John Case - The Murder Artist

Originally “Afghan Wedding” was part of an hour-long special about Afghanistan, pegged around a Donald Rumsfeld we-haven’t-forgotten-you visit to that beleaguered country. I got a nice long interview with the secretary of defense about the state of the postwar recovery. I interviewed Karzai. We got some excellent tape of the crew working on the reconstruction of the Kandahar-Kabul road. And then there was a pastiche of feel-good stuff about life in liberated Kabul and Kandahar. Girls going to school. The opening of a health clinic for women. Exhilarated Afghanis listening to music. Dancing. Capped off with the wedding: Afghan couple celebrates long-postponed nuptials.

The wedding was to take place in a village near Kandahar. A safe zone, or so we were told. The crew and I got there with our equipment, no problem. Even with the cameras, the wedding got started on time. And then the happy occasion turned into a nightmare when the crew of an off-course U.S. F-16 seeking a rumored Taliban conclave misread the wedding tableau on the ground.

Four killed, fifteen wounded.

The segment was removed from the hour-long progress report about Afghanistan. Now the wedding footage was going to be part of an ambitious show about collateral damage: Gulf I (Saddam and the Kurds), Mostar (the bridge), Gaza and Jerusalem (noncombatants killed by both sides), Afghanistan (my wedding piece), Liberia (chopped-off hands and feet), Gulf II (friendly-fire fatalities). The show – Big Dave was angling for an Emmy – would finish with a segment about the mother of all collateral-damage stories: September 11.

I cue up my segment on the iMac. On the monitor, the nightmare has not yet begun. The camera cuts between the glowing faces of the bride and groom, then moves in for a close-up of the tiny American flags pinned to their nuptial finery.

“Dad, can we eat breakfast in the TV room and watch cartoons?”

I jump. Liz took off with the kids more than six months ago and one week into their visit, I’m still not used to the way they just materialize . “Jeez, I gotta put bells on you guys.”

Kevin laughs.

Sean says, “Can we?”

“What?”

“Eat breakfast in the TV room? Please? ”

I shrug. “Why not?”

“Great! C’mon, Kev.”

But Kevin doesn’t budge. “When are we going to the Renaissance Fair?”

I’m wondering what I can get away with. “I’m thinking… noon.”

“No way!” Kev complains. “We’ll miss the whole thing.”

“Kevin,” his brother tells him, “it doesn’t even start till eleven. And it goes till seven.” Then, because he’s just learned to tell time, Sean adds: “P.M.”

Kevin gives his brother a look. “No kidding, P.M.” He turns to me. “You promise? Noon?”

I pretend to think about it. “Nahhhh, I can’t promise .”

Sean gives a little gulp of a laugh and then the two of them moan in chorus: “Daaaaad.”

At least they know, after a week, when I’m kidding. The first couple of days, worried looks flashed from one to the other. To say they’d forgotten my sense of humor understates it: they’d forgotten what I’m like – a depressing reminder that five months had been just about long enough to turn me into a stranger to my sons.

When the kids are gone, I cue up the bits of footage I picked out last night for possible cuts. I mute the audio and lean back to watch. I take some time checking out how various cuts will affect the transitions.

And I decide that maybe the dark-man sequence has to go. It’s thirty-eight seconds long and if I can live without it, I’m just about home free.

One last look.

The dark man is one of the bride’s brothers. The ceremony is over and he’s holding his weapon – it’s an AK – in one outstretched hand. With a loopy grin on his face, he squeezes off a few rounds in sheer jubilation. I like this, the irony of gunfire as celebration in a country where the sounds of war never seem to stop. Just as the camera closes on the man’s gleeful face, the whole screen jumps.

That jolt was, in fact, the impact of the first bomb from the F-16.

The dark man’s grin collapses into slack-jawed astonishment, then turns into a puzzled contemplation of his weapon, as if it might somehow be responsible for what’s happening. He’s still connecting the dots when the second bomb detonates, this one so close the screen instantly fills with dust and debris. Visible only in silhouette, the dark man goes airborne, body hurtling through the air. Then he’s propped up against a rock, powdered in dust, eyes dazed, blood seeping from an ear.

The camera shifts to me. I’m coated in dust, too, standing in front of a rocky outcrop and talking into a microphone. Then we see a group of women, wailing and pointing toward the sky. Me again. Then the bewildered bride staring at the face of her fatally wounded groom.

I roll it back, check the frame counter. The sequence is good, but it’s peripheral. I tap a few keys and it’s… gone.

I tinker with a cut I made last night and shave off the remaining few seconds I need, then roll it through. I stop when I hit the image of the dark man – somehow a few frames survived my edit. I delete them and roll forward, just to make sure the transitions are clean. I freeze it when the kids come in – for what must be the tenth time now – to remind me that it’s time to go. “ Past time to go,” Kev says. “Almost twelve-thirty.”

“Let’s go-ohhhh!”

“Let’s be off,” Kevin says in a funny, stilted voice – a knightly voice, I realize.

“Yes! Your loyal servants Sean and Kevin beg thee!”

Suddenly, I’m engulfed by the two of them: the towheaded Lord Kevin and his mirror image, Sir Sean. They tug at my sleeves and rock from foot to foot, as if they have to pee.

“Just let me-”

“Pleee-eeeeeeze!”

With a sigh, I reach for the mouse. “Okay.”

“Who’s that?” Sean asks, pointing at the monitor.

I paused on a frame that shows the groom’s face, his eyes wild, his face obscured by a skein of blood.

“Just a guy,” I tell him.

“What’s the matter with him?” Kevin asks as the haunted and battered face of the wounded groom disappears from the screen. What the boys couldn’t see was that his legs had been blown off. What they did see was the terror on his face.

I click through the shutdown procedure to close out the application, then pop out the disk. “He was scared,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because he was in a war, and he was hurt and that’s… that’s scary.”

“I want to see it,” Sean insists.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because we have to go, ” I tell them, pushing back from the desk.

Sean bursts for the door, but Kevin stays where he is, big blue eyes locked on me. “Is that man going to die?”

I hesitate. Finally, I say, “Yeah.”

I put my arm on Kevin’s shoulder and try to steer my son toward the door, but Kev doesn’t budge. “Dad?”

“What?”

“Were you there… with that man?”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t you help him?”

I take a breath. “No. No one could help him.”

While this is true – the man died less than three minutes after the footage was shot – Kev’s question makes me uncomfortable. The groom was beyond assistance, yes. And I was able to help some of the others. Still, we kept filming.

Kevin nods, but after a moment, he says, “Daddy?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think the man wanted someone to take his picture.”

I get down on my haunches, so I’m at my son’s level. “Sometimes if you show a terrible thing – like war – then people all over the world can see how terrible it is and that can help stop it. I think the man-”