World Witness: The Photography of Andrea Bruce

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, September/October 2006

For Andrea Bruce ‘95, vision is everything. And at that moment, in June 2004, riding in a Humvee with soldiers from the U.S. Army 1st Infantry Division through the streets of Baquba, Iraq, she had lost it. Dark was all around her, and pieces of shrapnel flew from a roadside bomb that had exploded five feet from the vehicle she was in. She could see very little, but she soon recognized the sounds of a firefight. Insurgents were shooting at the soldiers, and soldiers were shooting in every direction with night goggles to aid them. Two men riding in the unarmored vehicle behind hers were badly injured when hot debris hit their faces.

She hoisted her camera to the black sky above her and blindly clicked, clicked, clicked.

And then there were the suicide bombings, which happened almost every other week. She would go to the scene where body parts lay, the charred remnants of citizens who, hoping to get precious work with the Iraqi police or army, had stood in line for days. The emotions of the Iraqi citizens would boil over, spilling onto her. Angry, looking for someone to blame for the atrocities that had taken their fathers, their sons, they would express their rage and confusion by targeting the nearest Westerner. Bruce, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Indiana native, was slapped, hit, pushed around by heartbroken Iraqis. A friend was once hit with a metal bar. She learned to leave such scenes quickly, to avoid the mobs, to avoid one person yelling at her turning into one hundred yelling at her, the scene turning into a nightmare that she had never seen in the job description.

Most of us will never know the kind of harrowing moments and aching introductions to despair that Bruce, a staff photographer for The Washington Post, experienced during the nine months she spent in Iraq to document the conflict for the newspaper. She knows this. But she also knows that American society remains more interested in caricatures who chomp insects for prize money and the lightweight lives of socialites than the war their country has waged and its heartbreaking aftermath. We wish not to be bothered. But Bruce wishes to bother us.

That, she says, is why she can’t wait to go back to Iraq. It has changed her to the bone. Changed her vision. Changed her world.

Rye Barcott Goes to War

He came to Carolina as an officer trainee. By the time he caught up with the Marines, he had plenty of trial by fire in the desperate slums of East Africa.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, May/June 2004

Two o’clock in the morning and the noise is deafening. Rye Barcott ‘01 gets dressed, grabs his machete. It sounds like war coming down outside his shanty in Kenya, and swarms of people are running toward the railroad tracks on the border of the Kiberan slums. Barcott follows the candles, the flashlights, the moonbeams that shine like an interrogation lamp; he follows the banging, to a man who lies bloodied in the middle of an enormous mob. He’s a thief, a mwizi, and his tale makes Barcott lose his voice. A villager stands over the mwizi. He appears to be flicking something at him. Spitting on him maybe.
Seconds later, the thief is in flames, and the jeering that awakened Barcott from his sleep immediately stops. Quiet falls on East Africa’s largest slum, and the mob disperses. When morning comes, small children and their parents pass the burn mark, an ugly scar on their orange horizon.

Barcott knows the man probably was trying to feed his family. He knows many young men just like last night’s mwizi. But what can you do? What can you do?

Another story, another day in Kibera: A woman comes to Barcott’s door. She has come to tell her tale, she says, but Barcott already knows it – she once was a nurse and now is a widow, three children, no job. It’s now the end of his summer, the end of his Burch Fellowship, and he knows all of Kibera’s sob stories. He’s heard them a thousand times over from different mouths, while their eyes focus on a white man’s wallet.

“I sympathize,” he tells them, “but I came here without money.” It’s a lie he has to tell. He has no interest in selling them dependence. Money is fleeting. Power is in understanding.

