JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And our show today is about being witness to something.

ROBERT: This actually is not something you really choose to witness.

JAD: Yeah. You feel like should I be seeing this?

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: And we're gonna start with a story from our friends over at Radiotopia, Nick van der Kolk and Brendan Baker. This is a story that for me, speaks to, like, what it's like to live in a city. When you look out the window, we're all so jammed together that suddenly you're seeing into the lives of somebody else through their window, and you just kind of fall into it without even wanting to.

ROBERT: In this particular tale, what is observed is so surprising and so—for its tenderness and for its quiet love that we—it's a rare thing to see. So we wanted to send it your way.

JAD: So here we go. This is how their story begins.

DIANE WEIPERT: So I'd been living in my apartment about 15 years, and one evening I walked in the living room, which has three bay windows which face the gardens in the back. And over half a block of gardens and across a small street, there was this bright window that I'd never noticed before, but it's at the exact eye level of my third floor apartment. And after a while I realized that I'd never seen it because there had always been curtains, and so it was always, I think, dimly lit, the curtains were often closed, and all of a sudden there's this bright light and no curtains, and it was like a movie screen. 15 years, and that window has meant nothing. [laughs] I haven't even noticed it, and now it's all I think about.

DIANE WEIPERT: There were new tenants, and it had always been a living room, and now it was suddenly a bedroom. And there were these two people in there, and they were naked, this young couple in their 20s. But they were really lovey-dovey and they were always naked!

JAD: That's Diane Weipert who tells the story. And she told it to radio reporter Briana Breen, who produced this piece with Nick and Brendan.

DIANE WEIPERT: The thing is they pushed their bed so that the head was up against the windows. So their heads, you could see both of their heads lying there. So you'd see things that you just—like, they were just shocking. I'd been there all of this time, and suddenly you could see people having sex really clearly, like, amazingly clearly. I had no idea that you could see so well across such a distance. And it was really uncomfortable. My husband and I were still adjusting to parenthood, and it wasn't the most romantic time in our—in our lives. And my son was probably three, and when you're new parents to a toddler, especially because he sleeps in the bed with us too, so he's, like, literally right between us, the last thing you need is a couple of hotties getting it on across the window, reminding your husband of everything he's not getting. [laughs]

DIANE WEIPERT: So to have this really beautiful, young woman, that was really thin and—and naked, all the time, really—you know, it was very frustrating. And she had this beautiful, tall, lanky, well-built boyfriend. And so at first, I just—because I felt like my husband was going to be staring at this naked woman all the time, I started closing the living room curtains, which is really kind of silly, and it made our room really dark. And we never closed those curtains, and so that didn't work.

DIANE WEIPERT: So I thought about, like, making a really big sign that said, like, "CLOSE YOUR CURTAINS" or "BUY CURTAINS." They didn't even have curtains. "BUY CURTAINS, WE CAN SEE YOU." And I thought about going by their building—I had no idea what their unit was—and leaving a note. And then I started thinking that was really silly and prudish, and started realizing that they were just young, and I had to just get over it and live with it and move on. And so that's what I did.

DIANE WEIPERT: We got really used to them, and they became sort of this symbol of what we used to be, you know, in our 20s. And they were living this really carefree time, and that's another thing that was kind of hard not to sometimes—when you're in early parenthood you get a little bitter, I think, about some of those freedoms. And we'd watch them sleeping 'til 11:00, while we've been up since five with our toddler. And we saw them eating breakfast on the roof together. So we got used to it. And we would notice, like, "Oh, look. They got a new plant in there." And they became sort of part of our lives, you know, because they were just always there, and never ever bought curtains.

BRIANA BREEN: Do you think all the neighbors in your building and the surrounding buildings also saw this?

DIANE WEIPERT: It's funny, I think that the way that we are positioned, because all of the buildings around us are different sizes, and our building is the tallest one on our block, but it's exactly at the right level to see their windows. I have a friend next door and then a friend across the way, and all of them have windows facing the gardens, but all of them are blocked. And I look at the other windows of the buildings around us, and I don't think anyone has this perfect level view.

DIANE WEIPERT: The irony is that I'm such a private person. And I don't know, am I supposed to have maybe respected their privacy and just looked away? But it's impossible, because that's the way the chairs face. They face the window. I couldn't not see them if I wanted to. But I guess I could have not gotten the binoculars.

DIANE WEIPERT: So time went by, and this is maybe a year and a half later, two years later, and I remember seeing their room and the light was on, but it was empty. And I thought that was strange, because it was five o'clock in the morning, and they never went anywhere early. And it was like that for, like, a whole week. It was just this empty room with a light on, and I thought that was strange. They didn't seem to be there as often, or maybe just she would be there, and he was gone for long periods of time. And we just kind of forgot about them. You know, we just—there wasn't as much action going on, and they weren't as present, and so we just kind of lived our lives and forgot about them for maybe seven or eight months.

DIANE WEIPERT: At the end of last year, in December, there was this night when my husband and I separately had both seen this woman, naked, sitting in the window. Kind of chubby, slump-shouldered woman who was just looking down at the street. And we both thought it was so strange, just couldn't figure out who she was and what she was doing and why she was naked. And a few nights later, there was this young man standing right at the window, by the bed. And he was skeletal, he was so thin, and he was bald, completely. And we realized it was the same couple. They had completely changed. He was sick. There was something serious wrong with him.

