November 26, 2004

THE EYES OF WAR
‘He’s a Journalist, How Could I Not Let Him Go?’  

Photographer Shoots  Fallujah War Images  as  Marines and Insurgents Shoot Each Other
By Arthur R. Vinsel, Community News Reporter

      Sixty years ago, mothers, wives and sweethearts    with men and boys at arms in the South Pacific to  the  South of France had only censored letters, 1940s movie newsreels and the messenger with that dreaded War Department telegram.
     Today it’s different.  LA City Council aide Caroline Brady-Sinco, 38 on her last birthday,  Nov. 19, is a wife and working mother of three children aged five-years old, three-years old and seven months—a truly 21st Century homefront woman, linked to a husband in battle by satellite and Internet.
     The thunderous chatter of automatic weapons and the ground-spanking thud of mortars provided ugly background sound in his telephone calls home from the assault on rebels in Fallujah. People were dying, as they spoke.
     “I can’t explain to you what that’s like,” she says.
     Luis “Lee” Sinco, 45, isn’t a soldier and never was. He chose to go into harm’s way. He had a choice, as one of those Americans serving as the eyes of a democratic nation in its newest war. He saw a duty to truth and went there as a Los Angeles Times photographer. 
     “People ask how I could let him go?” says his wife, a former Daily Breeze reporter herself for ten years. “How could I not let him go? He’s a journalist. I knew that when I married him. Once you’ve been a journalist, you’re always a journalist. ” 
     If there are no atheists in foxholes, a wryly comforting assurance by a World War II Army chaplain, there are no political pundits among troops and embedded journalists; not pressed face down in a gutter with only a  curb for cover, as bullets and rockets rip just overhead through a cold, soaking predawn rain.
     Face down in a gutter with only a  curb for cover was where Sinco was when he emailed his dispatch to his wife to edit for a photographers’ publication, which read:

I prayed as never before, for the next half hour. I thought for sure I would be killed. Overhead, more rockets whistled by, exploding 50 yards behind us. The blinding light of illumination flares shined down on us. At the northern edge of town, Arabic voices eerily blared from nearby minarets, calling on the townspeople to wage war.

     “I didn’t change a word,” says Caroline, employed as a constituent advocate for 15th District City Councilwoman Janice Hahn. Caroline’s workplace crises involve citizens’ concerns on trash pickup, steep DWP bills or leash law violations. 
     Politics cause wars, but combat is a nonpartisan affair. Nobody thinks like a Democrat or Republican, dashing through smoking streets between bullet-scarred whitewashed walls pocked and peppered by ordnance in the taking of an recalcitrant city, block by bloody block. Staying alive is the business at hand.  
     “When he called, the kids would be scrambling around begging to talk to Daddy. They need to hear Daddy’s voice, but what about that background noise? Sometimes I just wish they had a little button on top of their heads that I could push and block out the war sounds.” 
     Lee Sinco was due on Cable News Network (CNN) one recent night, after a grab-shot photo of an exhausted Marine from the Appalachian farm and coal mining village of Jonancy , KY put a very American face on America ’s latest war, stirring feelings worldwide.
     Sinco was having a smoke with Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, 20, who’s since become known as The Marlboro Man. He realized the kid’s expression mirrored his, after 24 sleepless hours of intermittent firefights, fear, cold rain, grisly sights and ugly sounds.
     “All I know is that if Miller had turned the camera around on me, I would have that same look: eyes filled with anxiety and fatigue, framed in a face determined to survive,”  Sinco e-mailed.  
     “I just don’t understand what all the fuss is about,” Miller drawled after global response to his picture brought jubilant Marine Corps brass to Fallujah and even a call from President Bush to come visit. “I was just smokin’ a cigarette and someone takes my picture and it all blows up.” 
     A lieutenant general came to congratulate the whole outfit, but there’s a war on there. He didn’t even look up Miller, who has three more years in the Corps. Then he wants to go home, raise potatoes, corn and green beans and chill out on his porch at sundown.
     Miller,  of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment—says the greatest good that could come of his unsought fame would be a complimentary case of cigarettes from the folks at Marlboro. He smokes three packs a day, in a time and place where lung disease is the least of a mortal man’s worries.  
     “I didn’t know whether to let them watch CNN or not. They used his voiceover describing the assault, twice. Once with Wolf Blitzer and once with Aaron Brown.  I went ahead,” Caroline  recalls. “This is history. As Lee said, ‘This is our generation’s Vietnam .’” 
      “Are they going to shoot my Daddy?” asked Carlee Sinco, who turned three on Monday, Nov. 22, another significant day in U.S. history in a wartime 41 years ago, the same day the child’s father was due home.
      “That night, all three of us slept in the same bed,” says her mother, whose fifth floor City Hall cubicle boasts family photos, potted African violets and piles of municipal paperwork. Son, Andy Sinco, grasps war now, although he was an innocent at only four years old when his father first went to Iraq for seven weeks.  
     “He was telling everybody his Daddy was ‘under a rock,’” Caroline says with a meager grin. 
     Indeed, Lee Sinco, born in the Phillipines of a family that founded a private university there 50 years ago, had a taste of war when he traveled on vacation at his own expense to Croatia covering that for the San Pedro News-Pilot, where the couple met. He became a folk hero to San Pedro’s sizeable Croatian community, she notes. 
     Here was an American, another immigrant, covering their homeland war, because it mattered in the world.
     Brady-Sinco says her past two months were tough—correspondents covering wars are historically far more likely to become casualties than troops—but she was more afraid a year ago. He was on the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning news team covering Southern California ’s wicked wildfires. Fire is more impersonal and unpredictable than a human enemy.
     “I often tell them, ‘Look,  I’ve got three kids at home and my husband is in Fallujah with the Marines covering the war. I may have to leave your meeting a little early,’” says the young Mom who used to stay to the bitter end covering local government. “I’ve gone through two nannies already.”
     “The people are basically just so kind and good,” she says, “and Councilwoman Hahn has been especially wonderful. She is also a single mother who works and she does more than I do.”
     Sitting at her desk, combat action photos arrayed on her computer screen—including an image blurred by concussion as a small building explodes in flames—Caroline Brady-Sinco recalls her husband’s voice as fighting slackened.
     “He just said, ‘I am so lucky to be alive, after what we went through today,’” she remarked, then the journalist’s commitment to accuracy prevails. “Well, what he actually said was: ‘I am so (expletive) lucky to be alive.’ ”