The Shattered Lens

by Jonathan Alpeyrie

  Born in 1910 in Berdychiv, a small town with a large Jewish population in what was then the Russian Empire (now central Ukraine), Theophile Lieberman arrived in France when he was only three months old. Theo’s father worked as a showman. When the war broke out in 1914 he enlisted. He fought in the Dardanelles, and then at Verdun in 1916. He came back from the front in February 1919.

  Theo stopped going to school at the age of fourteen. The children had to work in show business to help earn money. In the 1930s Theo decided to leave his father to set up his own troupe, which was rather successful.

  As soon as World War II broke out in September 1939 he volunteered in order to obtain French nationality. He was enrolled in an antitank unit, then transferred to the all-black Eighth Senegalese Colonial Regiment. He was a sergeant with a four-gun battery of antitank guns and fought at Sedan in May 1940. His unit was hit hard by German infantry and tank attacks. Because of the Eighth Regiment’s heroic resistance, the Germans sent in Stuka dive-bombers to finish them off. It worked. Theo and a few other survivors—most of them wounded, including himself—dragged themselves into a ditch near a small bridge. After an agonizing time in that ditch a German column passed nearby. A Wehrmacht soldier unloaded his machine gun on the wounded black troops. Fortunately for Theo the Germans ran out of ammo. But he still got hit in the groin. He spent three days eating worms from his wounds, after which he was picked up by another Wehrmacht column with a doctor. They sent him by rail to Germany to be treated. A German surgeon saved his life but had to amputate a leg. I was also convinced that he’d lost the function of his genitals, though I can’t recall anyone telling me this explicitly. Nevertheless, the assumption itself left an impression. Theo recovered for nearly two years in a hospital bed before being repatriated to Nice. Before his departure, the German officers present at the hospital honored him with a full military ceremony, even though he was a known Jew.

  Theo spent the rest of the war hiding guns and grenades under his wheelchair for local partisans, while being pushed around by a priest, who would later become the bishop of Nice.

  After the war he received the Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur (created by Napoleon), which is the closest thing the French have to the Medal of Honor. Theo had lost everything, so the city of Nice gave him an apartment and a store very close by. He became the seller of high-end Bally shoes. He married his sweetheart Fanny, my father’s aunt, and they stayed together for forty years until he died in 1992.

  I always have to laugh at the irony of buying shoes from a one-legged shoe salesman. Unfortunately I was too young to have adult conversations with Theo before he died. I would have asked him what it was like to be so close to death, to be treated by men who could send you to a near-certain death for being a Jew. I also wondered what it was like to live without being able to use your penis, though I doubt I would have had the nerve to ask him outright. War hero or no war hero, it’s hard to imagine anything being worth that price. In my “what if” moments I often ask myself whether I’d prefer keeping my genitals and living with dishonor, or accept dishonor and retain my ability to fuck.

  That kind of question over the years has been completely conditioned by Theo, who continued his life with honor and continued making love to Fanny—though perhaps not strictly speaking. Ultimately I believe dishonor is the real punishment of war. I mean real dishonor, the kind where you are forever known as a coward or a scumbag. Most people to whom I say such things think I’m either crazy or fanatic or just posing—which is why I rarely say such things. But the memory of Theo—that perfect example of honor at the price of pleasure—keeps everything in perspective for me.

  Some shelling in the distance roused me from my paint-flake reverie. I was fully immersed in the world of my forebears. There was movement all around me. One of the fighters unlocked my chain and we all proceeded to the basement, which would be safer in the event of a direct hit.

  As we waited out the shelling I looked at the young men around me, working out their own heroic aspirations—all of them to some extent driven by a chain of events their own forebears had set into motion. I wondered how many of these men would finish the war in a similar state to Uncle Theo. How many of us would make it through alive?