DIANE WEIPERT: After that, I just watched the window all the time. He would sit—all day he was there. Because I work from home, and I would see him all day in the bedroom, either lying down or sitting at the computer. And then after a couple of weeks he was just lying down, and he was just there, and his bald head would be up against the pane of glass all the time. And she would be there, and she'd come in and she would bring him things, but mostly it was just him there by himself. And sometimes he would have his knees bent, and you could just see how skeletal they were; they were just bones. And sometimes he'd kick off the blankets, and he was just lying there naked and emaciated. And then after a while, he was just always burrowed under the blankets.

DIANE WEIPERT: I found myself thinking, like, "Well, maybe he's been through chemo and he's recovering, and he's going through this—this sick phase before he gets well." Because he's so young, you know, he's such a young guy.

DIANE WEIPERT: And so we had to go to Colorado to see my family for Christmas, and I worried all the time I was there. I thought about them, and I worried that he wasn't gonna be there when we got back. I worried all the time about it. When we got back, about 10 days later, he was still there, but his head looked so much smaller. And there were a lot of people there. And then I got out my binoculars, I got my birding binoculars. [laughs] I'm not proud of it, but at that point I felt so invested.

DIANE WEIPERT: It looked like people coming to say goodbye, and there was this sort of short, blonde, Midwestern-looking woman, who I guessed was his mother. And then there was this young guy who just kept pacing the halls. You know, you could just see—there were two doorways leading out of this room, and you could just see him go down one side and through the other, and then back and forth, and back and forth. And I'd figured he was the brother. And it looked like the girlfriend's sister was also there. It was just a guest that looked like her.

DIANE WEIPERT: I remember there was just this little gathering going on in the living room right below. The neighbors were standing around and having drinks, and they had no idea at all what was going on right upstairs. I would watch people come and go, then after a while everyone left except for the girlfriend and the mother. And—and I spent—and I spent all that evening sitting vigil on the back of the couch and watching.

DIANE WEIPERT: And I remember the girlfriend lying beside him for a long time on her own, and she was just stroking his face so tenderly. It was so much affection that really transcends the kind of young love that you expect. All I could see was the top of his head all that time. And I remember later seeing her standing by the bed with the mother on the other side, and they were just all talking. And she put a hand on his forehead, she put the back of her hand on his forehead, and then she was wiping at her eyes. And you could tell that there was this—that there was this sense that something—that it was getting closer. Then I could see this reckoning, where she was wiping at her eyes and touching his forehead, and wiping at her eyes.

DIANE WEIPERT: And there were candles lit, and this young woman was on one side, and his mother was on the other side. And they just were lying there for a really long time, and they had their hands just resting on his chest. And so I watched it for a long time. The mother and the girlfriend were lying on either side of him, and you could tell it was his—this was the end. I thought, "Now all that's left is the girlfriend and the mother, and inexplicably, me. Me. Like, I'm one of the three people at the deathbed." And they lay there for a long time, and then they just got up and they went into the other room. And I realized that it must have been the moment.

DIANE WEIPERT: And all this time, you know, I always had this sense that they're—they're gonna break up, they're gonna move out. Nobody that age stays together very long. And I had no idea, it was this beautiful love story. So the next day—the next day I got up and I went to the window first thing, and they were folding up blankets and stacking them on the bed, and I figured that he had been taken away. And so I was in the kitchen, and my husband called because he had—he knew how obsessed I had gotten with this situation, and he said, "There's activity over there." And I came running, and I got my binoculars and I looked. And I realized that he was still there, he was still on the bed, his body was still there. And it was the coroner. So the coroner and his assistant came, and they had these white, plastic gloves on. And they pulled his body to the edge of the bed and onto this white sheet, and I just remember the lifelessness of it. It looked so shrunken. It almost looked like a shrunken rubber proxy of a body, so incredibly dead.

DIANE WEIPERT: They wrapped him in the sheet, and they zipped him into a vinyl bag, and they put him on this kind of gurney. They took the gurney out, and I just had this very strange impulse, and I ran and threw on my coat kind of over my pajamas and ran out to the street, and ran to the corner. And I got there just as they were hauling him out. They were carrying him out, and the girlfriend was there. She was talking to one of them in the doorway, and they loaded him into this van. And I realized that they didn't know me at all. Like, I had no place to be there. And they looked at me, I remember the coroner's assistant looking at me like I was sort of a rubbernecker in the street, you know? Looking at this grisly scene. And I realized that's what I was. I had no place to be there, and suddenly it all felt so perverse.

DIANE WEIPERT: And so I went home. And I felt very strange about the whole thing. And I tried to tell myself that well, I never wanted to be part of their lives. I was the one that wanted them to put up curtains. I wanted them to shut the intimate stuff out. I was uncomfortable with it. I was the one that wanted out. And I started remembering all of a sudden, when I moved to that apartment so many years ago, and I was in my mid-20s, that I had to share the apartment with a roommate because it was too expensive. And my bedroom was in the living room. And I remember how when I first moved in, I pushed the head of my bed up against the three bay windows, so that in the morning I could see the sky. And I remember that I had no clue. It never occurred to me that anyone could see me. I remember that I felt like whenever I looked out the window I never saw anyone, and I never closed my curtains either.

