The e-mail was a punch in the gut: “the soldier you made famous — killed himself last Saturday — thought you should know.” I knew at once what the message meant: Joseph Dwyer was dead. Dwyer was the subject of a photo I’d taken during the first week of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the medic running toward safety with an injured Iraqi child in his arms. Splashed across newspapers worldwide, it brought Joseph instant fame.
That photo was a tremendous accomplishment for me; I was only 25 when I took it. Now, though, the picture was suffused with a different meaning.
Joseph Dwyer was dead of a substance overdose at 31. I’d read news reports that he was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. He thought he was being hunted by Iraqi killers. He’d been in and out of treatment. He couldn’t, his mother told the media, “get over the war.”
But as I stared at his image on my wall, I couldn’t dodge the question: Did this photo have anything to do with his death? News reports said he hated the celebrity that came with the picture. How much, I wondered, did that moment contribute to the burdens he’d brought home with him?
In the predawn hours of March 25, 2003, the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment was in Mishkab, south of Baghdad, contending with ambushes from all directions. I was embedded with the unit as a photojournalist for The Army Times.
U.S. aircraft were dropping bombs on Iraqi fighters, who were using the cover of the nearby village to launch their attacks against the 7th Cavalry. Fire engulfed the palm trees that lined the Euphrates River. A few minutes later, a man appeared, jogging up from the village, clasping a makeshift white flag.
He said there were injured people in the village who needed immediate medical attention. Fearing an ambush, the unit commander told the man that the Army would treat the wounded, but that they had to be brought to the road.
The man left. A few minutes later, he was running up the dirt road again, this time carrying a 4-year-old boy named Ali Sattar. A medic appeared to my right and ran to the Iraqi man, who handed over the injured child. The soldier was Dwyer.
In June 2003, a few months after that incident, I traveled back to Iraq to document Ali Sattar’s fate. The boy’s leg injuries had been massive, and he hadn’t been able to receive proper follow-up medical care. Ali couldn’t walk without a painful limp, so his relatives mostly carried him.
Joseph and I hadn’t had much time to speak in Iraq, so I was surprised to get an e-mail from him one day a month or two after my return to Mishkab. He wanted to know whether I knew what had happened to the boy in the photo.
“I was afraid the kid didn’t make it,” he wrote after I sent him details. “I wish I was there with you back at that village.”
I heard from Joseph a couple more times. He didn’t tell me he’d been struggling to fit into civilian life after his three months in Iraq. I first learned of his problems with PTSD in a 2005 news story about his arrest in Texas after a standoff at the apartment where he was living. He thought there were Iraqis trying to get in, and he was shooting at the phantoms.
The last message Joseph sent me was on Dec. 1, 2004.
“When I first got back I didn’t really want to talk about being over there to anyone,” he wrote. “Now looking back on it, it’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever done. I hope you feel the same about what you have done. . . . You told everyone’s story.”
About a week after Joseph died, his mother called me. Maureen Dwyer told me that she’d read the statements claiming that Joseph hated the fame the picture had brought him, and she wanted me to know that they weren’t true. Joseph loved the photograph, she said. He’d always been proud of it. He just felt somewhat embarrassed at being singled out because so many other soldiers were doing exactly what he had done.
