“If you are reading this, you should know that I am dead,” began the blog of a 27-year-old Army wife named Jessica Harp. “At least I hope I’m dead,” she added. “It would be awful to fail at your own suicide.”

The entry, posted to the blog “(Mis)Adventures of an Army Wife” on April 11, was titled “A Final Goodbye.” Its broad outlines, though not dramatic conclusion, are recognizable to many in the post-9/11 generation of military spouses. In 4,100 words, Ms. Harp chronicled her husband’s severe depression after his unit’s deployment to Afghanistan in 2009, and her own subsequent depression, for which she sought counseling and medication.

After her husband’s return and their cross-country move to Fort Jackson, S.C., so he could attend an eight-month officers’ course, she was told she could not join the base’s family support group because her husband was only a student there. She tried to put to use her master’s degree in financial counseling, but was told she was unemployable because she would be leaving the area before the year’s end. Her husband’s erratic behavior, coupled with his drinking, convinced her that he was an alcoholic, and she encouraged him to get help.

“The doctor immediately put him on antidepressants and sleeping pills,” she recounts. “And that was it. No counseling. No getting to the root cause of the issue. Just drugs.” She writes that he mixed his prescriptions with alcohol and at times became violent.

Read more…

Bryan Denton for The New York Times Sidney Kwiram, right, of Human Rights Watch, and Alexander Dziadosz of Reuters leave candles in a bouquet next to a pair of cameras placed in rememberance of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros at a small memorial service held by colleagues in Benghazi on Thursday.

This is an e-mail sent this morning from C.J. Chivers to the editors at Getty Images and Vanity Fair, describing events in Benghazi, Libya, since the remains of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros arrived at the Benghazi port Thursday night. Mr. Hetherington, the conflict photographer and director of the Afghan war documentary “Restrepo,” and Mr. Hondros, one of the top war photographers of his generation, were killed Wednesday in Misurata, Libya.

The editors of Getty Images and Vanity Fair shared this e-mail with the men’s families, who, after slight redaction (of e-mail addresses and of some internal discussion about with whom to share this) approved it for public release. Sebastian Junger has written a moving tribute to Mr. Hetherington, his co-director on “Restrepo,” for Vanity Fair.

Eddy Risch/European Pressphoto Agency Tim Hetherington in 2008. Read Sebastian Junger’s remembrance of Mr. Hetherington on the Vanity Fair Web site.

Pancho, Hugh, David,

This morning the bodies of Chris and Tim, along with that of a Ukrainian doctor killed in Misurata the same day, were blessed in a small, private ceremony at the Benghazi Medical Center, where the three spent the night.

The ceremony was organized by the British consular office here, and attended by about eight people.

The blessing was administered by Sylvester Magro, the Bishop of Benghazi. Father Magro leads the Roman Catholic diocese of eastern Libya, a spiritual footprint remaining from the decades of Italian presence here.

The bishop was kind and soft-spoken, and clearly touched. He began by asking the Lord to, “Hear our prayers for these, our brothers, who you have called in peace.” His primary reading was a set of excerpts from the Gospel of John, Chapter 11, on the death and resurrection of Lazarus.

The lines I remember most from it were these:

Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise.”

Getty Images Chris Hondros was killed Wednesday in Libya.

After the gospel reading, the bishop led the group in prayer and sprinkled the three with holy water.

We then went outside, where the Human Rights Watch representative present (who with Peter Bouckaert arranged Chris’s and Tim’s swift exit by sea from Misurata) picked flowers from the hospital grounds and passed them around.

We all took care to thank the attending diplomat for arranging all of this and for allowing us to be there. It’s worth noting here, even though I’m sure you all know this from your own bittersweet experiences these past days, how deeply Chris’s and Tim’s deaths have resonated among even those who did not know them. After the ceremony, the bishop and John (last name not given), one of the diplomat’s security escorts, lingered. They very much wanted to hear stories of the two, and how they had died, to provide some sense and meaning to the loss. Even among these men, no strangers to war, there were reddened eyes.

This was the second service for Chris and Tim since their arrival in Benghazi port last night. Shortly before midnight a candle-lit public event was held at one of the local hotels, and attended by 35 or 40 people, including Christopher Prentice, the UK envoy here, and Chris Stevens, the American envoy. After each attendee was handed a lit candle, both men were invited to speak, and they did. Mr. Prentice noted in particular the powerful words of condolences he has heard from Libyans, who see Chris and Tim as heroes.

