A Dark Topography

Sam Abell to speak at Randolph Community College, 28Feb2012

2012-02-18T11:36:00.006-05:00

Sam freaking Abell will be speaking for free(!) at Randolph Community College on 28 Feb 2012. He'll be teaching his audience how to be good photographers. Unfortunately, at that exact time, Flogging freaking Molly will be speaking at the Orange Peel. They'll be teaching their audience how to be drunk and Irish.

If I hadn't bought tickets three months in advance, I'd probably choose Abell over FM. But I did, and my whole crew is going, so I can't miss it. Thought I'd pass along the press release just the same:

ASMP/NC and Randolph Community College host award-winning documentary photographer Sam Abell

Tuesday, February 28, 2012, at Randolph Community College, Asheboro, NC.. Social hour starts at 6:00 pm and the program starts at 7:00 PM

Sam Abell’s thirty-year career has been dedicated to achieving artistic expression through documentary photography. He has pursued his goals primarily through his lengthy, in-depth coverages for National Geographic magazine and its Book Division. At the same time, he has maintained a career as an artist, teacher, and author.

He has applied himself, particularly, to the photography of cultural landscape: He explores ways in which places can be purely recorded, with images simultaneously shaped by the photographer’s imagination.

In addition to his photography Mr. Abell is a member of the board of the director of the Santa Fe Center For Photography, the George Eastman House, and the University of Virginia Art Museum.

Currently Mr. Abell is photographing the Amazon headwaters for a book project. Mr. Abell is represented by the Kathleen Ewing Gallery, Washington DC.

You must register for this program at: http://abell.eventbrite.com

Friday Forecast: Partly cloudy, with a hail of bad-ass photojournalism

2012-02-16T09:28:00.006-05:00

I hope by now you've seen the MX coverage of the Greenpeace action at Lake Julian. The story broke with my favorite shot of the whole ordeal, which promptly became obsolete as the day went on.

Next up: The ousting of Occupy Asheville from the newly-designated park space in front of city hall. This all goes down at noon tomorrow, and I'll be on the scene with reporter David Forbes and reporter/photog Bill Rhodes.

Follow us:
@DarkTopo
@DavidForbes
@mxnews

Occupy Asheville is the last Occupy camp in the nation, so I'm told, and though I don't expect tear gas and firehouses, I'm betting there will be some really good photos. Stay tuned.

BREAKING: Greenpeace activists breach security at Lake Julian power plant

2012-02-13T07:51:00.001-05:00

Broke the story wide open right here.

i'm worried about you.

2012-02-11T22:38:00.000-05:00

revenge and gratitude

2012-02-01T22:38:00.000-05:00

Pull pin, sqeeze lever: Part II

2012-01-29T21:40:00.000-05:00

Part one was about the lessons learned in burning a Christmas tree. That was a year ago.

Yesterday was a long, rough trip, with lessons of its own: Heat rises. Courtesy is a veneer. Etiquette is for the timid. Long exposures drain batteries. There is never enough time. Shovels aren't long enough. Always check your six.

And it's a good idea, at the end of the day, to set something on fire. Makes a man feel accomplished.

Yancey Railroad, September, 1976

2012-01-25T23:30:00.000-05:00

In the fall of 1976 my parents traveled to Yancey County from Charleston, SC. They were on their honeymoon, and the South Toe river had just flooded in a little town called Micaville. Construction workers were replacing a bridge on the Yancey Railroad, and my dad, ever the railroad enthusiast, stopped to take pictures.

I had no idea these slides existed until after I graduated from college and began working on the Kona project, documenting the remains of the Yancey Railroad. My dad had a way of revealing such information just when you were starting to feel proud of yourself. "Oh, the Yancey Railroad? Yeah, I photographed that thirty years ago. You know, when it was still operating. But don't worry, yours will probably be better."

I remember standing in his office with these slides held up, blinking into a lamp. The railroad was amazing, of course, but what made my jaw drop was the shot of the church at Kona. If not for the mold on the AgfaColor slides, it could have been taken that afternoon. In fact, I had just photographed it that summer.

I was born five years after these photos were taken, and ten years after that, we moved to Yancey County. By then the railroad was gone. The big flood came in 1977, wiping out the work these men in the pictures had done a year earlier. During that flood my wife was born. The tracks are still there outside her mother's house. We were married on a rock, by the South Toe, less than a mile from the place where these photos were shot.

My dad performed the ceremony.