  * * *

  I PAUSED MY PAINT-SCRATCHING project at Operation Barbarossa, when on June 22, 1941, more than three million German troops invaded the Soviet Union. I’ve never seen anything even near that scale; no one in my generation has. And I doubt something like that could be repeated in my lifetime. In fact, there are few people alive who have witnessed Operation Barbarossa from the combatants’ point of view.

  The only massive invasion to have occurred in my adult life was when the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003 with more than 150,000 troops. But I had only recently started my career and was focused on Africa at that time. To get close to the invasion forces you needed to be embedded, which meant already having credentials and connections. I was at a stage when wandering through jungle, savanna, or desert with a ragtag group of forgotten freedom fighters suited me better than competing with CNN embeds in an Abrams tank racing across Mesopotamia.

  In any case, the Germans invaded with a number of troops that was an order of magnitude greater than any invasion in recent memory—in all of history, for that matter.

  Ukraine was to be deurbanized and serve as the Reich’s granary, while the Slavic populations would provide slave labor. Ironically, the colonization model Hitler had in mind was based on America’s notion of Manifest Destiny: in the United States, Europeans subjugated or simply liquidated the indigenous population and imported African slaves for hard labor as they expanded westward into what was deemed uncivilized emptiness. In Hitler’s plan he would subjugate the Slavs and use them for labor.

  But nobody could take such an audacious plan seriously in 1939—at the time of the Polish partition—notwithstanding the fact that it could be found black on white in Mein Kampf.

  History buffs often like to play “what if” in their minds, and Operation Barbarossa always offers some of the most disturbing what-ifs in recent history.

  Initially the invasion was to take place on May 15, as soon as the ground, still muddy from winter snows, hardened enough to ensure the mobility of the German panzers, which were crucial to Blitzkrieg tactics. But the invasion was delayed for a number of reasons. Hitler’s Balkan campaign in April was one; others included delays in distributing motor transport, problems with fuel distribution, and the difficulty in establishing forward airfields for the Luftwaffe.

  The bottom line was that the Wehrmacht was at the outskirts of Moscow in late October when the first snows fell. After that, the Soviets had winter on their side. Eventually the Germans, who were not prepared to fight in cold weather, had to hold their positions desperately and initiate a series of tactical retreats when the Soviets funneled in reserves from Siberia.

  What then would have happened if Operation Barbarossa had begun just a few weeks earlier? Europe and the rest of the world would no doubt be entirely different. Or would they? Here it depends on whether you believe in a historical destiny that compels peoples and nations toward certain ineluctable actions, or whether you believe history is just a random concatenation of causes and effects that we call destiny to appease some deep-seated teleological need.

  As I scraped away at Belarus and Ukraine I wondered whether it was my destiny to be captured by Syrian rebels, or if I was just an unlucky schmuck.

  * * *

  THERE WERE ABOUT a half dozen young guys who came in and out of the house and they were all very friendly with me. They weren’t really soldiers, more just helping the rebels in whatever capacity they could. They would always greet me with, “Hey, Johnny.” So it was a pleasure to spend time with them, a tinge of normality.

  One of them was an officer’s son, a young kid about twelve or thirteen who would show up at the house once in a while. Sometimes he wore kids’ clothing; other times he sported a desert camouflag
e outfit. Whenever he saw me he would light up and say, “Hey, Jon.”

  One morning I was next to the covered area near the pool. Rabiyah was there with the officer’s kid. We were just standing around, talking. Then suddenly we heard the ominous whistling sound of a mortar, and it was coming straight for us. Rabiyah and the kid ran for the house, but it looked too far away for me, so I jumped into the pool and instinctively ran toward the deep end, which was opposite the direction from where the shells were being fired. I hunkered down into the corner and bits of metal and earth started raining all around: on the road and throughout the orchard. The house didn’t get hit, and the other two made it back there safely. All told it lasted only about thirty seconds—just a few shells. But I stayed in that corner for a while, kind of dazed.

  I wondered if I could ever get used to being shelled. It always made me think of World War I in the trenches, the literally shell-shocked soldiers. Could a human being ever get used to something like that without going insane? I found it hard to imagine.

