Early the next morning I was aboard a U.S. Navy supply ship heading up the Malacca Strait. There were 8 journalists on board - writers, a BBC tv reporter and cameramen, and 3 photographers. It was a 2 day trip up to the USS Essex, and with little else to do on board, I photographed the crew preparing supplies which would be transferred when we arrived. With only experience of ferries to go on I’d feared getting horribly seasick - but was holding up okay, and excited about what we’d find when we got to the Navy ships.

We transferred to the Essex by helicopter. I quickly learned to use the word “helo” - pronounced “heelow” - as no one seemed to understand me when I said “chopper”. The supply ship had been crewed by ex-navy “civilian mariners”, but I’d been warned that things would be “different” on the real Navy ship. And they were.

If there’s one thing this experience has given me it is an indelible association between US Navy ships and disinfectant. Where the supply ship had been pretty crusty, the interiors of the Essex were sparkling clean - floors, walls, celings, everything - spotless. Every time I descended a set of stairs or a ladder (of which there were many) and my nose reached the same level as the deck, I’d get a heady whiff of disinfectant. A few days ago I visited the lavatories in a Singapore shopping centre and the smell took me right back to the Essex - I guess they were both using the same floor cleaner!

On the Essex and later on the Harpers Ferry, we were always “escorted” by either Navy or Marine media liasons. Although we were ”free to move about the ship,” the reality was slightly different. This was good in some ways - on occasions when I managed to evade my escorts, I got lost in the labyrinth of corridors and hallways on each deck and it took me forever to find my way. Hunt-for-Red-October lighting at night and a flashlight strapped to my head, I’d wander around in circles.

Then there was the food. The man from the Wall Street Journal got lost and asked a passing Marine for the ”mess hall” to which he got the barked response, ”YOU MEAN THE CHOW HALL!!!” before being politely escorted to the right place on the right deck.

The “chow hall” resembled a high school cafetaria, complete  with cliques of cool and not-so-cool kids (I was later told that majority of the crew of the Essex and some 90% of the crew on the Harpers Ferry were under 21). You had to be quick when you got in line - there were dozens of hungry sailors and marines behind you, and neither they nor the chow hall folks had time for a sense of humour. If you didn’t know what you wanted, you got either dirty looks or something you really didn’t want. I became good at barking out my meal preferences in seconds: “Meatlof! Potatoes! Gravy!” It was true American cooking - and at meal times you could just smell your way to the chow hall.  I had to reset my body clock  to the ship’s meal times - breakfast at 6am, lunch at 11am and dinner at 4.30pm.

My first time in line as I got to the top of the queue, I took a plate from the stack but seeing that the cook already had a plate for me, was about to return mine to the stack when the Marine behind me behind me muttered, “You touch it, You take it!”, so I spent the next 20 minutes pretending it was perfectly normal to be carrying two plates about. 

The bunks were cramped - 4 to a tiny room, shared showers with everyone else staying in “officers county”. Our Marine escorts remarked on how luxurious this was. They were living in “trees” the next deck down, 3-stacks of bunks on either side of a two-foot corridor. I wondered how sailors and marines manage it - at sea for months at a time, no privacy and no space, on a metal hulk rocking in the waves.

Trying to tell the story of the aftermath of the cyclone from the Essex was limiting - there was only so much I could do without making landfall. We photographed the navy preparing drinking water for delivery, helicopters shackled to the decks not going anywhere, and resupply trips between ships. You could feel the frustration among the crew - everyone I talked to spoke of feeling helpless, even angry, that here was a ship loaded with clean water, food and shelter only 50 nautical miles from the disaster area, yet the stubborness of the Myanmar junta was preventing its use. 

The Navy had been prepared to let media on board in the event of an aid mission, but when it became clear that just wasn’t going to happen, we were transferred back to the crusty supply ship for the slow 2 and a half day trip back to Singapore.

On the return journey there was none of the anticipation of the journey out. Most of us felt frustrated being stuck on a ship with nothing to do and no story to tell. We resigned ourselves to the trip and found ways to keep ourselves busy. What do journalists do on a slow boat back to Singapore? They play the American version of Trivial Pursuit against one another, they play ping pong against the crew, they count down the hours until the next chow time, they read books while trying not to look at the clock too often.

The hardest thing of all was once back on terra firma, trying to drop off in a stationary bed, with no rocking of the boat or groan of the engines to lull you asleep.

Before I start please spare a thought for the thousands who died when Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar and the thousands more affected by it, who have lost loved ones, their homes and their livelihoods.

For a news pictures editor in charge of Asia yesterday was a tough day. The death toll was rising steadily as the enormity of the tragedy slowly unfolded and we worked hard at getting pictures from staff and stringers. Handout pictures from pressure groups were scrutinized and checked for usage rights usage and potential bias. We had staff waiting at airports to speak to tourists who may have had images of the scene as the cyclone struck.