Bill Moree once told me that the only reason we do what we do as photographers is that we like to look at our pictures hanging on the wall. Well, today I shot about five hundred frames of the governor drinking beer at a press conference. A hundred photos for every one of these YRR slides. I doubt I'll ever hang any of them on the wall.

Bill was wrong; there is another reason we do it. I'm not sure what it is. But as I was driving back from the press conference I caught myself composing an email to my dad: "Drank beer with the governor today, here are the shots." Just one sentence. Because, whatever that other reason is, my dad understood it.

All photos by Rev. C D Cooper, III:

Get your Ektar while you can . . .

2012-01-04T23:03:00.001-05:00

HuffPo: Kodak preparing for bankruptcy.

happy new year

2012-01-01T12:42:00.004-05:00

At the start of each year I like to clear out my folder of web-ready images waiting to be posted. And though I sort of feel like year-in-review posts are redundant for this type of blog, especially with the chronological sidebar over there on the right, I have added a few images to represent the best/worst moments.

I was going to caption them all, and then I actually looked at them and decided that they can be summed up very simply: Here's to 2011--May we never see the likes of you again.

I've always been sad to see a year go. Not this time. So, for 2012, my usual refrain: Keep your head down, keep your eyes on the horizon, and keep your hands in the soil, clutching the roots.

A Dark Christmas

2011-12-25T23:55:00.004-05:00

One year ago tonight I shot this photo:

It started snowing Christmas morning, when we still had two families to visit. By nightfall it was clear we were not getting back to the city. We slid into my brother-in-law's farm just as it became full dark.

Around midnight, I went out to shoot this photo. My nine-year-old niece accompanied me, and I offered to pose with her in the shot. ("Why do you want to take a picture of the horse trailer?" "It's not the trailer, it's the culvert.")

So I have these two frames, one with us, one without. I've been trying to post them for a year, but I never could find the right context. It's a difficult Christmas. Isn't it always?

But, in context, placed next to each other, the photos say this: You can't always be warm, or understood, or appreciated. Sometimes, it is enough not to be alone.

Merry Christmas.

(i hid the whiskey bottles in the back.)

2011-12-22T14:13:00.003-05:00

My recyclables are on the cover of the Mountain Xpress this week. This makes three covers in a row!

my lens is bigger than yours.

2011-12-11T17:20:00.002-05:00

Just sayin.

So I was walking by a reflective shop window the other day, when suddenly I stopped and said, “Gosh, who's that ruggedly handsome man with that giant lens?” Then, after he left, I thought, “I better get a lens like that if I ever want to impress the ladies.”

We all know the type. He's an older professional, maybe a doctor or a lawyer, and he's getting back into photography after a long and stressful career. So the first thing he does is go out and buy an f2.8 super-zoom because he can afford it.

Well, I can't.

Furthermore, I never really wanted one. Lest we forget (and these days I sometimes feel like there's a real danger I will forget) the tenet of DarkTopo philosophy that was phrased so well by Robert Capa: If your photos aren't good enough, you're not close enough.

Of course, Capa died from stepping on a landmine. And he probably never had to shoot a poorly-lit Asheville city council meeting, either. So I decided it was time I joined the ranks of all the pros and retired rich guys out there and buy some giant over-compensating zoom. I got on the B&H website and sorted my search results by “most phallic” and weepin' creepin' wombats, do you know how much these things cost?

As an “emerging artist,” I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me. Also, I buy their old lenses. They're usually a lot happier about that than they are about those footprints on their shoulders.

In any event, I'm now the proud owner of the old-school Nikkor 80-200 f2.8 D zoom. I picked it up from KEH for a little over $400. It may not have the sex appeal of the new AF-S lenses, but at least I'm the only kid on my block who has a lens made from a decommissioned artillery shell.

Now, it has come to my attention that this lens is the subject of some controversy. The internet is abuzz with allegations of back-focusing. For those of you who are painters, back-focusing means the actual point of focus is behind the targeted point of focus.

The internet photo commandos have all chimed in on this subject. There are two camps. Some say that it is simply impossible for a Nikkor lens to perform poorly. Others say the lens ALWAYS backfocused, and it's only now in the pixel-peeping digital era that we actually notice it. Then they go on and on about studio tests vs. real world results and call each other's mother a whore.

The moral of this story is: Photographers are jerks. Take me for instance. This blog is pretty much all about how I take pictures of those around me to increase my own renown and fortune, and then complain when it doesn't work. But some of us are REAL jerks. Like the people that point out my faults in the comments section.