BRIANA BREEN: Did you ever find out either of their names?

DIANE WEIPERT: I never have found out their names. And I looked through the local obituaries obsessively for weeks, and there was never anyone that fit his description. There was never anyone young enough, or that looked like him. So no idea. I walked by their place several times, and there are only numbers on the mailboxes and the buzzers, there are no names, so I can't look up anything. I don't know, yeah. I have no idea who she is. I have no idea who he was, no idea what he was sick with. I don't know if I've gotten anything right. Maybe they were married. But I didn't get wrong the fact that he died, because I was there. I was there for that. Because I saw it all.

DIANE WEIPERT: I think about that a lot, how he chose—that he chose to die in that bed, in that bedroom, and he didn't choose to go to a hospice or anywhere. He wanted to be in his bedroom. All of those long days, from the morning when I looked out, in the evening, he was just exactly in the same position. That was where he wanted to be. And it's where all of the happy times were, I guess, and the end times, you know?

DIANE WEIPERT: Just a couple of days after it happened, she was up on the roof with a friend doing yoga. And I've watched her lying around a lot. She went out of town, I think, for a bit. And she's still there. I have been watching her recovery, and instead of being this young woman, she looks totally different. She looks so changed. She just looks like this very experienced, world-weary person. She has a job now that gets her up very early, because I get up at 6:00 and she's already dressed and heads out at, like, 6:15.

DIANE WEIPERT: And the other night I saw her, and she was in her bedroom. And she was wearing this baggy t-shirt, and all the lights were on. And—and she was dancing. [laughs] Just dancing around her room. So yeah, I want her—I want to move on. This young woman, that I was so cranky and bitter about, you know, now she's—now I feel so protective and kind of maternal, you know?

BRIANA BREEN: If you ran into her like at the corner market or something, do you think you could ever say anything to her?

DIANE WEIPERT: Yeah, if I ran into her, I wouldn't say a thing. [laughs] What would I say? "I have been watching you through your window." How creepy would that be? [laughs] Yeah, no way. She doesn't know that—she doesn't know that there's this person that—I don't know, this complete stranger that's out there really rooting for her, you know?

JAD: Diane Weipert told her story to radio reporter Briana Breen, who produced this with the folks at Love + Radio, Nick van der Kolk and Brendan Baker.

ROBERT: Special thanks to Karen Duff and to Brendan, Briana and to Nick. And there are some wonderful stories on their podcast. You should listen to all of them. It's called Love + Radio. You'll find it at LoveandRadio.org. I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: We'll be back in a moment.

[LISTENER: This is Jean Pelletier in Boston, Massachusetts. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. On today's show, we're theming it To See Or Not To See. These are stories about being witness to something, whether you want to be—you don't want to be. And next up ...

JAD: A story about a set of pictures.

ROBERT: Pictures.

JAD: I should say that there are some moments in this story that get a little—what's the word?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Heavy.

JAD: Heavy. Yeah. So be forewarned. But we'll start with the picture taker.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: My name is Lynsey Addario, and I'm a photojournalist.

JAD: She's been covering war for the last 15 years.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I've done military embeds, infantry units patrolling, going in house-to-house searches.

JAD: She's worked in—well, everywhere. Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan, a million places. She's been kidnapped twice. She's won a Pulitzer, a MacArthur, and she's been called one of the most influential photographers of the past 25 years. In any case, this particular story ...

JAD: Can you set it up a little bit?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Sure. So in December of 2009 ...

JAD: She was taking pictures for Time Magazine. She was in Afghanistan, Garmsir district, Helmand Province, stationed at a base in the middle of the desert.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I was embedded with the medevac team, and their role is to go in and pick up injured troops out of the theater of war.

JAD: This is a small team of basically, helicopter pilots, medics, doctors.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Basically, whenever there's an injured soldier, these teams are called, whichever team is closest to the injured.

JAD: We're talking, like, helicopter dropping into ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Oh, yeah. I mean, this is fast.

JAD: So Lynsey had been embedded with this team for a couple of days, and not much was happening.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: You're just sitting around, reading magazines and then rereading the same magazines.

JAD: And one night, really late ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I think I was lying in bed, and I was totally, like—if I wasn't asleep, I was on the verge of sleep when they—someone ran and was like, "There's an alpha."

JAD: Alpha is like...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Alpha means the most gravely wounded. Like, you have seconds to get there. I mean, it's life or death.

JAD: So she grabs two cameras, her helmet, body armor, runs out to the Black Hawk.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I strap myself in and we take off. And I think it was about a two-minute flight, which is so fast. And I remember I was shooting the fields as we flew in because I was trying to focus and see what I can see. Luckily, they had lent me a set of night-vision goggles, which was really nice of the military because you can't see anything without them in the middle of the night because they are using night vision, so they don't ever turn on the lights.

JAD: So if you were to look through the camera directly, you would see ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Nothing.

JAD: ... just blackness?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Nothing. So what you do, for a photographer, is you put the night-vision goggles in front of the camera lens so it looks green. It's fluorescent green.

JAD: Does that mean that the picture you get is green?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Yes.