  * * *

  UP TO THEN the heaviest shelling I’d experienced was from the giving end, in 2010 when I was in Afghanistan embedded with the French Foreign Legion, with whom I’d already embedded six years earlier in Côte d’Ivoire.

  I arrived in Bagram Airfield near Kabul with another photographer and there they arranged armored vehicles to get us to the base at the front lines. After a few uneventful days on patrols, one of the captains came up to me and said a major operation was going to start the following day: five hundred men, mortar teams, armored vehicles. “There’s going to be firefighting,” he said. “We’re going to kill some Talibans.”

  They’d set up a sort of diorama in a huge sandy area, re-creating the landscape with flags and soldiers, so people could really get a visual understanding of the terrain. The commanding officer pointed to specific buildings and hills with a stick. There were some Afghan auxiliary units looking at it, too. They gave me full access.

  The following day, after everything had been prepped, we went into a typical Afghan village full of mud houses. On the left there was a large, not very deep wadi in which they were cultivating crops. Beyond that was a mountain range, not very high but with steep hills. We took up positions behind a low dirt wall. There was fighting about two miles away. Machine guns. Suddenly the platoon leader, a Frenchman (the platoon leaders are always French in the Foreign Legion), said, “Guys, we have to go. There’s a counterattack.” There was an ambush and we had to help them out.

  At the time my arm was basically paralyzed because I’d torn all my shoulder muscles in a water polo game the week before. I lied to them, because if they had known they would have sent me back to Paris. So I tied it up and spent three weeks in Afghanistan with my arm loose. It was very painful, and the armored vehicles were high because of all the gear. With only one arm I didn’t have the strength to hoist myself up, so the guy behind me gave me a push.

  You could tell the soldiers were nervous. As we drew closer we heard the boom-boom of 20 mm rounds landing and RPGs being fired. We got into a village on the outskirts of the town and unloaded. There was fighting. I ran with the men at the point of the attack. We got cover from an armored vehicle shooting 20 mm rounds, just blasting things. Moving closer and closer, we soon entered the actual town. They were running from street to street, a column of guys. At one point we stopped because one of the men had stepped on an unexploded ordnance. I got a picture of it. It didn’t blow up. Then I looked to my left and there was a closed door where civilians had just taken cover inside a house. It was raining and I saw a small puppy all wet, looking at me and shivering, terrified from the fighting. I wanted to take him in my arms, but obviously I couldn’t.

  We continued and then made a right into the street. Suddenly one of our soldiers got shot, though not badly because he was wearing a flak jacket. He pointed and said, “They’re right here.” We went down the street and there was more and more shooting going on. Then we took a left into a square. All the guys took positions. I found cover along a wall. Then one of the soldiers went into a very narrow street and boom! . . . He got shot, then dropped. I got a picture. His friend came in to help him, and he got shot, too, in the head. He died almost instantly. I didn’t get pictures of that because they grabbed my camera. All the guys were firing everywhere. Then we went from one area to another and started cleaning things up. Eventually it wound down and stopped completely.

  We stayed put in another street for a while, then suddenly the Taliban ambushed us again, with RPGs, so suddenly there were forty to sixty guys all shooting at the same time. It was what they call a fireball—a mad minute when everybody shoots at the same time. I couldn’t even take pictures because I was doubled over. And then it stopped.

  I saw two crazy American mercenaries I’d befriended. They were on their way to check the house where they thought the two Taliban who had just ambushed us were. One of them looked at me and said, “Hey, man, we’re gonna fuck these guys up.”

  Then the men captured a Taliban and the Romanian lieutenant beat him up viciously because they’d just killed one of the lieutenant’s men. I took some pictures but I felt very ambivalent about it.