Anyway, I downloaded a focus test chart from the incredibly unjerkified Tim Jackson. Out of the kindness of his heart, Jackson came up with a focus test way back when the D70 was current and the internet commandos were yakking about whether or not it displayed backfocus errors. For his generosity, Jackson was of course vilified on the photo fora. See a pattern here?

I printed out the chart and ran the test. Because I know I will get comments about the illegitimacy of my procedures, here is a picture of my tripod (set to 45 degrees), my cable release, the flatness of the chart, and the viewfinder image.

I tested the lens at 200mm, f2.8 at the closest possible focusing distance (around 60 inches).

Here are some 100% crops, taken from the edge of the frame. I use the edge because there's pretty much nothing in the center. Before you leave a snarky comment about how my test isn't valid because I didn't show the center crops, you can get the uncropped, full resolution photos here.

Autofocus:

Manual focus:

The Results

Yes, this lens backfocuses like a mofo. Twenty millimeters is about 3/4 of an inch, which is greater than the depth of field this lens has at those settings.

Of course, the standard response by Nikon folk is that this test has no bearing on real world performance. Apparently, they assume I executed this test in Mordor from the back of a unicorn. Make no mistake: Relying on autofocus with this lens will give your subjects soft eyes and sharp ears.

But, for the detractors of this lens, I feel it my duty to point out the obvious: For the rare shot when you need to zoom all the way to 200mm at the minimum focal distance with a wide open aperture, why don't you just focus manually like a real man?

"Real world" examples:

Conclusion

While we're talking philosophy, there's another tenet of DarkTopoism that should be mentioned here: Cameras and lens are tools to be used, not artifacts to be adored. This idea has drawn fire before, specifically when I posted a picture of my shrapnel-wounded hand after a night in the holler and raised the question of how I would have felt if that hand had been holding a Leica M9.

This lens is fast, it's built like a tank, and it's one-sixth the price of the new AF-S 2.8 zoom. For a savings of $2000 USD, I think I can handle the inconvenience of manual focus at close ranges. After all, some of the finest cameras in the world are manual focus.

Plus, let's not forget what this is all about: Impressing ladies. That $2k I saved will buy some really awesome rims for the DarkTopomobile.

Stay tuned for more photos . . .

Humbug.

2011-12-06T22:35:00.004-05:00

Another Xpress cover this week, plus a fairly in-depth story about Asheville's (tenuous?) grasp on the local business movement. The cover was part of a really fun shoot with the Montford Park Players.

Christmas minus 18 days. Batten down the hatches, folks.

"Max Cooper's subjects are harbingers of things to come"

2011-11-23T09:57:00.002-05:00

Letter to the editor about my Argus cover story. Love that last line: "Lost to all but God."

Aren't we all?

On a related note, last week I met two WWII veterans within an hour. One was in the mall, while I was buying presents. The other was here. Two shockingly different situations, both of them humbling.

I'm out for Thanksgiving. Let's hope we all meet safely on the other side.

Civic Center renamed . . . or is it?

2011-11-23T09:17:00.005-05:00

The theme in council chambers last night was that two people, presented with the same facts, can come to vastly different conclusions. And this morning, there are two conflicting stories:

City Council delays Civic Center renaming vote

Asheville City Council passes Civic Center renaming deal with U.S. Cellular

So, as a media type, I'm fascinated by all the spin on this issue. Even after a public meeting with an on-the-record vote, we still can't figure out what's going on. All I can say is: great galloping wombats, what a long meeting.

smugmug test post

2011-11-13T22:09:00.004-05:00

I've run out of disk space. I'm taking the opportunity to begin hosting images from my Smugmug account, which means YOU can take the opportunity to buy prints of them. Here's a test post with a vertical and a horizontal. What do you think?

McWho?

2011-11-10T18:54:00.004-05:00

. . . and suddenly, we have a new congressman. My photos of Representative McHenry's visit to AVL spice up the Xpress coverage. Mag's is a good room that time of day.

Redistricting is a bizarre business. It's strange to think that the Taylor/Shuler/Mumpower/Miller conflicts of the past don't even apply to us anymore.

AVLArgus on the cover of the Mountain Xpress!

2011-11-09T16:57:00.001-05:00

Read the story here!

run faster, comrade.

