Category: war

Higgins Boat Restoration (St. Vaast Notebook I)

Here’s a 25-second quickie I shot last month in St. Vaast, France, with D-Day buffs in mind, of a couple guys finishing up a restoration of a Higgins landing craft like those used in the Invasion of Normandy. Funding for the project was to end at the end of May, so I think they’ll manage – just in time.

St. Vaast is a picturesque little seaside town about 30 kilometers north of Utah Beach, the westernmost of the main D-Day beach invasions. From a small promontory near where these two guys were working lies an excellent if distant view south towards Utah Beach and the landing points stretching to the east. Trying to picture some 4,000 boats and landing craft in this stretch of the English Channel –along with a soundtrack produced by countless planes, rockets and gunfire buzzing overhead– was both dizzying and numbing.

A bit more on St. Vaast another time.

Note: This video notebook was shot on 13-Apr-2012.

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Sarajevo Siege + 20: Fifteen photos

Time flies. Today marks the 20th Anniversary of the beginning of the siege on Sarajevo. Not a day passes that I don’t think about my visit there last year.

Even then it was difficult to imagine that nearly two decades had passed since the longest siege in modern times had ended. Plenty of buildings were still sitting as shells of ruins or in disrepair. Everywhere you turned bullet holes still marked buildings like violent graffiti tags. After a few hours of walking around and snapping pictures, I asked myself that time-tested question: How many photos of aging shelling and sniper fire damage does one man really need?

Quite a few as it turned out: in keeping with this month’s A-Z blogging challenge, here are fifteen, which will take care of today’s entry which was assigned the letter F. Or, you can go with a less safe-for-work theme: F for fucked up. Either will work and both interpretations are fine with me.

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Despite the battle scars, there were plenty of signs of moving forward. Cosmetic ones mainly, the kind that arrive on the artificial coattails created by foreign capital-financed construction projects and pedestrian malls lined with boutiques where most of the locals can’t afford to shop. Just as striking were the remnants of a past not too distant, the Yugoslav days and daze where Sarajevo was the country’s cultural and creative capital that hosted the world for nearly two weeks in early 1984. The city’s main train station, where an old rusting sign built for those Winter Olympic Games still greets visitors near the taxi stand, hasn’t changed much in three decades.

Inside one of the station’s logistics offices, a portrait of Tito still hung on the wall. Inside a station cafe, four men, all retirees, sat chatting over their 9:30 am cocktails and grumbled about the lack of vacation options to fit their budgets.”Screw it,” one said, before losing his train of thought. The others burst out in laughter, cajoled him for his apparent senility, and ordered another round.

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11,541 red chairs, one for every person killed during the 44-month siege, were arranged in 825 rows today to commemorate the beginning of the siege. Check out my twitter feed at right or online (@pirancafe) for links to photos published and tweeted throughout the day.

Memorial for the children killed during the siege of Sarajevo

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__________________
Indeed.
F is for Fifteen
in the Blogging From A to Z Challenge 2012.
Check out more participants here.

My explanation for this is here.

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Piran Café will be inaugurating a free monthly newsletter in May. It’ll be loaded with travel tips and wine reviews, updates on CC licensed free-to-use photos, musings on my obsessions of the day, plus an exclusive FREE giveaway EACH month available to subscribers ONLY. Giveaway No. 1: Sign up now and you’ll be automatically entered to win a FREE major publishing house travel guide of your choice. Drawing is on 1 May, so do it now!

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Previously from Sarajevo (Jun/Jul 2011):

- Sarajevo Tunnel Museum (Sarajevo Notebook III)
- Things you’ll find in the basement of Sarajevo’s Academy of Fine Arts
- Michael Jackson meets Christopher Reeve?
- Sarajevo pics, Part deux
- Trebević Mountain Polka (Sarajevo notebook II)
- Sarajevo notebook I – time lapses
- more pics from Sarajevo on my flickr stream

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Sarajevo Tunnel Museum (Sarajevo Notebook III)

Here’s a quick stroll through the 25 meters or so that remains of the what locals dubbed Sarajevo’s Tunnel of Hope.

During the beginning of Sarajevo’s three-year siege, the city was entirely cut off by Serbian forces. Locals came up with the tunnel idea, dug beneath Sarajevo’s airport, linking the city’s Dobrinja neighborhood with the Bosnian-controlled Butmir neighborhood to the south. The tunnel, built over a period of just under seven months, was completed in late July 1993, allowing much-needed humanitarian aid to come into the city and helped people get out. It also provided beleaguered residents a way to bypass the international arms embargo. Eventually a pipe line was laid for delivery of oil.

In all, 2800 cubic meters of ground was excavated for the 800 meter long tunnel, according to the Tunnel Museum website. As you can see in the video, the average height was about 1.5 meters and averaged one meter in width. According to some estimates, as much as 20 million tons of food entered the city through the tunnel, and one million passed in and out including then Bosnia president Alija Izetbegovic. When the siege was over, the tunnel was filled to avoid damage to the runway above.

The museum website is here; an absolute must visit. I’d suggest you combine it with other interests and let Sarajevo Funky Tours be your guide. You won’t be disappointed.

A few more shots:

Tunnel Museum

Entrance of the Tunnel Museum

Across the stret from the museum, formerly a police station

Sarajevo Airport from the museum

And finally, the entrance to a second tunnel that was built later but never used when the siege was drawing to an end.

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Previously from my June 2011 visit to Sarajevo:

- Things you’ll find in the basement of Sarajevo’s Academy of Fine Arts
- Michael Jackson meets Christopher Reeve?
- Sarajevo pics, Part deux
- Trebević Mountain Polka (Sarajevo notebook II)
- Sarajevo notebook I – time lapses
- more pics from Sarajevo on my flickr stream

Felonious F-35 folly

Where’s the outrage indeed. From The F-35: A Weapon That Costs More Than Australia by Dominic Tierney in The Atlantic:

Washington intends to buy 2,443, at a price tag of $382 billion.

Add in the $650 billion that the Government Accountability Office estimates is needed to operate and maintain the aircraft, and the total cost reaches a staggering $1 trillion.

In other words, we’re spending more on this plane than Australia’s entire GDP ($924 billion).

NYT contract photographer on military censorship in Iraq

Via BagNews, an exclusive audio slideshow and interview with NY Times contract photographer Michael Kamber, who has worked in Iraq since 2003.

US military-imposed censorship in Iraq (and elsewhere) is hardly news: sanitizing the scenes and using the work of photographers in the field – who put themselves in the line of fire just as soldiers do – as part of the greater PR machine is priority No. 1.

Kamber discusses censorship imposed by the US military, and touches upon self-censorship and the ethical balancing act involved when deciding what to photograph in dangerous and emotionally charged moments.

In 2003 and 2004 we worked quite freely. .. And then slowly things just became off-limits. At first the car bombs were off-limits. And then we couldn’t photograph hospitals. And then the morgues became off-limits. And then we couldn’t photograph prisoners. And then we couldn’t photograph wounded soldiers. And then at a certain point we couldn’t photograph detainees.

Note for an upcoming conversation with my 19-year-old nephew

In Is America Hooked on War? TomDispatch’s Thomas Englehardt writes for Mother Jones:

Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment.

Hollensturz in Vietnam by Willi Sitte, originally uploaded by pirano.