"My family, we do war." Tim Hetherington's Final Photos

The memory: meeting Tim for the first time in Beverly Hills. I was the odd person out on the Restrepo PR Team. The geek with the husband in the military. So, so nervous. I was awkward meeting Tim and Sebastian. They were giants, after all. I was just a writer, poet, and blogger. A military wife whose husband lived either 3,000 or 12,000 miles away, a mother with children who didn't listen, and a cat who gave me grudging respect.
"My family, uhmm... we do war, and we'll be working together," I said, quite inarticulately as I shook his hand.
Tim paused, then smiled.  "Don't worry, I'm British. I understand irony,"

 While there is the machinery of war --the guns, vehicles with big pronounceable acronyms, drones, computers, and bombs, all of it is run by either service members in the military or contractors.  And whether or not we agree with policy or strategies, the role people like me is simple:  we care about them. We send packages, cry when we read of another fallen, but mostly we talk to those who have fought the big battles in lands far away, as well as when they get home. We try to offer the safer harbors of family, friendship, acceptance, hope and encouragement. We're not perfect, and there are times we'd like to quit. But the truth is that war is always on our mind, and being part of this is etched in our DNA.

Tim's Final Photos

Newsweek recently posted Tim Hetherington's final photos, taken with his Mamiya 7. Tim's friend, and an editor of Newsweek James Wellford shared these words from Tim:

“Photography is great at representing the hardware of the war machine,” he told his good friend and writer Stephen Mayes, a month before he died. “But the truth is that the war machine is the software, as much as the hardware. The software runs it, and the software is young men. I’m not so young anymore. But I get it. That’s really what my work is about.” -Tim Hetherington

Tim had a knack for breaking down broad topics  into smaller parts, to which the rest of us could relate. In one of his last notes to me, Tim wrote how he had begun to understand how much work and what the families mean in the broader context of this war machine. It might be that the men and women are the software of war, and most certainly, at the very least, their friends and families are the best Apps around.