2011-10-24T22:08:00.002-04:00

So I found myself downtown with Shovelin' Shane, the Bard, Captain Hook, and dozens of angry protesters. I won't show you too many shots of the protesters, because that would spoil the Asheville Argus piece, which is hot off the press. But they were angry. So angry, in fact, that they made signs.

Now I try to keep politics to a minimum here on DarkTopo, but I don't think it will surprise anyone when I say that if you want to arouse my sympathy, it's a bad idea to call me "Comrade."

However--and I know I'm going to regret saying this--it's a beautiful sentiment. Run faster. And with the crowd chanting, the light fading, the hula-hoop girls gyrating, and the regular Asheville nutjobs staggering around like milkweeds with legs, it was really surreal to see two of the most stable, familiar faces I know in the crowd. Oh, and Captain Hook.

The Old World is Still Behind You

It's been a Blitzkrieg of a year. I feel like I walk around with the Old World in my head all day, waiting to resurface in some useless, morose fashion. Shovelin' Shane knows what I'm talking about. I think, at 30, we all have a pretty good idea. And I'd like to say it was a Blitzkrieg of a night, but . . . well, we're 30, and we go to bed early.

Run faster, comrade. Was that how we felt, back when we thought we knew what darkness looked like?

Even if it was, that was then, and this is now.

Bokehlepathy

Now I'm going to tell you a deep dark secret about portraiture. It has to do with bokeh, that Japanese term for the area of the image that is out of focus. Bokeh is the topic of much discussion on the interwebs. Good bokeh, bad bokeh, smooth bokeh, nervous bokeh. Photographers spend unbelievable sums on lenses due to the character of their bokeh. This is especially important in portraiture, where shallow depth of field is all but requisite.

But all of that is a lie. You've been fooled by the politicians and Wall Street bankers into thinking bokeh is something you can buy like soap or gasoline. The truth, Comrades, is this: Those out-of-focus highlights in the background of your portraits are really the subject's thoughts.

And in the next picture, we can see that Captain Hook's thoughts are a bit . . . sparse:

Must be because of the hat.

Anyway, like a lot of things on the internet, once you see it you can never un-see it. It sticks in your consciousness. History is the same way. That's what we're studying here, right? Aren't all photographs history?

The Times

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast ...
The present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’ ...
-Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin'

So we ate at Burgermeister's. What better place for a crew of malcontents to end up on a Saturday night after a protest? It's a strange world we live in. Downtown, dozens of people bemoan the decline of American prosperity. Across the bridge, we sit down and buy a 3000 calorie meal for $10. I pass the camera across the table:

If all photographs are history, doesn't that make photography a study of the Old World? I can go through old negatives and see my friends, clear as as a cold river, in a time when the World Trade Center was still standing, when we all weighed 30 pounds less, when my father was still alive, when none of us had heard of iPods or Facebook.

The price of all that history? You can't join the new world. From the moment you pick up the camera, you will always be on the outside, looking in.

Run faster. We are too old, too grounded, too established to be complimented by the beauty of that sentiment. Not only is the Old World is still behind us, it's catching up. Sometimes, when I put on my dad's cap or load a camera with film, it almost seems like we're waiting for it.

It's an old story, that wistful search for days gone by. But these times we live in don't allow for idle wandering. Like Dylan said, there's a battle outside and it's raging.

And I say running is for cowards. A real man stands his ground . . .

. . . but you should always--always--check your six.

AvlArgus: Collected Street Portraits

2011-10-16T10:53:00.001-04:00

Some wicked awesome street portraits in the Argus this week. Shot with my trusty and tedious Voigtländer Perkeo. Nothing says "dedication" like scale focusing!

New Work in SHOTS!

2011-10-09T11:46:00.002-04:00

The new issue of the super-prestigious SHOTS magazine includes a piece from yours truly . . . in fact, it's a self-portrait! All those years of art school finally paid off. Get the issue on the magazine rack at your local hipster book store and check it out.

The Other Moments

2011-10-07T21:55:00.004-04:00

Today is my anniversary, and let me tell you one thing, DarkTopo fans, I don't deserve her. I am daily humbled. As a photographer, all I can do is continue to document her one great lapse in judgement.

Over on the commercial blog I've made another post, in which I show some nice portraits that follow all the rules. But DarkTopo, like marriage, demands more than pretty pictures. It's not even about breaking the rules. It's that sometimes--and in my case, often--what you see through the viewfinder makes you forget the rules are there at all.

AvlArgus: The Day It All Started

2011-10-02T22:41:00.000-04:00

Argus coverage of the Occupy Asheville event. Already getting snarky comments!