JAD: Huh.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: So they fly for two minutes through the pitch black, land the helicopter, she has no idea where.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: And everything is happening extremely fast. I'm trying to focus as I'm looking out the helicopter door. And suddenly in my viewfinder, I see a man sort of wrapped—I think he was wrapped in a blanket. And he's—he gets put right in front of me on the floor of the Black Hawk. The first thing I thought is, "I think he's already dead." He seemed completely unresponsive. And he seemed so young. I just remember looking at his face and thinking, "God, what are we doing here?"

JAD: Within seconds they're airborne again, flying back to the field hospital. Lynsey takes pictures on that brief flight back—grainy, fluorescent green images of the medics tending to the soldier, checking his vitals.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: We land at the field hospital.

JAD: They rushed him on a stretcher into the hospital tent.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: And the whole team of medics, Navy nurses, the anesthesiologist, everyone is there. They carry him inside and put him immediately on the table, cut his clothes off. They're cutting his pants off, open up his shirt. And the room starts filling up with everyone because everyone has heard that there's an alpha. And so troops come in from across the base sort of in support.

JAD: She says within minutes, the room went from just a handful of people—five, six—to a dozen, 20.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: And it's—you can hear a pin drop. I mean, the room is silent except for the doctors. You know, they're trying to resuscitate him. He had lost, I think, eight or nine pints of blood. They're bringing in blood. They're bringing in all sorts of things. And I ...

JAD: Are you shooting this whole time?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Well, yeah, of course. You know, I'm basically trying to be invisible because it's so sensitive to be a photographer in that situation. What I do—I don't shoot like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. You know, I shoot one frame, and then I put my camera down. And I shoot another frame. Because you can hear the click of the shutter, and it is, like, exponentially louder than normal in a situation like that.

JAD: Well, did you get—did anyone give you a look of, like ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: So ...

JAD: ... back off, or anything like that?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Well, at one point, I was shooting for probably, I don't know, five or six minutes maybe. And an officer walked over to me, and he said, "Hey, stop photographing." And ...

JAD: Really?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Yeah. And I put the camera down, and I looked at him and I said, "I have permission."

JAD: She had worked all that out beforehand as part of the conditions of her embed.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: We had had all these conversations. You know, what happens in the case of this? What is my access? What can I do?

JAD: But at this point, she says, the room was full of people from across the base who didn't know any of that, didn't know who she was, that she had permission. And so she was sort of at this fork in the road. There were those, like that officer, who clearly felt ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Put the camera down.

JAD: Stop.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Obviously, this is not the time to argue or to be disrespectful, so I didn't say anything else. I put the camera down.

JAD: But she says the moment she did that ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Several other troops said, "No, let her shoot. This has to be documented."

JAD: Oh, that's interesting. So you have one guy who says, "You can't take a picture of this."

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Right.

JAD: Almost like, anything but this.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Right.

JAD: And then another guy is like, "No, this especially."

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Right, right. First of all, the guy who said no was being protective. It made perfect sense for me. But I think the guys who stood up and said this has to be documented, I think at some point, everyone realized, like, look, this war is not going away. We are losing so many lives and limbs, and no one is seeing it.

JAD: And keep in mind, this is 2009. This is just at the tail end of an 18-year ban where the news media couldn't even photograph military coffins. In any case, the officer let it go. Lynsey continued to take pictures for about another 20 minutes. She took pictures of the doctors cutting open the boy's chest, massaging his heart.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: At some point, I remember someone, one of the doctors looked up and said, "Does anyone else have any suggestions basically for how to save him?" And everyone said no. And they sort of disconnected the—I mean, he died.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: People were looking down, and then they were looking at each other. And someone went to go get a flag, an American flag, to drape over his body. And I continued photographing. And there was a moment where the whole room was silent, and people stood around his body draped with a flag and said a prayer. That, to me, is one of the most powerful images that came out of this whole series.

JAD: There's this old idea in photography called the decisive moment, that the world is filled with these far-off realities, but every so often, a photograph can capture a moment that—boom!—takes you there. This is one of those photos. In the picture, you see all these men and women standing in kind of a loose semicircle. Some of them still have their blue surgical gloves on. They look totally spent. They're all looking in different directions, and they all look like they're not even there, like they're totally lost in their own thoughts.

ROBERT: Their attention is clearly inwards.

JAD: Yeah.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I'm sure all those troops were like, "God, that could have been me. Why couldn't we save him? What are we doing here in Afghanistan? Is this war worth it?" And to read the expressions on their faces, like, it's even—you can be at war as a journalist, but never actually get to the heart of the war because we don't have access or people don't open up. And I felt like I really had reached a—like, the crux of the war.

JAD: Interesting.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: It was war.

JAD: You'd seen an essence of something.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Yeah.

JAD: But then came a problem: any photos that she had taken that included that soldier's face or any other identifying marks like tattoos—and he did have tattoos—according to the rules of her embed, she couldn't use those photos without the soldier's permission.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Right.

JAD: And you never got to speak to him?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: No.

JAD: So was it days later, weeks later, months later, where you began to ask yourself, can I ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: No.

JAD: ... who do I talk to?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: It was minutes later.

JAD: Minutes later.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I mean, it's—the military does not let a journalist cover something like this without coming directly to that person. And so literally, like, I followed the young man's body out to the morgue. And they had to walk him outside. And I remember it was—the moon was so bright that night. And I was shooting with the moonlight as he was being carried outside. And then I went back to the tent where I was staying, and within minutes, the military PAO, the Marines' public affairs officers, came and said, "You know you can't send those images out without permission from the next of kin."

