SAM DECKER: All those years when I wasn’t sure where I was or what I was doing, that roll of film stayed in my pocket. Not the best storage conditions, I told Lilly, so that was one reason not to develop it: all the shots would be fogged or faded. But even if the roll was still good, I wouldn’t do it. No one needs a picture of Conway dead, especially not me. Broad daylight, the two of us hoofing it back to the battalion from the MLR for our first hot meal in ten days, waxing grandiose over the showers and beds calling our names. Suddenly, there’s a whistling sound; I’m knocked off my feet and flat onto my ass. When I stand back up, there’s Conway looking the same as before, only on the ground. It’s a sunny, peaceful morning. If there wasn’t a crater where the Chinese artillery shell had just hit, there’d be no reason to think Conway wasn’t getting a jump on all that sleep we’d just been jawing about. He bragged he’d go fourteen hours straight, maybe sixteen. Twenty, I boasted back, maybe twenty-four. I was getting ready to lie down next to him when I saw the medics.

I wouldn’t have taken the picture if he’d been anyone else. Up until then I’d been grabbing shots of grunts in the chow line, or writing letters, or playing cards, or sleeping off last night’s patrol—because what the hell else would I be taking pictures of? What kind of asshole puts himself in the middle of a war and, instead of trying to do something about the fighting or the bleeding, frames the explosions or the bodies just right to supply the folks back home with some vicarious excitement, some token image to make their lives feel more informed or lucky or safe or whatever else passes for meaning? Forget all that noble gas about bearing witness: anyone who takes war pictures likes doing it. They like it or they wouldn’t be there, because there are plenty of better and easier ways to make a buck. None of them are making a difference. Picture or no picture, people will keep killing each other using methods old and new—day after day, year after year, centuries of killing—until one way or another we’re all dead, and all the guns and cameras of the world are just so much garbage lying in the dirt. The only thing a war photographer does is make the killing look beautiful. He distorts it into a moment frozen in perfect clarity, when an honest photograph would be messy, blurred, and hard to read. No one wants honesty. No one will frame it or print it on a cover or a front page, because honesty is ugly. And once I realized that, a few days into digging my first foxhole, I didn’t want to be a war photographer anymore.