Dr. Warner Anthony: The DarkTopo Interview

2011-09-28T10:33:00.007-04:00

Dr. Warner Anthony lives in the woods. I had not been to his house in fifteen years—not since he was the clerk of the session in the church my father served—and you forget, in that amount of time, how beautiful a place is. Anthony's house is more than beautiful, it's intentional. The walls are mostly glass, a vast deck wraps around the exterior, and the light shifts and changes as we sit in his living room, talking about the people he killed.

“Does it bother me?” My father's friend sits with his back to the open window. A breeze stirs the air through the screen, threatening to sound the giant windchimes that hang from the ceiling. “Obviously it does, because I bring it up. But that was the price I paid for the job I was hired to do.”

The job: US Army medic, 99th infantry division, 395th regiment, L company. For his service, he received the Bronze Star, a presidential citation, and two Purple Hearts.

“I'm not ashamed of anything that happened,” he says as soon as we sit down. Like other veterans I've interviewed, he has little patience for small talk. “You can ask me anything.”

I remember standing in church and hearing Anthony's voice over the rest of the congregation. Like everything else he does, he prayed with intent. No idle recitation; Anthony spoke with the surety that God was listening. No one else in the room prayed like that except my father, and it was his job.

With the same intent, Anthony tells the story I've asked to hear. He joined the European theater just in time for what Americans call the Battle of the Bulge. Germans call it the Ardennes Offensive, after the frozen landscape in which it took place. By any name, the five-week battle resulted in American casualties four times greater than those of the decade-long War on Terror.

My father could remember hearing Hitler on the radio. “In the 1939-41 period,” he wrote in his memoirs about radio broadcasting, “international shortwave broadcasting was coming into prominence. We could hear, first hand, the nightly news from BBC, and the ravings of the maniac from Berlin.”

The thought makes my skin crawl. I've watched the Triumph of the Will, and listened to Hitler speak on YouTube. But to hear it live? It's a peculiar American horror, facing the fact that the second World War was not always history.

Transcription excerpt. Interview questions in bold.

Warner Anthony: So we went down to this first pillbox and crawled up on top of it. Now, you know, these pillboxes were interlaced. One pillbox covered another pillbox which covered a third pillbox. So you were under machinegun fire and mortar fire, so we went in there at night and built what we called a beehive charge. They were shaped like the hay beehives, you know, the fiber beehives. What happens is when you ignite that, it implodes in it.

MC: Shapes the charge down.

WA: Yeah, it shoots down. There was probably two feet of soil on top of three feet of concrete on top of this pillbox. And so the beehive charge went off and . . . only two of us went in there to look, and one guy stuck his head in to look, and said “we've killed everybody in there.”

And I went in and looked, and to this day I'm still sorry that I looked. Because every exposed piece of skin had blood coming out of it. The face, the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the back of the hands, the palm of the hands, all the skin was just exuding blood from the concussion.

MC: What made you look? Were you confirming kills . . . ?

WA: No. Idle curiosity. I've not changed that attitude at all. I want to see. It's in my nature. It's not always good or bad, but I wanted to see.

I have two conflicting feelings about this interview: Awe and guilt. I have this story that I want you to hear, that I believe you need to hear. But who am I to tell it?

I reckon that I am better educated about history than 99% of Americans my age, and yet my chief relation to the war is through video games. My next most intimate experience with combat is this first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan, which invariably reduces me to tears. Everything that Anthony says about the American populace, quoted below, is also true of me.

I have no way of understanding what Warner Anthony went through. He told me so himself: “In your wildest imagination, you cannot conceive what we went through.” Then he stopped and rephrased it: “If you weren't there, you may not know what we did.”

WA: We got there in early November. And from that day on, dusk was at four o'clock. Sunrise was at eight o'clock, and it was foggy all the time . . . We had five divisions online. The Germans had seventeen. They overwhelmed us . . . we had no buildup. We ran out of ammunition. We ran out of food. We ran out of everything . . . Our division covered a four and half mile front. A division in combat is supposed to cover a half-mile front. We were covering nine times what we should have been covering, because they said, “This is an inactive front.” But they were wrong. Hence, the Battle of the Bulge.

My father was a student of history. My much-discussed copy of Adolf Hitler was his. In addition to that, and his memoirs, he left this:

I wash my hands after I touch it. Why, then, do I keep it?

