....The Sacrifice," by award-winning war photographer James Nachtwey, shows U.S. soldiers in Iraq receiving frantic medical treatment in a helicopter and medics working to repair the carnage of war at a field hospital.
That chaos is shown beside more tranquil views, such as a returned serviceman with a prosthetic leg holding his surfboard after riding a curl and a one-legged young man chatting with his fiancee during a break from his rehabilitation regimen.
"This is one of the costs of this war. The money is the easy part. This, the injuries and the people that are lost, is the real cost," Nachtwey said while hanging the exhibit, which opens on Friday at 401 Projects.
"It's important for the people of our country to understand the nature of the sacrifice being made.
"These are mainly young people, mainly in their 20s, athletic, active people who have sustained a great loss and want to move on with their lives."
Since the Iraq war began with the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, there have been 3,125 U.S. personnel killed and 23,417 wounded....
....The exhibit includes a 35-foot-long (10.6-meter) print comprising 60 images taken in a field hospital in Iraq, aimed at giving what Nachtwey called "a sense of being on the edge of chaos and control in the emergency room."
But it also includes more upbeat images -- a returned veteran stretching after a run on an athletic prosthetic leg and another recovered soldier, with two prosthetic legs and a prosthetic arm waiting his turn at a golf tee.
Nachtwey, who spent two months taking pictures in a field hospital in Iraq, said the preponderance of leg injuries in his exhibit reflected the human cost of the conflict.
"There are a lot of leg amputations.....Here is the article from National Geographic about Nachtwey's report called The Heroes The Healing. A photo gallery about the wounded is here. We should force those who support the war in Iraq to view these pictures. Better yet, e-mail the photo gallery link http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0612/feature3/gallery1.html to those who support the war in the House and Senate.
