Bomb Took 3 Limbs, but Not Photographers Can-Do Spirit - New York Times

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Giles Duly in his bedroom at his sister's home in west London.

LONDON

TO the annals of understatement and optimism add this: the account of Giles Duley, an independent photographer, about the moment after he stepped on a hidden bomb while covering an American and Afghan infantry patrol.

Mr. Duley heard a click and felt a flash of heat as the explosion lifted him into the air. He landed on his side on the dirt, roughly five yards from where he had stood. He smelled the stink of the explosives mixed with that of his own burned flesh. He took stock.

I remember looking up and seeing bits of me and my clothes in the tree, which I knew wasnt a good sign, he said. I saw my left arm. It was just obviously shredded to pieces, and smoldering. I couldnt feel my legs, so straightaway and from what I could see in the tree, I figured they were gone.

Mr. Duley had become, in that flash, a triple amputee. Now he risked swiftly bleeding to death. He recalled uttering a single word: bollocks.

As the American soldiers he had been walking with rushed toward him and began tightening the tourniquets that would save his life, a fuller line of thought took flight. Rather than tally what was missing, Mr. Duley counted what remained.

I thought, Right hand? Eyes? he realized that all of these were intact and I thought, I can work.

Mr. Duley, 39, was wounded in February in Kandahar Province, becoming another in the long line of casualties in the Pentagons offensive to displace the Taliban from one of its rural strongholds.

Five months on, after leaving the hospital, he is roughly midway through a 12-week physiotherapy regimen at Headley Court, a military rehabilitation center near London.

There, freshly fitted with two prosthetic legs and a left arm, he has been relearning to walk and confronting the details of pushing forward in life. Pulled along by what would seem an incurably upbeat mind, he is making plans to return to work as a photographer.

WHEN he set out for Afghanistan, Mr. Duley, a former fashion and celebrity photographer who changed his focus to cover what he considered untold stories of human suffering and resilience, had been preparing to start a quarterly photography journal, to be called Document.

In an interview at his sisters home in London during a weekend furlough, he said the project had not been derailed by his wounds. He said he hoped to publish the inaugural issue next year. But before doing so, he said, he wants to return to the field.

His first planned trip? Back to Kandahar, to photograph the medical treatment of Afghan civilians.

The technicians who fashion the prosthetic limbs at Headley Court are crafting a stubby prosthetic arm that will be fitted with a tripod head. To this, Mr. Duley said, he will attach a camera that he will raise to his eye, and then get back to work.

You see? he said, demonstrating how he can move the remaining portion of his left arm.

He swung the stump quickly to his face. Then, with his right hand, he depressed an imaginary shutter button on an imaginary camera hovering where his arm came to its abruptly severed end. The length is just about perfect, he said.

Mr. Duleys misfortune has made his own life resemble those of the profile subjects he once sought. But he has framed his lot not as a tragedy I have never seen myself as seriously wounded, he said but as a life-altering hardship that contains opportunity, too.

As a triple amputee, he said, he hopes to channel interest in his own struggles into bringing more attention to the suffering of other people. For me to make sense of what happened to me, I have to make it advantageous to the work I do, he said.

If this cheerful blend of pragmatism and editorial sense could seem to suggest that his journey has been easy, do not be deceived. Mr. Duley has traveled a terrifying path.


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