The romance of the second World War saturates the American subconscious. From thrillers to romantic comedies, Hollywood movies continue to use as a backdrop the familiar history of the war. We compare politicians we don't like to Hitler, and call any aggressive, regimented person a Nazi. We build stone memorials and inscribe them with noble sayings, and re-subtitle war movies with wry humor.

At the same time, there is a story I tell about my first day as a teacher: I told my class about Robert Capa's famous photos from D-Day, and they said, “Cool. What's D-Day?”

Genocide, my father once told me, “is the worst thing in the world.” And that thought has stayed with me, in this modern age when we believe that everything from public nudity to organic farming is a political act, throughout all the moral relativism of art school, surviving even my own existentialism. One thing I know is true: This helmet once protected a head in which Nazi thoughts danced like black lightning.

I keep it because there is great danger in reducing history to myth. The human condition is one of denial—look at Neville Chamberlin. We get so caught up in what we think, and what we suppose, and what we believe. And soon we'll tell ourselves that it never happened, and that, even if it did, it couldn't possibly happen again. But here, on my desk, is proof.

NPR reports that of the 16 million Americans who served in the second World War, less than two million are still alive.

At 86, Anthony is very much alive, though he wears a brace on his knee, and occasionally his hearing aides sing out with feedback. His small, good-natured dog barks at inopportune times as I record our conversation.

After the war Anthony became a chemist for Rohm and Haas, leading a varied career (including a brief stint as a photographer for National Geographic). In retirement, his life is full: He has many children and grandchildren that live all over the country. He has found a new companion after the death of his wife, and they travel together, alternating between the North Carolina mountains and Florida. He continues to serve the church, and continues to speak with his intent voice.

“We talked about forgiveness in the Bible class today,” he says, bringing up a touchy subject. I ask him if he's angry. But we're not talking about the Germans.

MC: How can you go through what you went through, and then look at the populace that we have to day, and not be angry?

WA: Oh, I'm angry. Oh, my God, I am really pissed off. Because I know that the responsibility rests with us. That's where the blame lies . . . and we Americans do not pick up that responsibility.

MC: Why not?

WA: It is a form of lazy indifference. And we are so busy knowing what the number one song is, we're so busy with Michael Jackson, we're so busy pouring money into a football game. Betty Ann and I have gotten interested in basketball. Every man on that court is making a million dollars. We have a whole disjointed society. What's the matter with us?

MC: I don't know. And as I said, I'm kind of a rogue journalist these days, and if I can answer that question, then I'll quit. And with politics, I don't even care about it anymore.

WA: But, you see, you cannot turn your back on it. You may not turn your back on it.

MC: I don't believe any of it makes a difference. Let me rephrase that: I don't think if I vote for Obama or Mitt Romney, it's going to be a dramatic difference either way.

WA: But you see, you were asking me earlier, did I feel like it was my responsibility to do what I did in the war. And I said to you, there was no one lower than me. I could not take the responsibility for that war, but I have the responsibility to speak out now, and say it's wrong. Maybe we can stop these wars because we can't afford the luxury of them anymore.

I transcribed much of our interview before deciding it wasn't enough. My recording was poor in quality, and much of it was interrupted by room noise, or personal conversation. But reading a transcript is nothing like hearing this story from that intent, purposeful voice.

So I added the audio to photos I took of Anthony that day, and below are the resulting videos. I've done my best to keep things unedited and truthful. I mark gaps in the conversation with transitions between the two photos.

As Anthony walked me out to my car, I tried to thank him for his service. He just shook his head; “Oh, come on.” I don't know what to make of that, or any of it. Half the men who served in L Company never came home. They are not here to be interviewed or thanked.

It's not my place to force gratitude on any of them. Why should they accept hollow honors from those of us who will never understand, just so we can assuage our guilt? The best we can do: Let the service of the dead stand on its own. Let the ones who came home speak for themselves.

Counting Kills: "I have no idea how many people I killed, but I was a very good shot, and I did a lot of shooting."

Medic Training: "That's one of yours."

Destroying Pillboxes: "To this day, I'm still sorry that I looked."

Joining Up: "It was the first time the Feds ever lied to me and fooled me. They continued to lie to me, but they never fooled me again."

Dec. 19, 1944: "We slaughtered 500 men."

Two Medics: "That's an American, kill him."

A Christmas Present: "I want to see where I fought."

Two Purple Hearts: "From then on, I carried a rifle."

New Argus Post!

2011-09-22T18:35:00.001-04:00

The Asheville Argus: Fog on the Top Deck