Injured Cameraman Receives Navy's Distinguished Public Service Award

 

By Heather Graulich
© 2009 News Photographer magazine

JUPITER, FL (March 30, 2009) – Photographer Chris Jackson remembers the IED blast that tore apart the Humvee he was riding in that day in Afghanistan. He remembers the incredible noise, the dust and the searing fire. When he speaks of what happened to him, and about the Marine he saved, it is quietly and in a matter-of-fact way.

But Col. Oliver North witnessed it, and maybe it’s all that practice in front of the camera, because his action-packed telling leaves little doubt as to why the Navy gave Jackson its Distinguished Public Service Award, the second-highest honor a civilian can receive.

They were on a routine patrol with the 6th Marines in the Helmand province of Afghanistan last August, filming for North’s show on the Fox News Channel, when a 50-pound homemade explosive – probably laced with gasoline or another accelerant – went off directly between the Humvee’s front wheels.

“I was two vehicles back when his exploded in front of us,” North said, “I watched Chris literally be blown out of the vehicle. And the vehicle is immediately on fire, and Chris picks himself back up and crawls back up to this berm the vehicles were on, jerks open the right front door, and you can see this wall of fire come out, and he grabs Sgt. Rauch and they fall back down the hill.”

The sergeant in question, Courtney Rauch, had been knocked unconscious by the blast, his left foot and lower leg badly injured. Four other Marines in the vehicle had made it out safely with less severe injuries.

As Jackson and Rauch lay at the bottom of the hill, the extreme heat of the fire engulfing the Humvee began to cook off the ordinance packed inside. Quite literally, all hell had broken loose.

“All of these bullets were going off – ping, ping, ping,” Jackson said. “So I pulled him behind the next vehicle behind ours.”

And that may sound like the easiest part of it all, but then you remember that an unconscious Marine wearing body armor and other gear is not exactly a light load.

“Chris’ leg is bleeding, he has cuts on his face, there are marks on his helmet and his face is just blackened by dirt and the smoke from the fire,” North recalled.

Soon, a helicopter arrived to transport the injured men, including Jackson.

“I had left the camera next to Chris running, and you see Chris just laying there for a while and the corpsman comes over and tells him ‘You’ve got to go,’” North recalled - and here he adds a laugh. “And Chris says, ‘I’m not leaving. You see him’- and he points at me - and he says, ‘In every hour of Ollie North’s video, there are five or six good seconds. I can do better than him.’”

So Jackson stayed, and with the one working Sony PD-170 they had left (it was North’s - Jackson’s was destroyed in the Humvee) they kept shooting, including this clip of Jackson immediately following the blast.

North and Jackson kept working on their original assignment – following the unit of the 6th Marines they had also covered in Iraq several years earlier. But the Marines in the unit felt like something needed to be done to recognize Jackson’s actions that day on the road in Helmand.

A few weeks later, former Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter happened to pay a visit to the camp and asked North about Jackson. The wheels were put in motion. Maj. Gen. Paul Lefebvre, head of the Marines in Iraq, also checked the veracity of the incident by asking his son, who happened to be serving in the same company with which Jackson was traveling.

“This guy’s a hero,” the Marine told his father. Rauch would echo those thoughts later as he recuperated following the amputation of his lower left leg.

“Without Chris’ quick-thinking and heroic act, I would have lost my life that day,” he said. “Chris forgot about being a reporter that day and became one of our brothers and acted as one of us.”

“It’s not just my words, it’s the words of all those who were eyewitnesses to that event,” said North. “All the commanders had to sign off on it. Here’s somebody who’s only job out there was to simply carry a camera, but in spite of his own injuries, jumps up and rushes back into the fire to save a guy who wouldn’t otherwise be here. It means a lot to them.”

Knowing that Jackson would shy away from attention, North and Lefebvre staged a press conference in Baghdad. Jackson thought he was attending a military briefing, but it was all for him.

“It’s hilarious, because Chris is beet red and totally surprised by the whole thing,” North recalled. “He’s such a modest, humble person. I’ve traveled all over the world with lots of cameramen, and Chris Jackson is one of the finest young men I’ve had the pleasure to serve with.”

For his part, Jackson feels what he did was not heroic, but simply the obvious choice.

“You don’t think about it, you just do it,” said Jackson, a freelancer who now works primarily for CNN. “I’ve been asked, ‘Why didn’t you film it?’ I honestly didn’t think about it. I guess when I’m out there I’m supposed to filming and show people what’s going on, but I didn’t think about grabbing the camera. That might make me a bad cameraman, but I saw someone who needed help.”

His near-death experience hasn’t stopped Jackson from reporting the war efforts. The very next day he was back on patrol with the same Marines. He began covering the wars almost immediately after 9/11, and plans to return to Afghanistan for another six-week embed in April or May.

“These guys have done two tours, some of them three tours,” said Jackson, a native of Toronto who now lives in Bangkok with his Thailand-born wife Suchela. “That’s why I keep doing these stories, because I think people in the states forget about what’s going on out there. I want to look back at my career and say I got the message out.

“My lens has no political affiliation, but I think it’s important that if your neighbors, your sons, are out fighting a war, you need to know what’s going on. These are American citizens out there, and it’s much more important than Britney shaving her head or the latest scandal. This is why I want to do this kind of work.”

 

Jackson says that when he's embedded he carries at least two cameras because of the dust, and to have a back-up. In the field he edits on Final Cut Pro on a Macintosh laptop and video is sent back to New York using a Bgan satellite photo. Liveshots are done using a Bgan and Streambox software. When not using the Panasonic HDX-900 or the Sony XDCam 700, Jackson says he likes to use the rugged Sony PD-170 because of its size and extended battery life, and that when he's embedded in war he likes to shoot standard definition because he's usually in low-light combat situations.

 

 

 

 

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