The Atlantic

Ask Us What We’ve Seen

American service members reflect on their time in Afghanistan.
Source: Adam Ferguson

Photographs by Adam Ferguson

In 2009 and 2010, while on assignment in Afghanistan’s Helmand, Kunar, and Wardak provinces, the photographer Adam Ferguson took a break from his journalistic work documenting the war to create portraits of American service members.

The movement that accompanies a firefight is exchanged for stillness in these images. Yet violence

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