i have NOT clicked on the link

nor will i. i do not wish to see the photos but i felt this was worth posting

The American Iraq
John Byrne

An anonymous expatriate harvests raw images of Iraq taken by American soldiers
Warning: The photographs that accompany this article are graphic and not for the faint of heart. If you wish to see some of the images but not the macabre ones, look at only the first two pages of photos. The link from the first sentence is very graphic.


A face, frozen in an expression of muted surprise, trails a wormy, bloodied vertebrae. Below it, a caption penned by an American soldier: “new meaning to giving head.” A bearded man, his bloody-crusted shirt accordioned below his neck, bears, “come on and give me some sugar.” Typed beneath a cross-eyed, lacerated corpse with one arm extended, are the words, “oo, ooo, pick me.”

These are the raw images of Iraq, taken by American soldiers. Besides the underbelly of war they reveal a quintessentially American aesthetic: tourist snapshots, boys toting beers and smoking cigars, notes taped to slumbering soldiers’ backsides, mohawks on fire. They reveal a fascination with brutality and death: charred corpses, severed limbs, and an American soldier whose face has been blown in so far that his brain is exposed.
Some are intimate and at once quotidian. Scores of photographs document the dull hallways of palaces, gaudy jewelry, even crystal chandeliers. Dozens display helicopters hovering in bare blue skies and silhouetted against rich, pumpkin-colored sunsets. A palatial, empty room is festooned with the sign “GOD BLESS TASK FORCE IRON HORSE.” In another, a GI looks stolidly into the distance, his helmet hugged against his chest, vaunts the caption, “yes, yes i am a sexy man-beast.”
These images are collected at UnderMars.com, an online library dedicated to photographs taken and captioned by American soldiers who have served in Iraq. The site was created by an American expatriate and computer programmer, Mark, who spoke to RAW STORY on the condition his full name not be used..................