She
also shared a photo of an xray showing an anti aircraft bullet lodged in a soldier’s
throat as she wrote the heart wrenching piece below…
‘SOLDIER
X: While I made portraits of our wounded soldiers at the military hospital in
Maiduguri, one of the soldiers made a statement that I haven’t been able to
shake off, ‘one way you know a soldier has been hit is that they suddenly start
shouting out names of family members’.
This
statement kept playing over and again in my mind, especially when I got the
most colorful welcome from my family, barely a week away on this journey. Many soldiers
play this long overdue welcome party in their heads daily, and the sad thing is
that for some, it may never happen.
I
had long conversations with soldiers about how they got wounded in battle. They
told me how grateful they were to be alive, some of their colleagues weren’t as
lucky.
I
also got to speak with medical personnel, on the uniqueness of their work in a
war against terror.
I’ll
share all their stories here and start by introducing Soldier X, who I never
met, but made a photograph of his Xray .An anti aircraft bullet, big and strong
enough to tear through the titanium body of an airplane, was lodged in his
throat, and for some reason, it didn’t blow his head off, this soldier lived
through his surgery and got to take the removed bullet home as a reminder. This
is a wicked wicked war! Why anyone would chose weapons made to attack war
planes and use it on a fellow human at close range, even in war there should be
rules.
Lieutenant
Ologodo told me something really important, that if you don’t believe in God,
working here will make a convert out of you, the frequency of witnessing the
darkest of evil deeds, alongside what can only be miraculous, will open your
heart somehow. This is such a brutally wicked war’.
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