JAD: That's the rule. If a soldier is unconscious and then dies before giving permission ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I have to then go to the next of kin. And I said, "Of course, I understand." You know, I'm not doing anything with those photos in that moment. I signed this piece of paper. When I give my word, I keep that word, you know?

JAD: Sure.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: But then the other side of me was like, [bleep], you know? In Vietnam, no one was signing pieces of paper. And in Vietnam, no one had to go to the next of kin before they published anything. And that's why the American public, I think, rose up against the war in Vietnam because they saw the most graphic, devastating images that were uncensored.

JAD: So then what do you do in that circumstance? I mean, I imagine you'd go to the next of kin, right?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Well, you're not allowed as a journalist to reach out to the next of kin. They asked me, are you interested in being contacted by the next of kin if they're willing to speak to you?

JAD: Oh, so you can't even actually call?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: No, no. They will not give you the information.

JAD: Oh.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: But I said, you know, "Of course I would like to be contacted by the next of kin, and please pass my information on." And I was sort of just waiting.

JAD: I mean, at this point, were you thinking the pictures would ever see the light of day?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I had no idea. And ...

JAD: A few days later ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: ... maybe less than a week.

JAD: ... her embed was over. She was flying to JFK on her way to meet her family for Christmas.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: And I had voicemails on my telephone. And I listened. And it was his father. And he left me a voicemail, and he said, "I understand you were with my son when he died, and I would like to talk to you. And this is my phone number."

JAD: Wow!

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I sort of choked up just listening to his voice, anticipating how difficult that phone call would be.

JAD: That phone call—and all the fallout—is coming up.

[LISTENER: It's Lauren Drake from Dallas, Texas. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. So Lynsey Addario, the photographer, has these photos, these intense photos of a soldier dying, but she can't use them without getting permission from the next of kin.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Right.

JAD: A few days later ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I had voicemails on my telephone. And I listened, and it was his father.

JAD: His father's name is Todd Taylor. His son's name was Jonathan Taylor. And just to jump ahead for a second, as we were talking about the phone call and the fallout from that phone call, I had all of these questions about what Todd Taylor was thinking, questions about his son, things that Lynsey couldn't possibly answer. So at a certain point in the interview, she just told me ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I don't know. I mean, you could maybe interview him.

JAD: Do you think he would? I mean, is that ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Well ...

JAD: ... is there any prohibition on me talking to him?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Well, I'd be happy to give you his information.

JAD: Yeah, I'd be—I'd love to talk to him.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Yeah. I mean, you can try.

JAD: Lynsey put us in touch, and I'll just tell you about the visit for a second. Todd Taylor was willing to talk. He had two conditions.

JAD: Turn right.

JAD: One was like, if I'm gonna do a story about these photos of his son, I should at least get to know his son a little bit. And the second was that I come down to Florida to meet him and his family personally.

GPS: The destination is on your left.

JAD: All right.

JAD: So I did.

JAD: Hey.

TODD TAYLOR: Good morning.

JAD: Good morning. How are you?

TODD TAYLOR: Doing good. Doing good.

JAD: Good to meet you.

TODD TAYLOR: Did you have a ...

JAD: The Taylor family live in a section of Jacksonville that's near a naval base, so there are a lot of military families there.

TODD TAYLOR: Come on in, meet all the doggies.

JAD: Todd is actually ex-Navy himself.

TODD TAYLOR: No, no, no. No jumping.

JAD: He introduced me to his three giant boxers.

JAD: No jumping.

JAD: Or they sort of introduced themselves. And then ...

TODD TAYLOR: This is my daughter.

LAUREN TAYLOR: Hi. Nice to meet you.

JAD: Good to meet you.

TODD TAYLOR: My youngest, that's Lauren. Yep, Jad.

LAUREN TAYLOR: I'm the youngest, yeah.

JAD: ... met his daughters.

LAUREN TAYLOR: I am Lauren Taylor. I am 16, going on 17.

SUE TAYLOR: Oh, God. You had to add that in. [laughs]

MACKENZIE TAYLOR: My name's Mackenzie Taylor. I am Jonathan's other sister, and I'm 20 years old.

JAD: That little voice you heard in the background is Easton. He's about two.

TODD TAYLOR: That's one of the babies she watches. Hey, handsome!

JAD: Mackenzie works as a nanny.

PAIGE LARSON: My name's Paige Larson. I'm Jonathan's stepsister, and I'm 21.

SUE TAYLOR: My name's Sue Taylor, and I'm Jonathan's stepmom.

JAD: And then, of course ...

TODD TAYLOR: I'm Todd Taylor. I'm Jonathan's dad. We're here in my house in Jacksonville, Florida. And today is Jonathan's birthday. It's April 8.

JAD: 2015. So he would have been how old today?

TODD TAYLOR: 28 years old today. 28.

JAD: When I got there, they pulled out photo albums of Jonathan, and we all sat at the kitchen table and looked at pictures.

TODD TAYLOR: Right there.

JAD: Pictures of him as a baby.

TODD TAYLOR: Of course, that was very young.

JAD: Toddler.

TODD TAYLOR: This was on the Disney cruise I took him on.

