will continue to report this story for ABC News. NBC
News to its credit is doing a series called the "Wounds of War," a
title also used occasionally by World News Tonight with Charles
Gibson. Despite this flurry, there still are not enough of those
stories, though many more are in print. When this stretch ends, we
probably will not see many similar stories for some time.
That is why, of the many photos about Iraq, this one, of a seemingly
normal wedding, stands out. It says more about the war than anything
from combat does. The result of war, its effect on soldiers, in this
case a badly wounded Marine and his road to what might be a normal
life, is something we as a people must understand. Otherwise we will
continue to repeat our mistakes. Otherwise, we might never know the
horror of war.
Nina Berman made only one shot to get this photo. Originally, the
picture was part of an assignment for People magazine. For reasons
Berman does not know, it never made it into the magazine. Berman later
entered the photo in the Portraits-Singles section of the World Press
Photo Awards where it won first place. It has been in Paris Match,
Stern and other magazines.
Interestingly, it has had enormous word of mouth response on the
Internet where blogs and Web sites are featuring the photo. So far,
the rough estimate is that there have been more than 250,000 views of
Nina Berman's photo. There are surely more to come. We may never know
the final number of people who will see it on the Internet, but the
photo will continue to resonate. This is because we are looking at a
profoundly sad photo that tells a story that so far has no ending. It
is only the beginning of a very long journey.
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At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief
in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote
and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced
and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the
History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a
National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold
Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and
has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in
Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My
Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in
Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story",
"Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First
War: A Saigon Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002. |
