The first words that were used to describe Tim Hetherington by almost anybody who knew him were "humble" and "modest."
Yet, Tim was a guy of great talents -- a photojournalist whose photographs were at a very high level of artistry, who had released this past fall an art photography book titled Infidel, consisting of portraits he had taken of U.S. soldiers fighting in the Afghanistan war. The title Infidel was a wry bit of Hetherington humor; a number of the soldiers he photographed had tattooed the word "Infidel" on themselves as they deployed to Afghanistan.
He was also someone who would, and did, take the grittiest pictures of combat. For one of those photographs he won the World Press Photo of the Year award in 2007. The photo showed an exhausted, battle-weary GI resting in a bunker in northern Afghanistan, an apt metaphor for what was then fast becoming the longest war in American history.
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Tim had also gone to Oxford to study literature, something he never mentioned in the long days we spent talking to each other about our lives when we were both embedded with a group of Marines in southern Afghanistan in September 2009, while working together on stories for CNN.
The Marine base in Nawa in Helmand province where we spent several days had no water or electricity, and large barrels of human feces were burned off on a daily basis. But Tim loved it; each morning he would uncomplainingly trek out on foot patrols across fields laced with homemade bombs. Tim and his enthusiasm for the Marines and for Afghanistan in general were infectious.
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