In October 2010, on assignment in Afghanistan for the New York Times, Silva was on a combat patrol outside Kandahar, embedded with members of the 4th Infantry Division. Entering a blasted and desolate compound, he was following two soldiers and a bomb-sniffing dog on a narrow trail through mounds of rubble. The recent NATO troop surge had driven the Taliban away from direct confrontation while greatly increasing their use of IEDs and land mines. Silva and Times reporter Carlotta Gall had come to document that shift.
"As fate would have it, I found exactly the story we were looking for," recalls Silva. "I stood on it."
He remembers a metallic ting and a deafening bang, and he was instantly on the ground, covered in dust and blood. The soldiers ran back, dragged him out of the kill zone and began administering first aid. He couldn't feel anything, except, oddly, in his shooting wrist, and Silva managed to squeeze off three more frames before he dropped his camera. Then he looked down at his legs. "I could see them dangling and shredded," he says. "I knew they were gone."
The explosion had destroyed Silva's left leg below the knee, and his right leg above it. But he had also been very lucky that day. The antipersonnel mine he'd stepped on was rigged to a second device, a metal canister filled with 30 pounds of homemade explosives that hadn't detonated. "If it had gone off, they wouldn't have found enough of me to put in a matchbox," he says.
He stayed conscious throughout the entire ordeal. The medics applied tourniquets and let him smoke a cigarette, and he used Gall's phone to call his wife of 25 years, Viv, in South Africa. "I told her, 'My legs are gone, but I think I'll be all right.' She said, 'Please don't die,' and I told her, 'I'll try not to."
Silva's career began during the political violence that wracked South Africa as apartheid ended. In the early 1990s, Silva was a member of a small group of young photographers dubbed the Bang-Bang Club. In 1994, while covering street clashes, the group was caught in a crossfire and Silva's best friend, Greg Marinovich, was wounded, shot three times. Another friend, Ken Oosterbroek, a 31-year-old photographer for the Johannesburg Star, was killed. Silva was unscathed. Afterward, he felt guilty that he had paused to photograph his friend lying dead at his feet.
Another Bang-Bang Club member, Kevin Carter, later won the Pulitzer Prize for a photo of a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. The public condemnation Carter received, calling him a vulture for not helping the child, may have pushed him over the edge. Three months later, he ran a hose from the tailpipe of his pickup through the window and asphyxiated himself.
"It's not only the guilt of survival; it's also the guilt of what you've witnessed," says Silva. "So there's a lot of guilt associated with this. There's no way you can avoid it."
0 komentarze:
Prześlij komentarz