JAD: Adolescent.

TODD TAYLOR: Kennedy Space Center.

JAD: Teenager. You see him running track.

TODD TAYLOR: He liked cross-country.

JAD: Going to prom.

TODD TAYLOR: That was Jonathan's girlfriend.

JAD: The thing you notice immediately in all the pictures ...

TODD TAYLOR: He had big blue eyes.

JAD: ... he's got these eyes that are not just blue, they're really blue, like if you boosted the brightness in Photoshop or something.

SUE TAYLOR: Yeah, that's—I forgot. I think we're on vacation here. But ...

JAD: The other thing you notice ...

MACKENZIE TAYLOR: His facial expressions are really funny in some of these.

TODD TAYLOR: Yeah, he was a big class clown.

JAD: ... a lot of goofy faces.

MACKENZIE TAYLOR: Very goofy.

SUE TAYLOR: Oh, big goofball.

MACKENZIE TAYLOR: Yeah. Goofball, yeah. Definitely knew how to make anybody laugh.

TODD TAYLOR: Full of energy, always into stuff. He kept the boys away, too. [laughs]

MACKENZIE TAYLOR: Definitely. Most definitely. He made sure if I had boyfriends, he'd call them just to see what grades they had.

JAD: Really? He would check on their grades?

MACKENZIE TAYLOR: Yeah, kind of give them a little interview.

LAUREN TAYLOR: I do remember he was very protective. If I had a crush, he'd be like, "Oh, no, you're not gonna have a crush. No, no boys."

MACKENZIE TAYLOR: There was one time before he left for Afghanistan I got really sick with a fever, and I remember him holding my hand just so he can make sure that I was okay, and took care of me.

JAD: They told me story after story about how he doted on his sisters, how he loved to read and wanted to become a history teacher after his four years in the Marines. And inevitably, the conversation turned to the day that they found out he'd died, December 1, 2009. They get a call from Jonathan's mom saying—it's that classic scene—"Oh, my God. There are two Marines at the door."

SUE TAYLOR: And we just kind of, like, left everything.

JAD: Sue, Todd, the girls jump in the car, race over.

SUE TAYLOR: They all wanted to get out. And we're like, "No," because we didn't really know what was going to happen.

TODD TAYLOR: Yeah.

SUE TAYLOR: So we made all the girls stay in the car.

MACKENZIE TAYLOR: And I remember walking in the door, and everyone just had this look on their face like the world had just ended. And I remember asking what happened, and my mom had told me that he was gone. The first thing I did was run to his room because everything was the same before he had left. I remember opening up his closet and grabbing one of his shirts and just holding onto it because it still had his scent on it. That night was really hard.

JAD: One thing that had never occurred to me, totally caught me off guard in thinking about those pictures, is that when those Marines came to the door and told them the news, well, they didn't actually give much news.

TODD TAYLOR: This right here was one of them. This is what was read.

JAD: Todd actually read me the circumstances-of-death statement.

TODD TAYLOR: "Hostile action result of multiple traumatic injuries received as a member of a dismounted patrol that was struck by an IED while conducting combat operations in the Helmand Province." That was it. On patrol, night patrol. That's all I had.

JAD: So you didn't know anything?

TODD TAYLOR: That's it.

JAD: Jonathan's unit was still in Afghanistan, so he couldn't talk to anyone. He had no clue what happened to his son. So when that casualty assistance officer told him actually, there was a photographer in the room with your son when he died ...

TODD TAYLOR: Automatically, I was like, I wanted to—I wanted to call her.

JAD: Earlier in my conversation with Lynsey, I'd asked her ...

JAD: What do you remember of the call?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: So the call—I went to my mother's house in Connecticut, and I asked my mother to be left alone, which in a big Italian-American family means ...

JAD: [laughs]

LYNSEY ADDARIO: ... it does not happen very often.

JAD: It's not a small request.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: No. She sort of looked at me like, "What?" And I went up into the guest bedroom, and I called him. And he picked up. I think he thanked me for calling him. I don't remember exactly what we said, but I said, "You know, I was with your son when he died, and I will give you as much or as little information as you want." And he said, "I want to know everything."

TODD TAYLOR: Because I wasn't there. I was here.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: He said, "I want to know every single thing. I want to be with my son."

TODD TAYLOR: Just to lose him and not be there for him, that was hard, really hard.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: And I felt sort of very awkward because I felt like, you know, why was I privy to this moment, and he as the father could not be privy?

TODD TAYLOR: The most important question to me was did he suffer? Do you think that he suffered?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I said no.

TODD TAYLOR: She told me, "Mr. Taylor, I don't think he suffered. I think he was in shock."

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I told him everything: how much blood his son lost, how long did they try to save him. And at some point, I said, "Look, I have these pictures. I have all of these pictures. I shot everything. And I need your permission to publish the ones that show his face."

TODD TAYLOR: Oh, yeah. She asked me for our permission. And ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: He was quiet.

TODD TAYLOR: I said—I told her yes. But ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: But he said, "I—can I see them?"

TODD TAYLOR: ...I wanted to see them first.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: "Before I give permission, I want to see every photo." And I said, "You know, I'm not sure you want to see these photos because they're graphic." But he wanted to see the—he wanted to see every photo.

JAD: All of them?