There were also readings.

David, at your recommendation we opened with the inscription from Tim’s book: “For He Who Gives His Life Shall Always Be My Brother.” This, appropriately, allowed our friends to be the guides in. It also, in its way and perhaps more appropriately, had Tim and Chris shepherding us. Thank you for pointing us to it.

Next came a few more.

The first was from Gustave Mahler, 9th Symphony, 4th Movement. This was recommended via Stephanie Sinclair of the VII photo agency. Bryan Denton received an e-mail yesterday with a note saying Chris had sent this to her when she was grieving a family death. Marc Burleigh, from Agence France-Presse, read it in the sort of rich voice I wish I had. Marc had bunked with Tim and Chris on the sea passage to Misurata early in the week, and had come back to Benghazi with them on the Ionian Spirit.

Here is the selection of verse:

Often I think they’ve gone outside!
Soon they will get back home again!
The day is lovely! Don’t be anxious,
They’re only taking a long walk,
They’ve only gone out before us,
And will not long to come home again.
We’ll catch up with them on yonder heights
In the sunshine!
The day is fine on yonder heights!

After Marc sat down, Bryan read this from Plato:

The souls of people, on their way to Earth-life, pass through a room
full of lights; each takes a taper — often only a spark — to guide it in
the dim country of this world. But some souls, by rare fortune, are
detained longer — have time to grasp a handful of tapers, which they
weave into a torch. “These are the torch-bearers of humanity — its
poets, seers, and saints, who lead and lift the race out of darkness,
toward the light. They are the law-givers, the light-bringers,
way-showers, and truth-tellers, and without them humanity would lose
its way in the dark.

And then Chris Stevens, the U.S. envoy, gave a brief speech about Tim and Chris’s work, and discussed the need to respect and protect journalists. He ended with a reading from Isaiah, (25:6, 7-9), that Bryan had chosen in the afternoon.

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will provide for all peoples. On
this mountain he will destroy the veil that veils all peoples, the web
that is woven over all nations; he will destroy death forever. The
Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces; the reproach of his
people he will remove from the whole earth; for the LORD has spoken.
On that day it will be said: “Behold our God, to whom we looked to
save us! This is the LORD for whom we looked; let us rejoice and be
glad that he has saved us!”

We thought we were finished, and would light more candles, but a representative from the rebel government rose and asked to say a few words. I am half-deaf and he spoke softly, so I missed his name but will get it later. His words focused on the appreciation, even wonder, that many eastern Libyans feel that foreign journalists have come to live within another people’s struggle, and that people like Chris and Tim would give their lives to record what is happening here.

When he finished, the attendees gathered around the pair of cameras on the table and lit bouquets of candles.

Evan Hill of Al Jazeera wrote something of the ceremony. In a very brief update, I linked to it here.

As for next steps, Chris and Tim are in the good hands of the medical authorities here and their arrangements are being looked after by the diplomats. I sense that all of you have a strong sense of the schedule for bringing them home. So I will leave the logistics to others, and sign off.

If any of you have questions, Bryan and I are ready and happy to answer them. As for photos, AFP filed from the memorial last night. We have other images if you wish to see them.

On the matter of unfinished business, I will try to find more on the Ukrainian doctor. His name, we believe, taken from the small slip of paper that accompanied him as he was blessed, is Anatoly Nagaiko. We want to provide you more information of a man who died on the same day, in the same city, and was prayed over together along with two men you love.

With respect, and sorrow,
Chris

It was 1 in the afternoon. I was looking through the mess hall in Bagram Airfield north of Kabul, scanning the faces to find Parween. I had met her a few days before as she commented on a book I was reading about Afghanistan; her first name was the same as that of the main character. The book was “Lipstick in Afghanistan” by Roberta Gately, a fictional account of an American nurse volunteering in Bamiyan Province after 9/11. Unlike the nurse in my book, Parween had grown up in Kabul in a highly educated family. Her father had attended Columbia University and worked as an ambassador for Afghanistan to Ethiopia. Now, she worked as a translator for American military forces in Afghanistan.

I found her sitting at a small table, her black hair combed neatly back from her forehead. She smiled at me and invited me to sit across from her. Parween, who was perhaps in her late 40s, had beautifully distinctive features highlighted by wrinkles of happiness. “I’m so glad you had time to get lunch with me today,” I told her. “It is a pleasure,” she said, rising from her chair to hug me. We settled back into our seats, picking up our utensils to eat.

