War Is Personal

Eugene Richards

Reportage by Getty Images

WEST ROXBURY, MASSACHUSETTS, 2008. Nelida Bagley slips into the darkened room on the fourth floor of the VA Medical Center, puts her lips to her son’s forehead, reaches for his hands to unclench them. “You’re upset, aren’t you, that I left you alone,” she says. “Oh, I’m so sorry, baby.” Her son, Jose Pequeño, 34, was a chief of police in New Hampshire and a member of the National Guard when he volunteered to go to Iraq. While on patrol in Ramadi, a grenade was tossed into his vehicle. It exploded. “When they found Jose, he was still inside the Humvee, but the left part of his brain was outside in the sand.”

Eugene Richards, "War Is Personal," in POYi Archive, Item #44706, http://archive.poy.org/index.php/items/show/44706 (accessed June 1, 2025).