He hasn’t picked up a camera since the incident. Silva faces more reconstructive surgeries to repair his urinary tract and intestinal cavity and will very likely spend several more months at Walter Reed. My white blood count has risen, so the rest of my body does feel it.”
There’s a lot of pressure from the swelling. “The side of my face feels like it’s the size of a melon,” he says. After surgery to repair his rectal cavity and urethra, he picked up an infection and has been battling constant fatigue and pressure. “So I’m not quite balancing on my own yet, but I’m sure that will come in time.”īut Silva has also suffered medical setbacks. “I walk between parallel bars and use a walker when I walk longer distances,” he says. In February, he took his first steps at the hospital using two prosthetic legs. Silva was transported first to Germany and then to Walter Reed, where he spent three weeks in the intensive care unit. Soon after, a medevac helicopter landed on the scene.
I told my wife, because I had seen my legs were gone, I told my wife, ‘Listen. He asked the New York Times reporter, Carlotta Gall, for a satellite phone to call his wife. While he was being dragged away, Silva continued to snap photographs. The guys around me were a little bit dazed from the explosion, but they grabbed hold of me pretty quickly and dragged me away from the kill zone.” My initial reaction was to ask the guys around me for help. “Basically I heard the metallic sounds - bang - and got thrown over. “I was like third man in line, and I just happened to put my foot maybe a little more to the left or a little more to the right, and bam,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross, speaking from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he is recovering. Two other people and a minesweeping dog walked through the area where the mine was just before he approached. On the day he stepped on the mine in Afghanistan, he was embedded with a unit of the 4th Infantry Division and a New York Times reporter.
Silva has photographed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, the Middle East and southern Africa.
0 kommentar(er)