TODD TAYLOR: Yeah.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Course, we were on the phone. I couldn't show him pictures. And legally, I needed permission from Time Magazine to show him anything because, you know, as a journalist, you can't show anything to anyone until it's published. You don't show people pictures of journalism before you publish them.

JAD: This is one of those cardinal rules that's drilled into every journalist's head. If you show a subject the raw stuff before it's out there, you're kind of giving up the only independence you've got. That's why, she says, ordinarily ...

LYNSEY ADDARIO: I would never, ever, ever show.

JAD: Just to play it out for a second, if he—to be cynical about it, if you show him the pictures, he might take away permission that he might have otherwise give you.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Yes, exactly. Exactly. You can say as a publication, "No, I won't show you those pictures before. You have to just say yes or no, do you give your permission?"

JAD: Like, in a way if you get down to it, I feel like one of the fundamental layers here is just, like, a question of whose rights, when it comes to that information, is more important?

ROBERT: I could hear an argument that says the battle is important. It was authorized by public figures. It is carrying America's message into the world, and shouldn't Americans see what goes on?

JAD: Yeah, but I could hear an argument that says, shouldn't a dad be able to protect who sees his son in that situation?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: In any case, Lynsey called her editors at Time. They had a series of conversations that went all the way up to the editor of Time.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: We had a very intense conversation, and we collectively made a decision to show him the photos.

JAD: To say that decision was unusual from their perspective would be severely understating it.

TODD TAYLOR: When I first got these from FedEx, I knew they were coming, and I was actually scared to look at them. And I saw my son there, and I just kept looking and looking. You can see these were the—in the medevac when they got him on. You can see the night-vision lens. There's Jonathan's body, chest. There's his face. There's the oxygen. Still had his watch on still. See his eyes closed there. That was ...

JAD: Yeah.

TODD TAYLOR: So many hands in there working. You can see they're doing CPR there. Now here you see right leg is really mangled and broken. That's really why he lost so much blood. It was all right in here.

JAD: Some of these pictures are ...

TODD TAYLOR: Oh, there's some of them that are ...

JAD: ... really hard to see.

TODD TAYLOR: Yeah. But even though they show the ugliness of war, I've got a piece of Jonathan. This is my treasure. I'll show you one of the pictures that to me, it's—it always stands out.

JAD: He brought up the picture of the prayer, all those people standing in a semicircle with faraway eyes.

TODD TAYLOR: Right here. You can just see a little different in their faces here. I mean, it meant something. He was somebody.

JAD: Yeah.

TODD TAYLOR: He wasn't just a number.

JAD: Todd said he wanted people to see this picture and the others.

TODD TAYLOR: To convey what's happening over there. This is going on every day.

JAD: And he says for him it's not a political thing. You can feel however you want to feel about the wars we're in. For him, it's about people seeing what is actually happening.

TODD TAYLOR: I mean, I wanted to let people see the sacrifice that these boys do.

JAD: It took Todd and his family over a month to decide what to do about those pictures, whether to grant Time permission to run the photos or not. He says ultimately, he called Jonathan's mother over.

TODD TAYLOR: Her and her husband and my wife and I, we all discussed it.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: And ultimately, he said no. And it was a lot of back and forth.

JAD: He said no to showing any pictures at all?

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Well, he can't say no to any pictures because those ...

JAD: Oh, because there was pictures without the face.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Yeah, exactly. He said no to any pictures with the face or identifying marks.

TODD TAYLOR: We decided really that we didn't want these pictures to get out for fear that his sisters, somehow they would get back to them. And that was the big thing. I didn't want them to be able to see this yet. As their dad, I want to protect them from seeing certain things. So we decided not to do it.

JAD: Time had planned to run a whole photo spread on the medevac team trying to save Jonathan Taylor's life. But since they now couldn't use most of those photos, they had to make the photo spread more general.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: What had been the—basically the death of a soldier ultimately became a photo essay on the medevac team. And those pictures were maybe two pictures or three pictures in that spread, but they were not the focus.

JAD: The prayer photo is in the news spread because in that photo, you can't see his body because it's covered with the flag. There are no identifying marks. But somehow in that context, it's not got the same impact, weirdly.

ROBERT: Because you're seeing the after without the before?

JAD: Exactly. And, you know ...

TODD TAYLOR: Let's see here.

JAD: ... Todd showed me the original photo spread because they had sent that to him.

TODD TAYLOR: You know?

JAD: Again, super unusual.

JAD: So this is the—this is the feature they wanted to do?

TODD TAYLOR: Yeah. And see, the pictures are so much more clear. This is kind of the layout that it's gonna be. They call it "29 Minutes." Graphing it out ...

JAD: Minute by minute.

TODD TAYLOR: ... this whole process.

JAD: So there you see all the before pictures that lead up to the prayer. And what it seemed to me is like if you don't see all that stuff: the wounds and the blood and the tenderness as they tried to comfort him, and then the emptiness they feel when they couldn't save him, like, if you don't see all that, you're not really standing with them in that prayer at the end. You're still seeing them across a space.

ROBERT: Yeah, that's interesting.

JAD: In the original spread, you are there in that room.

TODD TAYLOR: And they did a—they did a great job, you know?

