Battle Lines Etched on Marines’ Faces
A twinkle in the eye, gone. A smirk, less cocky. An alert gaze, averted.
These triptychs — portraits of Dutch marines before, during and after deployment in Afghanistan — tell their stories quietly. They’re not especially shocking at first glance. A few show little outward change in the young men. Others, however, seem to disclose profound transformation.
“Two of the boys, I was very worried about,” said the photographer, Claire Felicie, 45, who has a son in the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps. “But they don’t tell me. They say all goes well.”
When her son, Tristan Feij, joined the Marines, Ms. Felicie recalled thinking: “Oh, my God. He has to go Afghanistan and they’re coming to my door and they will say, ‘Your son has been killed.’”
As it turned out, Mr. Feij was assigned to the Caribbean. It was his mother who wound up in Afghanistan.
The more Ms. Felicie imagined her son at war, the more she wondered about other marines and whether the experience of war would change them.
So she set out to photograph 20 young marines of the 1st Battalion, 13th Infantry Company (a different unit than her son’s). She caught them five months before they left for their mission in Afghanistan. At about three months into their deployment, she visited them at Combat Outpost Tabar in Uruzgan Province. They posed for their final portraits in September 2010, a few months after they arrived back home in the Netherlands.
“You see all those pictures of men in action,” she said. “I wanted to let the people see they are boys. Brave boys.”
Ms. Felicie, who lives in Amsterdam, has been taking photos since she was 18, but began her professional career in 2003, working out of a darkroom in the family kitchen. “I locked all the doors and all the children weren’t allowed to disturb me,” she recalled.
Last year, Mr. Feij tried to assure Ms. Felicie of his invincibility. “Mom, don’t worry,” he told her. “Marines are the best.” The same day, in an incident witnessed by most of the men whom she had photographed, two marines from the 13th Infantry Company were killed in an I.E.D. blast.
You can click on the following link for Claire her photos in Afghanistan