I asked her what it was like growing up in Afghanistan. “Well, my father wanted to leave this country, but the government wouldn’t let him,” she said. “My father was always abroad, but he raised us in the Western tradition.” The government would not have allowed him to leave again had he returned home, she said, so he stayed away, traveling for the foreign service, until he finally settled in the United States.

But the Afghan government “kept us, his family, imprisoned here,” she said. “My mother was incredible. She kept our entire family together, all seven of us, raising us all without him.”
Read more…

Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times Former Baath Party officials on trial in a Baghdad courtroom on April 21. Front row, from left: Tariq Aziz, Abud Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, Farooq Abdullah Yahya and Hadi Hassoun Najim. Back row, from left: Sabawi Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saber Abdul Aziz Hussein and Ahmed Khudair Sabah.

BAGHDAD — Iraq has been castigated of late by human rights groups for violently cracking down on journalists at protests.

Photographers, in particular, have an especially difficult time here taking pictures of government proceedings and scenes of violence — as a blog post last year by my colleague Joao Silva described in detail.

But like nearly everything in Iraq, the issues of press freedom are never simple. Sometimes it’s a matter of showing up and schmoozing to gain access in a way that would be unheard of back home.

On Thursday morning, I, our photographer Ayman Oghanna and our Iraqi newsroom manager visited the criminal court in the heavily guarded Green Zone, just across from the American Embassy, to see the verdicts delivered in a case against several defendants on trial for the 1994 murder of Sheik Taleb al-Suhail, then an Iraqi exile living in Lebanon.

Initially, we were told that taking photographs in the courtroom was forbidden. But that was just the first answer, and we knew from experience that it was subject to negotiation.

We spoke to the security officials and then popped into the presiding judge’s office. And before we knew what was happening, court security officers were shuffling the eight defendants into the courtroom for a quick and private photo shoot, before the judge entered the room to read out each of the men’s sentences. (I immediately recalled a similar experience last year when we visited Samarra. After chai and polite conversation with the police colonel, we were ushered into a room to meet the prisoner we had been hoping to see, a young man who had just killed his father. )

Some of the men in the courtroom, including Tariq Aziz, the former foreign minister, and Abed Hammoud, a presidential secretary, were on the famous American deck of cards of the most wanted members of Saddam Hussein’s government after the invasion in 2003.

One of the men, Abed Hassan al-Majied, the brother of the former government official known as Chemical Ali, who was executed in January 2010, asked about us, “What are they doing here?”

“This is just for the memories,” said the head of the court’s security detail.

Mr. Hammoud, who covered his face with a notebook as the pictures were being snapped, asked, “Why are these Americans taking pictures of us?”

After a few minutes, the court session was about to begin and we were asked to go to the spillover room in the back. As we walked out, Mr. Hammoud looked at me and shouted an expletive to describe former President George W. Bush in particular and all Americans in general.

As the proceedings began, Mr. Majied, before hearing that he would be sentenced to hang for his role in the murder, rose and addressed the court.

“Just 10 minutes ago, there were two Americans here,” he said. “By what right can they come into this court and photograph us? Who are they, and what is behind this?”

The judge replied, “They are from the press, so just be quiet.”

Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times Tariq Aziz awaiting the judge’s verdict. He was acquitted, but has already been sentenced to death for crimes committed during the administration of Saddam Hussein.

Then, one by one, the judge read the sentences for each man in the trial, which began in 2009. Three were sentenced to death, two to life sentences, one to 15 years in prison. Two others, including Mr. Aziz, were acquitted. Mr. Aziz, however, has already been sentenced to death in another case involving crimes of the former government.

After the defendants were taken from the courtroom, Safia al-Suhail, the daughter of the victim who became an international symbol of Saddam Hussein’s repression as a guest of the Bush White House at the State of the Union address in 2005, stood in the lobby.

“Justice is there, after 16 years,” said Ms. Suhail, who is now a member of Parliament and a prominent activist.

Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad.

Tim Hetherington, a British photographer based in New York who was a director and producer of the film “Restrepo,” was killed in the besieged Libyan city of Misurata on Wednesday, our Times colleague C.J. Chivers reports. Three photographers were wounded in the same attack, and one of them, Chris Hondros of Getty Images, died.