The day was a stream of planning meetings, coordination with text and TV meetings, safety meetings, negotiations with wide eyed tourists all believing they had shot a million dollar picture, editing and captioning the results, trying to find staff with the requisite experience for the conditions, stroking those who had volunteered but lacked the experience and speaking to the photographers on the ground (compared to whom my day was a walk in the park - no power, no water, no food was the least of their worries).

So what was all this stressing about? The bottom line is to tell the story, honestly, fairly and objectively so the rest of the world can see something of this disaster in one of the most closed and oppressively run countries in the world.

At the end of yesterday I went home believing that a caring world knew about what was going on.

Once at home, after explaining to my 12 year old son why so many had died in a cyclone, I browsed a few of the international news sites to see how the world was reacting to something I felt  was the most important news event of the day.

The first blog I read under a slide show of pictures on a major US news site read (I paraphrase as it has been removed now) “why should we care about this dirty little washed up country and who gives a damn anyway”

This comment on the blog chilled me, not because it was there but because it was supported by many other comments.

But I care and so do the team who will deliver today’s file and tomorrow’s. 

Am I just shouting into the wind? Should we all become wedding photographers?
 

The following images are unlikely prize-winners but serve to demonstrate the delight with which news of his win has been received by his Reuters colleagues. In the first Paul Barker, Editor Asia News Pictures and Asia Chief Photographer Russell Boyce toast his image;

while in the second the editorial team from text, TV, graphics and pictures at Reuters Asia HQ in Singapore drink his health as Adrees himself listens-in via the telephone on the desk to the right of the frame, from his assignment in Nepal.  

I bet he’s pleased now that he diversified beyond basketball and maybe at long last my spell-checker will stop trying to correct his name to ‘Address’.

http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news  /2008/04/pulitzer.html

Reuters Bangkok senior photographer Adrees Latif tells how he took the pictures which won him a Pulitzer Prize. The pictures were taken in Myanmar during the protests in September last year and include the photo of Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai being shot.

“Tipped off by protests against soaring fuel prices, I landed in Yangon on 23 September, 2007, with some old clothes, a Canon 5D camera, two fixed lenses and a laptop.

For the next four days, I went to Shwedagon Pagoda, two-three kilometres from the centre of town and waited for the monks who had been gathering there daily at noon.

Since I was at the same pagoda every day, dozens of people, including monks, asked me who I was and what I was doing. As the ruling military regime is notoriously secretive, my replies were guarded.

Barefoot in maroon robes, and ringed by civilians, the monks chanted and prayed before starting their two-kilometre march to the Sule Pagoda in downtown Yangon. Each day their numbers grew, from hundreds to thousands.

By 27 September, the city had become packed with troops. Soldiers and government agents stood at street corners.

Finding the Shwedagon Pagoda sealed off, I went to the middle of town to find groups of young people taunting soldiers at Sule.

Within minutes, the crowd swelled from hundreds to a few thousand. The soldiers threw barbed wire coils across the roads.

Knowing that hundreds of people were gunned down in similar circumstances in a 1988 uprising, I climbed an old crosswalk directly overhead, to get to one of the few spots offering a clear view.

Below me, protesters were singing and waving flags; to the side, young men were thrusting their pelvises at the soldiers.

At about 1.30pm local time, two dark green, open-top army trucks approached, followed by dozens more packed with riot police. They were hit by a barrage of water bottles, fruit and abuse from the crowd.

I had already locked on my 135mm lens and set my camera shutter speed to 1000, aperture to F/7.1 and ISO at 800. With the camera on manual, I wanted to stop any movement while offering as much depth-of-field as possible.

Two minutes later, the shooting started. My eye caught a person flying backwards through the air. Instinctively, I started photographing, capturing four frames of the man on his back.

The entry point of the bullet is clear in the first frame, with a soldier in flip flops standing over the man and pointing a rifle. In the second frame, the man is reaching over to try and film.

More shots rang out. I flinched before getting off two more frames - one of the man pointing the camera at the soldier, and one of his face contorted in pain.

Beyond him, the crowd scattered before the advancing soldier. The whole incident, which went on to reverberate around the world, was over in two seconds.

I kept low on the bridge, capturing some more images from among a crowd taking cover. However, with soldiers firing shots and smoke grenades below, I had to get off the bridge.

With adrenaline pumping through my body, I put my camera in my bag and followed the protests for another hour and a half. Feeling the demonstration had lost its strength, I made my way back to my hotel via backstreets and along a railway line.

My initial caption read: “An injured man tries to photograph after police and military officials fired upon and then charged a crowd of thousands protesting in Yangon’s city center September 27, 2007.” Initially, I thought he was merely trampled. I had no idea he was dead.

Two of the frames showed the man’s face. A few hours later his colleagues in Japan had identified him as Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai.

The images dominated front pages across the U.S. and the world. Mourners at Nagai’s funeral in Japan clutched the picture, which played a role in the public outrage that prompted Tokyo to scale back aid to the ruling military junta.”