Boots on the Ground - The Washington Post Magazine
Washington Post photographer Andrea Bruce Woodall has traveled to Iraq five times since the war began. Most recently, she arrived a week shy of the first anniversary of the invasion in March and stayed through a period in which a widespread insurgency against the U.S. occupation flared anew, and U.S. fatalities approached 1,000. For some Americans, the chaos and violence in Iraq has receded to a kind of grim background noise, distant and impersonal. Woodall set out to dispel that creeping indifference by getting up-close and specific. Here, through her camera's lens and her personal journal, is Iraq as it's seen from the bulletproof window of a Humvee.
The photos in this week's magazine were sitting, unpublished, on Andrea's memory cards and the words were in the personal journal she kept on her travels covering the war in Iraq. Finding these images and putting them on the page with her words is the best work a photo editor can do.