Self-portrait

Photo taken in 1999 with a Canon AE-1 35-millimeter camera. (Photo by Melanie Patterson)

This is me at 25 years old.

I took this self-portrait from the passenger seat of a Humvee in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where my Army Reserve unit was deployed for seven months in 1999. The war ended in 1995, so we were there on a peacekeeping mission.

 I don’t remember where we were heading on the day I took this photo. I do remember taking lots of photos from the Humvee (while someone else was driving, of course). I wanted to capture what I saw: the beautiful landscape, farmers in their fields, horse-drawn carts, and also buildings with dozens of bullet holes in them from the war.

In the beginning, many of the photos were out of focus because I wasn’t used to shooting from a moving vehicle. But even those photos are intriguing, especially the images of women doing field work. The women and the landscape are blurred, making them look other-worldly and mysterious.

Eventually, I got the hang of panning my 35-millimeter Canon through the window of the Humvee so I could get some in-focus photos, too. During my time in Bosnia, there was plenty of opportunity to focus on my passion for photography and writing.

The military was an ideal place for a young soldier to learn photography and journalism.

When I enlisted in the Reserve in 1993 as a print journalist, I had been doing personal writing for years. Photography was new to me, though. I first learned to use a big heavy Nikon camera, loaded with black-and-white 35-millimeter film. After learning the basics of composition, framing and timing, the instructors turned us loose on base—Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana—with our cameras and with pockets full of film. Then they took us into the darkroom and taught us to develop our own film and prints.

For the next eight years in the military, I had many chances to practice photography and journalism. I interviewed and photographed low-ranking privates, high-ranking generals and plenty of people in between.

I photographed engineering and construction units as they built schools and drilled wells in the suffocating heat of El Salvador.

In 1994, I was in France for the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landing. At Omaha Beach, I interviewed a man who had survived the landing fifty years prior. Tears streamed down his face as he pointed to the spot where he had landed.

The military also took me all across the United States. In Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, I covered dental units providing care for Native Americans. I rode with flight crews on Black Hawk helicopters in North Carolina, where they kept the door beside me open during the flight so I could photograph the landscape below. I had to put my glasses in my shirt pocket and button it closed so they wouldn’t blow out the door. The pilot had fun tilting the helicopter, trying to scare me.

I’ve covered military exercises in the Mojave Desert at Fort Irwin, California; at Fort Hood, Texas; at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and at Fort Polk, Louisiana, among other places.

It felt like a privilege to tell the stories of my fellow soldiers. I’ve always said that being a journalist was the best job in the military.

—Melanie Patterson

© Forged In Words 2022