The four had reached the city by sea from Benghazi, the rebel capital. “Early reports said they had been working together near the front lines when they were struck by a rocket-propelled grenade,” Mr. Chivers wrote.

During the making of “Restrepo,” Mr. Hetherington and his co-director Sebastian Junger spent 14 months with a platoon of United States soldiers in the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. A Times review of “Restrepo” can be read here.

Our colleagues on the Lens blog have a slide show of Mr. Hetherington’s work and one of images by Mr. Hondros. The pictures by Mr. Hondros were taken earlier Wednesday. Also, the photographers Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown were wounded in the attack.

Pentagon officials continued their silence on Tuesday about allegations against Greg Mortenson, the co-author of the best-selling “Three Cups of Tea,” after a fellow best-selling author and mountaineer, Jon Krakauer, released an article on byliner.com raising his own questions about the accuracy of Mr. Mortenson’s book and the management of his charity.

But Col. Christopher D. Kolenda, one of the United States military officials who first reached out to Mr. Mortenson because of the book’s inspirational lessons about girls’ education in Central Asia, said that Mr. Mortenson’s work had been vital to the American war effort in Afghanistan.

“My personal and professional interaction with Greg and his organization has proved invaluable in terms of contacts with elders from across the country and support for education in some critical areas,’’ Colonel Kolenda, now a senior adviser to Michele A. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in a brief phone conversation on Tuesday.

Colonel Kolenda declined any comment on the allegations against Mr. Mortenson, first by the CBS News program “60 Minutes” on Sunday and then by Mr. Krakauer in his article on Monday.

Both CBS and Mr. Krakauer said that the central, inspirational anecdote of the book was false: Mr. Mortenson, they said, never stumbled disoriented into the warm embrace of the village of Korphe in northeast Pakistan after failing to reach the summit of K2 and then in gratitude returned to build a school. CBS and Mr. Krakauer also said that Mr. Mortenson had grossly mismanaged the finances of his charity set up to build schools, mostly for girls, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr. Mortenson has forcefully countered the allegations.

Colonel Kolenda, who read “Three Cups of Tea” in late 2007 when his wife sent it to him while he was commanding 700 American soldiers in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, was so taken with a central lesson in the book – reaching out to the local residents – that he contacted Mr. Mortenson. By June 2008, Mr. Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute had built a school near Colonel Kolenda’s base, in Kunar Province, close to the border with Pakistan. Although CBS and Mr. Krakauer said that some of Mr. Mortenson’s schools were empty, or did not even exist, Colonel Kolenda said that the school near his base, at least as of 2010, had students and was operating.

By 2009, Mr. Mortenson had become an unofficial adviser to the United States military in Afghanistan. That summer, Colonel Kolenda has recalled, Mr. Mortenson was in meetings in Kabul with him, village elders and at times Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then President Obama’s top commander in the country.

Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times A supporter of the populist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr held an anti-American poster during a protest on April 9 in Baghdad against United States forces.

BAGHDAD — Unlike any other Iraqi public figure, Moktada al-Sadr has mastered the art of manipulating images and iconography in service of a political message.

After the recent street demonstrations demanding an end to the United States troop presence here by loyalists to Mr. Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric who spends most of his time in Iran, his political followers staged their own public display of anti-Americanism through a photo exhibition in the lobby of Parliament.

Surrounded by banners that read, “No to the Occupation” and “Yes, to Freedom, Yes to Independence. No to the Occupation,” parliamentary staff members from Mr. Sadr’s political office organized a display of photographs from the war that, in sum, were meant to make a moral argument for the Americans to leave.

One image depicted an American soldier pointing a pistol at an Iraqi man. In another, an Iraqi was seen with his hands up next to an American tank, clouded by the haze of a sandstorm. Yet another one showed an Iraqi boy, a double amputee, on a bed.

The photographs, as moving as they were, were largely devoid of context. The viewer is left to wonder if the detainees were actually insurgents, or if the boy had lost his legs from a roadside bomb planted by Al Qaeda or one of the Shiite militias, or from an American airstrike. One photograph carried a photo credit – David Leeson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who covered the earlier days of the war for The Dallas Morning News.

Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times Supporters of Mr. Sadr held a portrait of him during the April 9 protest.