  After cleaning up the town we left. We slept on the ground, and the following day we were ambushed again. They hit us with RPGs. There were always two F-15s on call to help the French, and the Americans wanted to solve the problem with a five-hundred-pound bomb. The French dissuaded them: “No, don’t do that, you’re going to hit civilians.” The officer was laughing. “These fucking Americans, what’s wrong with them?” he said. “They just want to blast the whole thing.” Instead they compromised with a show of force: basically the plane flies fifty yards off the ground to scare the enemy. It usually does the job.

  Then they moved us to the wadi area, where we took up positions. We heard on the radio, “They’re going to attack you guys, so be ready.” Thirty to forty men were spotted from a satellite. They were coming on our left side to flank us and attack. The foreigners were very excited about it, because it was a wooded area, and it was a little bit elevated. Then you had the wadi, and after that the mountains. They lined up all their heavy machine guns along a huge tree trunk that had fallen down. They were up on a slope, so they would have simply mowed the Taliban down. We waited about an hour or two, but nothing was happening so I went to where that trunk was. One guy from Russia gave me a cigarette and said, “You want some action? Wait a little bit.”

  The lieutenant came and said, “These assholes in the artillery unit want to take care of it.” Everyone started complaining about their fun getting taken away from them. I could see on the side of these hills, about a half a mile away there was a platoon with armored fighting vehicles that carried 120 mm cannons. They were French, very good.

  Suddenly we heard boom, boom, boom. And then they started launching 120 mm mortar rounds. That was terrifying. They hit a mile away and everything was shaking. Afghan dirt is very fine, so it explodes into a mist. The men coming up on the flank were finished. The sound was so loud. Thirty Taliban were killed. The legionnaire who died was a lance corporal from Slovakia.

  It might be one of the most tired commonplaces of war, but it’s true nonetheless: the rush you feel in the middle of a firefight, when something within you knows you can die or be maimed from one moment to the next, is unlike anything else. Never have I felt so alive, so fucking happy to be alive. I’m sure that’s what keeps so many soldiers coming back to the front lines—not to mention us photographers and reporters, who don’t even get to fire a weapon. There’s something about the thrill of surviving a brush with death that begs repetition.

  I didn’t climb out of that empty pool until I was reasonably sure there were no more shells on their way. But when I did, I felt renewed.

  * * *

  THE DAY AFTER I took shelter in the pool I looked around at the pale blue paint chipping off the sides. So many of my first experiences in how to overcome fear took place in swimming pool
s. I learned how to swim late, at the age of nine. My father had taken me to l’Oustau de Baumanière in the South of France, where there was a swimming pool. It was an old-school swimming lesson, put the kid into the deep end and let him figure it out for himself. I swallowed a little water and almost panicked, but then managed to dog paddle to the edge. It didn’t take long before I developed a taste for it, and in no time you couldn’t get me out of the water.

  I eventually took such a liking to the water that I started to swim competitively. In 1997, between my junior and senior years of high school, I’d just broken up with my first love and was very sad. To take my mind off my loss I convinced my parents to send me to a three-week Jack Nelson swimming camp in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where they train Olympians.

  It was hell. They’d wake us up at four in the morning and we’d have to run an hour and a half on the beach. Then six hours of swimming, then weight training, then classes. After the first day of training I said to myself there was no way I could go through with it. It was too hard. I went to one of the pay phones at the camp and called my mother, who was still living in France at the time. I was eighteen years old and whining with a face full of tears.

  My mother, who had always refused to cosset me in any way, was unequivocal. “You wanted to be there. You’re there.” And she hung up on me. She refused to talk to me the entire trip. I never tried to call her, because I knew she’d say something to the effect of “Don’t be a wimp.” I wanted her approval, for her to say, “Okay, you can go home now.” I knew I could have gotten some money, hopped in a cab, and been on a plane back to New York very easily. But no. I had to face my fear. That’s what she was saying in her very undiplomatic way.

  So I sucked it up and went through the three weeks, winning all the races in my specialty, the 100-meter backstroke. I was so good that the coach took me out of the group and trained me by myself. I even qualified for the Junior Olympics. By the end of the three weeks I was like a machine.