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Richard Whelan, Biographer/book, "Robert Capa: A Biography" [University of Nebraska Press]/Michael Hoffman, Philadelphia Museum of Art/book, "Robert Capa/Photographs"

A Thousand Words March 14, 2008 Novelist Jim Lewis once believed that photographs were a necessary part of any wartime tale. Fallujah, however, changed all that. Lewis told us in 2004 that graphic documentation of violence doesn't help anyone understand the story.

The window of a Humvee rolling through Baghdad's dangerous streets is essentially a television, watched in the dark. The glass is dirty and three inches thick: everything has a hazy and muted look, like a rerun of an old seventies movie. Humvees are dim inside even on sunny days; you can see out, but Iraqis can't see in, any more than a sitcom character can see us when we watch. Even the proportions are right: the older Humvee windows have the squarish shape of an old-fashioned picture tube; the latest armor kits feature wider, more horizontal windows, like the letterbox of plasma screens. And these screens show, for the American soldier-viewers, the day-to-day life of seven million souls: Iraqi children walking to school, men lounging in chairs outside of businesses, a food seller grilling meats. Women swathed in black abayas (so rare before the invasion and so common today) shuffling through the streets. Tall concrete blast walls, everywhere.

Chris Hondros / A Window on Baghdad hondros images from windows of humvee in iraq