Hatem Baidhani, a staff member in Parliament and an official in the Sadrist movement who organized the exhibition, explained: “We are not really enemies of America as a state or a people. But we are against the American policy which killed many people and left many innocent victims.”

Over the eight-year American war here, Mr. Sadr has emerged as one of the more empowered political figures, having risen from a militia leader who twice fought the Americans in major battles to a political figure with probably the most grass-roots support among the Iraqi people. Mr. Sadr is the one politician who can command his followers into the streets almost at will, and his decision last year to support Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a second term as prime minister helped end a political stalemate that lasted months and elevated Mr. Sadr to democratic kingmaker.

Read more…

We go to war because of the men on our left and right. Since 9/11, we should probably add to that the contractors in the rear providing us food, drinks and organizing basketball tournaments. Maybe we don’t fight for them, but we certainly couldn’t fight without them. This situation isn’t good or bad, it just is.

When I was in Afghanistan, my unit had to hire interpreters to talk to locals. They were contractors, though we didn’t think of them like that. In the Korangal, we struggled to keep them from going on leave, and never returning. Throughout our battalion, we struggled to staff enough of them. My platoon had two interpreters, and we still struggled to operate across our district.

At Bagram Air Field, I ate food made by KBR employees. In Kunar Province, my company hired locals to cook the food that had been flown in by contracted helicopters. And when our radios broke, the Army flew in a contractor to fix them.

In Baghdad, Sri Lankans served us food, Kenyans protected the PX, and Russians laundered our clothes. An American helped us conduct intelligence, an Iraqi cut my hair and Filipinos served me coffee. Contractors don’t shoot, but we need them to move and communicate.

I have never been trained on contracting. The only class I had on contracting in ROTC was focused on ethics. I didn’t get any training in either the Infantry Basic Officer Leadership Course or the Military Intelligence Captain’s Career Course. So when I arrived in Afghanistan, I read a PowerPoint slide, went to Jalalabad and got certified as a finance officer who could dispense money to locals.

Still I spent government money on goods. It’s like I was hired to coach the men’s basketball team, and I played professional football. My company had to improve various structures around our FOB, and I approved funds to buy supplies from locals, like air conditioning units or wood.

That’s why, in the spirit of “What Soldiers Are Reading,” I recommend Allison Stanger’s book “One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy.” In the last generation, contracting has come to touch every facet of the national security system — from defense to diplomacy to development. A professor at Middlebury College, Professor Stanger explains how contracting, especially in defense, isn’t going anywhere; this poorly regulated and unsupervised system wastes billions of dollars.

Oh, and it fails to keep us safe.

For instance, in the fiscal year 2008 the Pentagon’s budget was 24 times larger than the combined budgets of the State Department and United States Agency for International Development ($750 billion compared with $31 billion). We have “militarized” our foreign policy, shrinking the power and budget of the State Department while exploding the Pentagon’s. President Obama said foreign policy is the three D’s: development, diplomacy and defense. But we fund only one of leg of this tripod, an unsustainable plan.

The numbers also dramatically show — and hopefully General Officers take notice — that contracting is multiplying. How many contractors are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Don’t worry if you don’t know; the Pentagon doesn’t know for sure either. In 2007, the Pentagon thought it had 25,000 contractors working for it in Iraq. Turns out the number was closer to 180,000. How many people does the Pentagon contract as workers worldwide? 5.2 million as of 2005. As of 2007, the Pentagon stopped keeping track altogether.

Oversight has not kept pace with expansion. The “Pentagon’s acquisition workforce shrunk by 25 percent from 1990 to the end of 2000” while at the same time contracting increased sevenfold. Another chart in “One Nation Under Contract” shows the Pentagon’s contracting budget increased 123 percent from 2000 to 2006, again while getting rid of all General Officer positions in the acquisitions field. At the same time that the military witnessed an explosion of contracting, it shrunk the Pentagon’s acquisition force. (Maybe that is why so few officers receive training in this field.)

So the state of contracting is both rampant and underfinanced. My experiences bear this out.

Our First Sergeant had to build three bases basically out of scratch, a job not taught to any infantry noncommissioned officer. Our Fire Support Officer ran our “solatia payment” program — the money that goes to families who suffer injuries or property damage because of our actions. I can guarantee that class is not taught at Field Artillery Basic Officer Leadership Course. While my unit didn’t have any issues, the problems with contracting are notorious.

