David Morrell: Double Image

The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events. Stieglitz told me, “When I make a photograph, I make love!” – Ansel Adams

THE PIT SMELLED OF LOAM, mold, and urine. It was three feet wide, seven feet long, and three feet deep, the size of a shallow grave. Coltrane had been lying in it for thirty-six hours, a rubberized sheet under him, an earth-colored nylon sheet suspended over him, anchored by dead branches and further camouflaged by fallen pine needles. Two hundred yards below the wooded slope on which he was concealed, vehicles were arriving. Six big open-backed trucks jounced along a narrow road into a clearing in the deserted valley. With an echoing rumble, a bulldozer and a backhoe struggled to keep up. A few flakes of snow drifted to the frost-hardened ground as the convoy stopped next to a rectangular area, roughly fifty by a hundred feet, where the ground had been disturbed.

Having waited so long, Coltrane frowned toward the increasingly dark clouds drifting into the valley and prayed that the weather wouldn’t turn against him. He raised one of the four cameras arranged before him, focused its zoom lens, and started taking photographs. Men in tattered winter clothes, clutching automatic rifles, jumped from the trucks and scanned the slopes around them. Despite the care with which Coltrane had hidden himself, he tensed when they concentrated in his direction. Afraid he’d been spotted, he ducked his head and pressed himself harder against the floor of the pit. When the men changed their attention to another area of the valley, Coltrane let out his breath, taking more pictures. A bandy-legged, heavy-chested, beefy-faced man with dense dark hair and a thick mustache waved directions to the bulldozer and the backhoe.

Got you, you bastard. Coltrane pressed the shutter button, unable to get over his good fortune. Back in Tuzla, his contact on the UN inspection team had spread out a map and indicated a dozen areas that they intended to investigate. Of course, they wouldn’t get around to those areas until they finished with the dozen areas they were already investigating. The schedule depended on the weather, which was due to worsen now that November was almost half over. By the time the investigators reached all the suspected areas, the men they wanted to prosecute would have eliminated the evidence against them.

Coltrane had chosen the most isolated spot, his compass and terrain map preventing him from getting lost as he made his way, burdened by two knapsacks, across streams and ridges toward this slope. Concealed among bushes, waiting two hours, he had studied the rugged landscape for any sign that he had been noticed. Only after dark had he constructed his primitive shelter and crawled into it, exhausted, craving sleep but knowing that food had to come first, the cheese sandwiches and dry sausage he had brought along. But even before eating, there was one thing he knew he absolutely had to do: check his cameras.

Throughout the next day and night, Coltrane had remained in his cold hiding place, permitting himself movement only when he ate more sausage, drank from a straw inserted in his canteen, or turned onto his side, urinating into a plastic bottle. All the while, he had second-guessed himself, telling himself that he was wasting his time, that he had chosen the wrong location, or that nothing was going to happen in any location and he might as well hike out of here. The dingy bar where his fellow photojournalists hung out in Tuzla was beginning to seem more and more appealing. But he hated to surrender to impatience. Giving up wasn’t in his nature. And now he was overjoyed that he hadn’t. Not only was he getting prime photos of what the UN inspection team had suspected was happening at various sites but he was also documenting the participation of the man they most wanted to nail.

Dragan Ilkovic. A perfect name for a monster.

The son of a bitch leaned his rifle against the front of a truck and braced his hands on his powerful-looking hips, watching with satisfaction as the bulldozer went to work, plowing earth. The backhoe moved into position behind it. Heart pounding against the rubber sheet, Coltrane kept rapidly taking pictures, glad that he had brought four cameras, each with a different lens and film speed, some with black-and-white film, some with color, so that he wouldn’t have to waste time changing film.

Below him, a man with a rifle shouted, pointing fiercely at what the bulldozer had exposed. The beefy-faced man hurried over, yelling commands at the backhoe’s driver. For a frustrating moment, the commotion hid what agitated them, but the group quickly parted, some of them rushing to help unload a large piece of equipment from a truck, and Coltrane reacted with horror, the small image in his viewfinder intensified by the magnification of his zoom lens.

He was staring at corpses, a soul-searing countless jumble of them. The bodies had been thrown into the mass grave with such careless haste, so tangled among one another, that it was impossible to know which leg belonged to which torso, which arm to which shoulder to which neck to which skull. The confusion became more manifest as the weight of the bulldozer crushed spines and rib cages. Clothes had disintegrated, flesh had rotted, creating a common putrescent black mush from which gray bones protruded and lipless mouths gaped in silent, eternal anguish.

During the war, this region in eastern Bosnia was supposed to have been a UN-controlled safe haven for Muslims. From hundreds of miles around, as many as fifteen thousand Muslims had hurried here, seeking protection. The target had been too tempting for the Serbs, who surrounded the area and bombarded it, forcing the UN troops to surrender. Surprisingly, the Serbs had let the Muslim children go. But they raped the women – to breed the Muslims out of existence by forcing Muslim women to bear Serbian children. And as for the men… Coltrane’s mouth filled with bile as he worked the cameras, taking more and more photographs of what remained after the Serbs had loaded the Muslim men into trucks and driven them to isolated valleys like this one, where they dug pits with bulldozers and backhoes, lined the Muslim men up on the edge of the pits, and shot them.

Some of the pits, like the one Coltrane photographed, held as many as four hundred corpses, he had been told. It took a lot of hate and determination to get the job done, but the Serbs had been up to the challenge. When they had finally shot the last Muslim in the back of the head, they had used the bulldozers to spread earth over the bodies, and that was that – problem solved, everything neat and tidy. Except, when the war ended and Bosnia had been carved into Serb, Croat, and Muslim regions, the UN had started talking about outrages against humanity. A war-crimes tribunal was convened in the Netherlands, and suddenly a lot of Serb commanders, like Dragan Ilkovic down there, had become wanted men. They had to be tidier.