Governer on Guard

Gaston Caperton overcame dyslexia to become a millionaire and rise to West Virginia’s highest office. Now he leads the venerable College Board into a new century – and, he hopes, a new relevancy – on the Web.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, November/December 2000

 

 

 

 

He is needlessly narrow for a man of such wide ambitions. Gaston Caperton has a tall, thin frame, but he does not possess it the way most of us accept our builds and carry them with us for the lot of our days. He lives outside the boundaries of his trunk’s long, straight, economic lines, propelled by a mind restless for accomplishment. Meanwhile, his limbs are left to catch up, discombobulated and noodly – a leg crooked at the knee and propped on a table here, a stray hand probing the fleece of gray hair as though by accident. His brown eyes are stubbornly squinty. Even the ashy circles and lines on his 60-year-old face contend with his tinny voice like a haggard pugilist backed into yesterday’s corner.

Cross currents, and crosses to bear. So strong that they make it both possible and impossible to believe Caperton has been a two-term governor of West Virginia and a millionaire. Now, as president of the College Board – the nonprofit organization that has long struck fear in the hearts of high schoolers with its SAT and Advanced Placement tests – he confronts the opposing ebbs and flows of his life story most poignantly, sitting before a table of books in his Lincoln Square office in New York.

Just the thought of reading in a spotlight challenges his nerves like nothing else.

“If somebody came in here today and pulled one of these books off this table, and asked you to read it, you would do that with great confidence and it would sound great,” says Caperton, who was diagnosed with a “reversal reading” problem in the fourth grade. “But I would be scared when you gave me the book, and I’d be scared when I read it aloud. Still today.”

The disorder has been both his bane and his blessing.

“I have never thought of myself as very smart,” Caperton wrote in an essay for his high school alumni magazine in 1996. “My dad…taught me to read, word by word. We got up early every morning, and I sat at the foot of his bed and learned how to hear the words, see the words, spell the words, read the words, and understand what they mean. Ten new words every day.”

“A lot of things were very difficult for me,” Caperton says today. “But I worked very hard, and when you’re able to overcome those things, you develop traits that help you throughout life. And those are advantages to you.”

Of course, the poetic irony nearly drips from the story line. The College Board – a creation of Ivy League universities that once were populated only by graduates of New England’s boarding schools, chooses a man who battled dyslexia – attended a public university and became a popular education governor in a state that often is known solely by its economic bleak holes, to lead it into its 100th year. When you add to the scenario the recurring controversies over the SAT – pick your peccadillo: relevancy, racial discrimination, economic bias, disability unfairness – the choice of the first College Board president not to come from academia becomes even more interesting.

But Caperton’s selection in July 1999 wasn’t about poetry or poster-boys for over-achievement, or even perfecting the SAT’s mechanics. It was about the bottom line.

A Natural High

From tiny Woodburn, Ind., to Washington, D.C., Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Jane E. Henney never faced a hurdle she couldn’t leap.

The New Physician, November 1999

She was homecoming queen. If you know any facts about Jane E. Henney, this is probably not one of them. It’s not that it’s a great secret, a diamond of a tidbit unearthed from the past. Just four words notable for their simplicity. One of the nation’s most accomplished women doctors, with a résumé as ongoing as her Midwestern roots, once stood before her peers at Manchester College in Indiana wrapped in the swath of the traditional female popularity contest. A tiara of tradition.

It is, quite probably, a disservice to old-school feminists to begin a story about the rise of the first woman commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in this way. A crown, some flowers, the idea of a man presenting you on his arm while leading you down a path—too much style, not enough substance. But this is not a narrative about fitting a mold, or not fitting a mold. It’s about a woman who grew with her small-town values, who worked hard, loved fairness but not politics and dreamed big even when dreaming seemed impossible.

Doc Niswander saw the dreaming in action—in fleeting, riotous, exuberant action—one day in 1968. He peered out the window of his house near the Manchester campus where he taught anatomy and physiology, and there was quite a sight: Janie Henney, smile stretching and legs flying, beating a path like Achilles to his door with a golden ticket in her hand.

“She had just pulled it out of her mailbox,” Doc says. “It was her letter of acceptance to medical school.”