Defense contracting isn’t the problem. Bad contracting is. (Stanger even titled a section of her book, “Why Contractors Aren’t the Problem.”) The problem is poor oversight, lack of clarity in what constitutes “inherently governmental functions” and a lack of training across the government. Not training our officers and NCOs to contract, then expecting them to buy goods and services downrange is a recipe for disaster.

Capt. Michael Cummings graduated in 2006 from UCLA. He joined the ROTC program and commissioned as an officer in the United States Army. In 2007, he deployed to Afghanistan with the 173rd ABCT as a Heavy Weapons Platoon Leader and recently returned from a deployment to Iraq. He currently works in Fort Campbell, Ky. He writes for www.onviolence.com, a blog on military and foreign affairs.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense or the United States government.
If you are a service member who has recently served in the Iraq or Afghan theaters and would like to submit a post, please e-mail atwar@nytimes.com

It was mid-January, 2010, just days after a powerful earthquake had reduced much of Haiti to rubble. Jake Wood, a former Marine and now the head of an international aid organization called Team Rubicon, arrived in Port-au-Prince with a group of volunteers to provide emergency medical care.

Out of the blue, an old friend, Clay Hunt, showed up. Mr. Hunt and Mr. Wood had served together in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Marine Corps and were almost brothers. Mr. Hunt had found them using a day-old GPS coordinate posted on Team Rubicon’s Web site. Minutes after arriving, he was helping to splint a patient’s leg.

Ride 2 Recovery, via Associated Press Clay Hunt participating in a 2010 Florida Ride with the Ride 2 Recovery veterans organization. Mr. Hunt, who was actively in various public service groups, took his own life in March.

“He couldn’t stand that we were down there and he wasn’t,” Mr. Wood said. “That was Clay.”

Mr. Hunt had battled depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in the year since he left the Marines, but volunteering with Team Rubicon and veterans organizations like Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America seemed to have given him a new sense of purpose.

And yet it was not enough. On March 31, Mr. Hunt committed suicide in his apartment in Sugar Land, Tex. He was 28.

News of Mr. Hunt’s death has ricocheted through the veterans’ world as a grim reminder of the emotional and psychological strains of war — and of the government’s inability to stem military and veteran suicides, which have climbed steadily in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

“The message I’ve been trying to convey to people is that if this can happen to Clay Hunt, it can happen to anyone,” said Paul Rieckhoff, the president and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “He was involved. He had a supportive family. He was going to the V.A. He was doing the right things. And it still happened.”
Read more…

It isn’t every day that liberals like Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, appear at Capitol Hill news conferences with conservative stalwarts like Representative Walter B. Jones, a Republican from North Carolina.

But the war in Afghanistan has made for some unusual bedfellows. On Thursday, the two congressmen, along with a mashup of conservative, liberal and even libertarian lawmakers and organizations found common ground in calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan.

They did not all see eye to eye on how or why the United States should get out of Afghanistan. Conservatives like Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California, and Mr. Jones said they thought spending tax dollars on nation-building in Afghanistan was a waste of money. Democrats like Representatives Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey, both from California, discussed investing military dollars on domestic programs.

And while some called for withdrawing all troops as soon as possible, others supported keeping as many as 20,000 American forces in the country for several years.

But there was broad agreement among the participants that the time had come to sharply reduce spending not just on the war but on the military in general. Read more…

Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times Hussein al-Najar is a member of a group of young Iraqis who used Facebook to organize protests. Nearly 40 percent of Iraq’s population is 14 or under.

In Iraq, the youth-led uprisings across the Middle East have conjured a range of emotions. Resentment, for the fact that in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere the people are seemingly taking control of their future and with their own hands and voices are demanding and achieving change. Iraq, of course, required America’s guns and soldiers to topple an autocratic government. Empowerment, for the events have allowed officials here the confidence to tout their own democracy’s progress, however violent and fragile it still is. And finally, for the youths of Iraq, the inspiration to demand a more perfect country, despite facing an entrenched political elite that has stood in their way.

To report our front-page article on the obstacles to empowerment that youths, on the streets and in Parliament, have faced in Iraq, we conducted about three dozen interviews with young Iraqis around the country.

Here is a sampling of their comments on three topics vital to the country’s future: democracy, faith and the future of the young generation.