JAD: It's really powerful. And I couldn't help but think that, like, maybe this would have created that conversation that Lynsey talked about just a tiny bit and, like, how weird that I'm one of the only people to see it. And to know that, like, I—the only reason I can describe it to you is because I'm on the radio.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: You know, I will always feel like journalistically we sacrifice—you know, we did not tell the story as powerfully as we could have. But we had integrity, and I feel like we treated everyone with respect, and we kept our word.

JAD: Lynsey and Todd now stay in touch over email once or twice a year. And in terms of keeping your word, Todd has made a deal with his daughters that they can see the pictures when they turn 21. But interestingly, the three of them don't agree as to whether they want to. Paige and Mackenzie, who are about to turn 21, say they don't want to see the pictures.

PAIGE LARSON: I just couldn't handle it.

JAD: Yeah. Do you feel the same way?

MACKENZIE LARSON: Yeah, I think for me, I just don't want to see him in pain, you know?

JAD: That's Mackenzie.

PAIGE LARSON: Yeah. My thing is, I just don't want to see it because I'd rather just remember him in one piece how he was. I'm just too sensitive.

JAD: That's Paige. Now Lauren, the youngest ...

LAUREN TAYLOR: For me ...

JAD: ... she says she needs to see those pictures.

LAUREN TAYLOR: Because I want to know what he went through. And I like constantly knowing things. And I don't like things being kept from me. And I just want to—I guess I just want a visual of ...

JAD: It sounds like a ...

JAD: She says she knows he's gone, but she still somehow needs proof, not that it happened, she knows it happened, but so it feels real.

JAD: Okay. So big thanks to Pat Walters, Kira Pollack, the Taylor family, and of course, Lynsey Addario. She has a book out now called It's What I Do, which is sort of a memoir about her war photography and how it's changed her life. And that book is filled with her photography.

ROBERT: Anything like the ones we didn't see?

JAD: Well, there's some amazing pictures in there, but nothing like these ones.

ROBERT: Hmm. So now for our last story, we're not gonna be looking through a window or through a camera on this one. This one takes place face to face. They are two people, one right with the other, a moment that is too powerful, too mysterious, too amazing to not share with you. It's called Gone.

ROBERT: This is a reading from Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty, who's one of—in my opinion anyway—one of the great living poets in America. This, however, is not poetry. This is prose. It's Mark's description of the death of his longtime partner Wally.

ROBERT: Thursday night, January 20, Wally's smiling. I get the Polaroid and asked him to show me that smile once again. And he does. The last time he'll be able to.

ROBERT: Friday January 21. The last words I will write for a month. "Time's the engine that decks the world in its beautiful clothes, and not one, not one is exempt." Wally's breathing changes, becomes heavier, regular. Breathing's work now, as if it were an audible sign of some transformative process within. He seems turned in on himself, not speaking. I don't think he can speak now. I touch him and talk to him. We know it's time for the morphine in an eyedropper on his tongue. Perhaps there's no pain, but if there is he couldn't tell us, and the opiate will ease the work for him. Rena comes and says goodbye. His eyes are closed, and when she comes into the room, but he opens the right one, the still good side of his face, and he takes her in.

ROBERT: She tells him she hopes he's not scared, and they spend a long time looking at each other. She says, "Knowing you has been a great gift in my life." And that she'll always carry him in her heart. Then she's quiet, giving him her love. "And then we looked at each other for some time," she told me later, "And I kissed him and I wished him a safe and joyful journey, and I left and I didn't see him in his body again."

ROBERT: I call his mother who's planning to come on Sunday. She comes Saturday morning instead, but by then his eyes are closed. She sit alone with him for a while. He opens his right eye just a tiny bit. We can tell that he sees her. All that afternoon he looks out at us through that little space, but I know he sees and he registers, and I know that he's loving us actively. And I know if nothing else about this man, after 13 years I know that.

ROBERT: So into the line of his vision I bring Bisbee and Portia the cats and Arden and Roe the dogs. And I sit there myself all afternoon. The lamp's on, the house is circled in snow and early winter darkness. The afternoon is so quiet and deep, it seems almost to ring like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening when he closes his eyes. There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who is now almost no surface, as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on.

ROBERT: I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current so far inside his life and my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love's deepest reality where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one swift river, hurrying into the tumble of rivers out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents, God moving on the face of the waters.

ROBERT: Suddenly I'm so tired, I think I can't stay awake another minute. Darren comes in—he's been in and out all day, spelling me, seeing where things are, and says he'll sit with Wally awhile. I say, "I'll sleep on the couch for an hour." I don't think I'd been lying down 10 minutes when I sit up wide awake. Darren is, in fact, on the way to fetch me, but I've come on on my own. I know it's time. I say to Wally, while the breath comes more shallowly, "All the love in the world goes with you." Each breath he draws in goes a little less further into his body so easily. He never struggles. There's no sense of difficulty, no sense of holding on.

ROBERT: Arden the dog stands up suddenly, moved by what imperative I don't know, and falls out of the bed. Darren says, "That's just Arden. He's okay," not wanting anything to steal Wally's attention from where he is now. I say, "You go easy, babe. Go free." The world seemed in absolute suspension, nothing moving anywhere. Everything centered. "Go easy." But you go.

ROBERT: Mark Doty has a new book of poetry just out called Deeply.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. Thanks for listening.

-30-

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