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Army journalist recalls escaping death
His memoir recounts his time in Iraq
Fred Minnick takes a picture from a vehicle in Iraq. Minnick penned the memoir "Camera Boy: An Army Journalist's War in Iraq."
Courtesy
By MATT GLEASON World Scene Writer
Published: 11/15/2009 2:24 AM
Last Modified: 11/15/2009 5:21 AM
Maybe it was the St. Christopher medallion Fred Minnick wore around his neck in Iraq.
Or it could have been the prayers his mother offered from Jones. Then again, it might have been blind stupid luck. All Minnick knows is he's alive and the insurgent who tried to kill him with a rocket propelled grenade is very much dead.
As Minnick recalls in his new memoir, "Camera Boy: An Army Journalist's War in Iraq" (Hellgate Press, $18.95), it was June 24, 2004, in downtown Mosul, or as Minnick calls the chapter: "When Time Stood Still."
On assignment to write about and photograph the aftermath of four car bombs, Minnick found himself in his own story — one he'd retell over and over in therapy for post-traumatic stress syndrome. If he put his near-death experience on paper, then read it aloud, the repetition would lessen the impact — at least that's what his therapist said. Still, five years later, a 31-year-old Minnick living in Kentucky can't read that chapter without choking up and crying.
That June day in 2004, Minnick and the other soldiers accompanying him spotted a white van pulled up in a grass field away from a mosque. Then, as if it all happened under the restraint of water, time impossibly slowed as the RPG accelerated in his direction.
Before, Minnick didn't believe in an entire life flashing in the instant before death, but then it happened to him.
"I thought of the first time I rode a bike with my father pushing me from behind," Minnick wrote. "I remembered my grandfather taking me squirrel hunting in Choctaw. I recalled my first kiss, the first time I fell in love, and my fraternity's initiation ritual.
"I seriously thought I was dead and had lost hope."
But hope, or whatever a man wants to call it, pushed that dud RPG into the pavement, then ricocheted it harmlessly over his head.
Death whimpered.
Life in the 'zone'
What happened before and after that slow-motion attack is perhaps best summed up in the forward of Minnick's book, which features Gen. Carter F. Ham, who commanded the Multinational Brigade-North in Mosul, Iraq, from 2004 to 2005.
" 'Camera Boy' is not sophisticated history, nor is it a defining summary of grand strategy or international geo-politics," Ham wrote.
"It is, quite simply, one soldier's story of what he saw, what he and his buddies did, and offers a sense of a soldier's life in a combat zone. Sometimes deadly serious, at others wholly frivolous, but always genuine."
Since the book's release a few weeks ago, Minnick said, "I have gotten a lot of response from people who treat PTSD, and they've been saying, 'We're giving this to veterans, because you capture all of it.' That meant a lot to me."
Looking back over the past few years, which have found Minnick transitioning from working for Oklahoma State University's student newspaper, to the U.S. Army and, finally, to life as a married freelance writer and photographer, he can see how far he's come.
"Because of four years of therapy, and really focusing on the trauma that I experienced, I'm able to talk about it," he said.
"There are things that certainly hurt to talk about, but I'm able to talk about it now, because I worked on it in therapy. It doesn't have the same hold it once had on me."
Minnick's therapist once told him to write a book about his time in Iraq just to "get it all out there."
After he finished "Camera Boy," Minnick said, "It was very important to me that I got it published and got those stories out there."
On the last page of "Camera Boy," Minnick wrote:
"Occasionally, a thought pops in my head that my service was not necessary, that I was mere cannon fodder in a political war.
"When these beliefs pop in from time to time, I tell myself that what I did mattered. For one year, I recorded history."
Signing
On Thursday, Fred Minnick
will sign copies of his
memoir
in Tulsa
beginning
at
6:30
p.m.
at the
Barnes
& Noble,
8620
E. 71st
St. To order a copy of
Minnick’s memoir, visit
tulsaworld.com/hellgate, or
call (800) 795-4059.
Matt Gleason 581-8473
matt.gleason@tulsaworld.com
By MATT GLEASON World Scene Writer
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