DEMOCRACY

“The political leaders have harmed democracy in Iraq. That is what made the Iraqis think that the corruption here is because of the new democracy. It also brought stupid and corrupted people to be high-ranking officials, and they are taking away our freedom.”
– Akeel Muhammad Jawad, 19, student from Hilla

“The democracy of today frustrates us. We are without security and services, and we are afraid of doing our work freely because of targeting. We have become hypocrites, sectarians and nationalists because of this experiment.”
– Salwa al-Jabori, 25, hairdresser, Kirkuk

“Democracy is a beautiful thing, and I used it for the first time in my life during last year’s elections. But I think the entire society of Iraq has no understanding of its meaning. That’s why the progress in the country is going very slowly.”
– Saif Abd al-Amir, 20, student in Najaf

FAITH

“We need Islam to improve our life, because Islam will lead us to prosperity and allow us to stop following the enemy. I changed after 2003 and became more religious because I saw the Holy Koran as accurate, and that Muslims are the target for all of the world.”
– Hind Ali Sabar, 19, student in Baghdad

“We need Islam to play the main role in everything in our life. I was very young in 2003, but I remember that I started praying to God to help us win the war against the U.S.A. and to push them away from our holy land.”
– Marwan al-Safar, 21, student in Baghdad

“For me personally, I became less religious than I was before 2003, for many reasons. There was a shortage of services during Ramadan. There was satellite television that isn’t concerned with religion. That might create a secular generation.”
– Eman Hamed, Baghdad

ROLE OF YOUTHS

“I do not think that the youths have any role, which is really wrong. It’s a disaster. Even the minister of sports and youth is more than 50 years old. It is a big problem in the government that they are so old, because the youths have all the energy. We saw what happened in Egypt when the youth decided to call for change.”
– Abeer Kamil, 20, recent college graduate, Hilla

“The youth is the weapon of the next change in Iraq, and especially in the Kurdistan region, through demonstrations and sit-ins that are forcing change and overthrowing corrupted people.”
– Sherzad Omar Rafeq, 25, attorney in Kirkuk

“Youths here do not have any power because the government controls everything, and they have not given us a chance. The youths are the leaders of the future. Our politicians are old, and we have modern ideas.”
– Ibrahim al-Alwani, 21, shop owner in Ramadi

HELMAND, Afghanistan — Where does a logistics unit like ours fit into a counterinsurgency fight? I put the question to my Marines and didn’t get much back, so my fellow platoon commanders and I dived into the topic more completely.

Our predeployment training required us to discuss counterinsurgency conceptually by introducing the idea of “tactical patience” and discussing our evolving rules of engagement that guaranteed a Marine the right to self-defense but cautioned against exercising this right simply because it could be justified in a specific situation.

I tried to frame the ideas in simple terms, discussing how our actions would affect the fight at large. No, I told them, we wouldn’t be conducting foot patrols, meeting village elders, building schools, kissing infants. We wouldn’t so much be able to positively affect the “hearts and minds” from behind bulletproof glass, but we certainly could bring enormous discredit upon the efforts of our brothers in the infantry who strove to do so.
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Holly Pickett for The New York Times First Lt. Jake Mauro stood by as a man was questioned for “suspicious activity” near an American operating base in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, on Dec. 4, 2008.

PAKTIA, Afghanistan — I have spent six months in Afghanistan, 85 percent of it unembedded.

For many journalists, embedding has become an integral part of reporting in Afghanistan. I know journalists who spend months at a time with the military. One of my colleagues calls it “Embedistan.”

The military’s role in Afghanistan is a critical piece of the story. Without embeds, it would be impossible to cover what men and women in uniform face every day when they go outside the wire, and what Afghans face when the military conducts operations. Embeds also allow journalists to see parts of the country that they couldn’t otherwise visit.

However, the military is only a piece, one perspective, of the story, and being embedded changes what you are able to report.

Holly Pickett for The New York Times Armored vehicles operated by the First Platoon of the 549th Military Police Company parked in a river below a village in eastern Paktia, Nov. 30, 2008.

Aside from the long list of tactical information we can’t report or photograph, the soldiers and commanding officers censor themselves. They are afraid of the repercussions of saying the wrong thing, and are on the lookout for journalists with an agenda.

Senior commanders want us there to highlight the work being done, but to some commanders on the ground journalists are a pain in the neck. One more person to worry about, one more person to keep safe. And by now so many journalists have embedded that the soldiers who have been deployed two or three times have been burned, or they have friends who have been burned, by a story that they didn’t think was accurate or that didn’t reflect well on them.

