Life on Hold

By David Zucchino

When Rick Loomis took off for the Middle East as the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq in early 2003, he put all his belongings in storage and sent his dog off to live with a friend. He was left with no home and no return address. He began living on the road. He was determined to follow the story of the war for as long as necessary, so he essentially shut down his personal life for several months.

Now, more than four years later, he's still at it. He has made a number of long, punishing trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, pursuing the truth of those conflicts. Loomis lives in an actual house now, in Long Beach, and he got his dog back. But he's still a driven man. He continues to pursue both wars with a passion; his photos from the front are searing and unforgettable.

I've accompanied Loomis on many of those assignments, and I have seen first-hand the way he performs under difficult and dangerous conditions. He is the finest photojournalist I have worked with in 30 years of covering wars and civil conflicts around the world.

Loomis is an extravagantly talented and highly principled photographer who shows remarkable dedication to his profession. He is honest and scrupulous in his dealings with photographic subjects and fellow journalists. I have watched him put in several days of work, effort and planning in an attempt to get a single perfect image. He refuses to settle for second best.

While Loomis is without peer among photojournalists for his artistic and technical skills, he is also an insightful journalist with a probing mind. He has made valuable contributions to stories I have covered. He has suggested story ideas, helped track down sources, endured hardships in trying to get us to dangerous locations for stories, and has made valuable contributions to interviews.

On a recent trip to Iraq, where we were embedded with U.S. surgical and medevac teams treating wounded U.S. troops, his professionalism was inspiring. He was able to juggle photography, video and digital sound, while also working with me 24 hours a day to follow and document medical teams and wounded soldiers under stressful conditions.

On a recent trip to Afghanistan, we decided to try a new angle on embedding with military units. Rather than embedding with U.S. troops, we sought to embed with the hapless and poorly-trained Afghan Army. Doing so required a long and dangerous ride in beat-up cars, with no security protection, from Kabul to Kandahar through Taliban-infested territory. Loomis never hesitated. His only concession to security was buying walkie-talkies so that we could stay in contact while riding in separate cars. (We figured one of us could use the radios to negotiate with Taliban kidnappers for the release of the other). We got the story, and came back alive.

Back in 2003, after Loomis spent several miserable weeks in the Iraqi desert with a Marine unit as it fought its way north to Baghdad, he met up with me in the capital, where I had arrived with an Army unit. We were the only reporters inside what is now called the Green Zone. At that time, it was the freshly-vacated palace complex inhabited only days earlier by Saddam Hussein and his top cronies. At last, Loomis had a home. We took up residence in the Republican Palace (named for the Iraqi republic, not for the Republican Party pols who mismanaged the Coalition Provisional Authority), and each of us had hundreds of palace bedrooms to choose from each night. We figured one of us must have slept in Saddam's favorite bed by the time we moved out a few weeks later.

Every day, we embarked from the palace on what we called our daily death march, walking back and forth across the palace complex in search of stories. With Loomis' energy and eye for news we found more stories than we could handle: Saddam's underground bunker complex; his cache of $765 million in $100 bills hidden in gardener's huts; Saddam's propaganda factory, complete with photos of him kissing babies and bearded sheiks, and posing with Yasir Arafat and Fidel Castro; his wine and cigar stash; the opulent lifestyle of Saddam and his cronies, with their yachts and race cars, whisky and pornography; Saddam's son Uday's "love shack;" piles of abandoned intelligence dossiers; the Hussein family's private zoos; the corpses of Republican Guards; and the mounds of berets, boots and uniforms abandoned by Saddam's soldiers as they fled.

Nobody assigned any of these stories. Nobody held a press conference. Loomis found them because he did what the very best journalists do: He left the comforts of home and went out in pursuit of the story.