“You learned what pictures the Public Affairs Officer would release and what he wouldn’t,” Brody explains. “Soldiers looking calm or stoic. Yes. Soldiers looking angry or frightened or exhausted or confused or lost with eyes like the bottom of the ocean. No.” After Brody photographed one especially protracted and bloody engagement with a unit from the 101st Airborne Division, he claimed that a division chief of staff prevented the pictures from being published. (The Army said it had no available information on the situation.) “He said it was ‘too negative,’ ” Brody writes, “meaning that my account didn’t conform to his tightly scripted vision of what victory was supposed to look like.” Those photos that did conform to the script were used in Army newsletters and publications, such as The Warrior and The Dog Face Daily. Others were made available on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, or DVIDS, a clearinghouse for military images and videos, operated by the Pentagon. All of the content on DVIDS is public domain—Army combat photographers don’t hold the copyrights to their work—which means that anyone can use Brody’s pictures for any purpose. One dramatic image he captured, of an infantry captain leading an assault across a field at sunrise, has appeared in advertisements for tactical radios, batteries, and vape pens.