Holly Pickett for The New York Times Pfc. Kyle Verdin prayed at Forward Operating Base Herrera in Paktia, Nov. 30, 2008.

My first embed was in November 2008 when I joined 101st Airborne units at Forward Operating Base Herrera in Paktia Province, about 13 miles from the Pakistan border.

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I had never been embedded, so nobody knew what to expect from me. I went through an informal vetting process — the soldiers wanted to get to know me and how I operate. The first week I answered their questions, and the second week they answered mine.

One of the soldiers asked me, “If one of us is wounded or dying, would you photograph that?” I said that if there was no one around and he was bleeding to death, I would try and help him. If people were around to help, I was going to do my job and document what was happening. He understood that I had a role to fill, even if it was an uncomfortable one to think about.

Morale was low, but that is one of those incredibly difficult things to photograph. In the military, it’s taboo, and internal emotions are always difficult to access.

Holly Pickett for The New York Times Specialist Charity Bennett, 23, of the 549th Military Police Company watched a DVD in her room at Forward Operating Base Herrera, Dec. 8, 2008.

Just two months before, an Afghan National Police officer had turned on a unit of cavalry scouts and shot several of them, killing one. The soldiers at Herrera were still recovering from a recent rocket attack, roadside bombs and an ambush. They were seeing more violence than they expected, and less positive change than they wanted.

On the Afghan side it is necessary to work unembedded to get a more rounded picture of what’s going on. I think it is always important to be able to talk to Afghans, and the more comfortable they are the more truthful they probably feel they can be with you. Any time you are going into a place armed, people are going to treat you differently.

If a group of armed soldiers rides their Humvees into an Afghan village, the villagers are at the mercy of those soldiers, and Afghans make little distinction between armed soldiers and a civilian journalist accompanying them. They will say things that the Americans want to hear.

Holly Pickett for The New York Times Sgt. First Class Hermes Acevedo met with elders of a village in eastern Paktia.

In Paktia I went with a unit of military police officers to a village near where a roadside bomb had blown up one of the American Humvees. Nobody was injured. The soldiers asked the village elders, “Who is doing this?” The elders said, “It’s people from Pakistan, it’s people from other countries, it’s not us.”

The unit leader said, “I think you know more than you are telling me and it’s going to be a problem for you if there are more roadside bombs in the area.” The Afghan village elders, mostly old men, simply replied, “The Russians left, and you will leave too, eventually.”

Holly Pickett is a freelance photographer based in Cairo. It was her mention of the word “Embedistan” that gave us the name for this series, which is drawn from the experiences of New York Times correspondents, photographers and others who have covered Iraq and Afghanistan, some embedded and some unembedded. We welcome your comments, and experiences.

Bryan Denton for The New York Times Adel Sanfad with a pod of air-to-ground rockets. In the past 10 days, several of these repurposed aviation munitions, recycled for new lives as truck-to-ground weapons systems, have appeared at the front.

In cheerful and crisp English, Adel Sanfad presented his new weapon, which was mounted on a welded frame to the back of his jeep near the front lines in eastern Libya. “These used to be for airplanes,” he said. Then he added, in a flash of pride that was undercut slightly with a wince: “But we modified them.”

Behind Mr. Sanfad was a pod of air-to-ground rockets, of the sort used by attack aircraft to fire on targets below. His system was fully loaded and armed, ready to go. In the past 10 days, several of these repurposed aviation munitions, recycled for new lives as truck-to-ground weapons systems, have appeared at the front, where they have been fired repeatedly by the Forces of Free Libya, as the rebels hoping to unseat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi call themselves. In this case, the weapon was a freshly made accoutrement to Mr. Sanfad’s life as a technical – a mobile combatant on an open truck, roaming the highways of the Libyan desert while mixing civilian and military equipment to wage a conventional war.

When it comes to mounting aviation weapons systems on pickup trucks, these kinds of weapons are, in a word, a sight. They are also a fright. They seem to spring from some post-apocalyptic dream, and in the eyes of many rebels their mere presence among otherwise lightly equipped forces suggests promise and power. But this is not quite so. In truth, the men who fire them have little idea of how far these rockets fly, a limited ability to change their elevation, and, (depending on the makeshift mount), often have no ability to traverse them left or right. Often times, those who Read more…