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July 20, 2003: another day in Liberia’s 14-year civil war.
Rebels were closing in on the government of President Charles Taylor. From a bridge leading into Monrovia, the capital, a band of child soldiers in Taylor’s army were returning rebel fire. Their commander, shirtless and dreadlocked, spotted a news photographer in the vicinity and issued an order in Liberian patois: “Oh good, white man, you come on bridge!”
Chris Hondros, a photographer for Getty Images News Services, complied, dodging bullets along the way. As Hondros approached the soldiers, the commander grabbed a rocket launcher and fired. As the rocket detonated amid a group of attacking rebels, he turned toward Hondros, leapt and issued a battle cry. The photographer clicked his shutter.
The resulting image—an instant of adrenaline-powered glee—appeared on front pages and in magazines from France to Japan to the United States. It was plastered on train station benches in Amsterdam and discussed in art galleries in Colorado, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. It became a defining image of Liberia’s protracted strife.
“Sometimes a picture captures things that people respond to,” says Hondros. “This is a picture of fighting that shows some of the uncomfortable realities of war. One of those is that [some] people in war enjoy it—they get a bloodlust.”
The commander has his own response to the picture: “I was happy at that time because I was defending my country,” he says, speaking through an interpreter. But he doesn’t like to look at the image now. “It gives me the memories of war,” he says.
His name is Joseph Duo. He is 28. He dropped out of the tenth grade to join the army early in Liberia’s civil war. After the fighting ended and Taylor fled into exile in August 2003, Duo was out of a job, with no means of supporting his wife and three children.
Hondros found this out last October. He had been unable to get the commander’s image out of his mind—the way he stares into, or through, the camera. “The illusion of eye contact gives the picture intimacy,” says the photographer. “He’s nakedly exulting in battle, and he’s looking at you unabashedly.” When Hondros returned to Liberia to cover the country’s first postwar elections in October 2005, he asked his Liberian assistant about the soldier. The man drove him to a squalid settlement at the edge of Monrovia, where Duo emerged from a concrete shack, a shirt on his back and his dreadlocks gone. Hondros was a bit surprised to see that his new acquaintance stands about 5-foot-3—much shorter than in the photographer’s memory. After sharing their impressions of the day they first met, Hondros suggested they return together to the bridge, now bustling with traffic, and Duo agreed. Standing at the same spot he’d stood in 2003, Duo grinned shyly for a postwar portrait.
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