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MillimeterA Word of Thanks to All of the Troops
Jul 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Bill Miller
Along with our brave troops in uniform, the videographers who brought us the Iraqi conflict should not be forgotten.
The troops are returning from the Iraqi conflict, brave men and women with battle scars etched in their memories forever. We see pictures of the reunions on the nightly news. Returning also are the brave men and women who took the pictures, reported the stories, and gave us the memoirs that will be embedded in our memories for a lifetime. We all know the reporters' names and recognize their faces in the scenes they sent back from places we had never heard of before — Tikrit, Al Kut, Bayji, and a dozen others I cannot pronounce.
But the guys on the other side of the lens, the videographers whose faces remained hidden behind the camouflage they wore, their names only known to the companies who sent them, they too are our heroes. Some returned wounded by the war, others did not return at all.
As we go about our daily business of capturing images for future generations, we should all take a moment to reflect upon the richness of our lives. Our daily routines are varied, from the mundane and boring to the exciting and adventurous.
Sometimes we are asked to sit for hours while the suits ramble on about some new economy that will change the lives of our grandchildren. Other times we are asked to hang from the struts of circling helicopters or climb 600ft. vertical cliffs to demonstrate a new carabiner.
While some of these tasks bore us to death or have us risk breaking our necks, at least most of the time no one is shooting at us. At night we are reasonably certain that we will be returning to the warmth of our homes or the solitude of the trailer park.
My partner for many years, Larry Crowley, was a cameraman for CBS during the Vietnam conflict. While the memories of covering that war are still fresh in his mind, there are still many aspects of what he heard, saw, and captured through his lens that are too painful to talk about.
I know this is true for the dozens of videographers returning from the carnage in the hot deserts of the Middle East. Their own private wars may lay buried within the subconscious for many decades to come, but the pictures and sounds they sent back to us — some through the most amazing technology I have witnessed in my many years of capturing images — will be ours to share with future generations.
These men and women are of a new generation of video-makers. I would like all of us to take a few minutes to thank them, remember them, and think of the sacrifices they made so that the world could witness the war as it was unfolding. The next time you're looking through your viewfinder, the next time you roll tape, take a moment to reflect on the sacrifices these unknown camera people made, perhaps with their own lives. Be grateful that we can all share in a career that offers us such great opportunities to be creative, giving, reflective, sharing, and above all, be videographers in this great nation that gives us the freedom to be whatever we want.
