The image shows a burned-beyond-recognition Iraqi soldier in the front window of a destroyed truck.

The sun is coming in through the back of the truck and most of the surfaces in the image are burned and just torn up, so it's almost a black and white image although it was made on colour film.

Warning: Some readers may find this graphic image disturbing

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We had travelled east from Nasiriya towards Basra, hooked up with Highway 8 and we started travelling south towards Kuwait City. And we came across this... just a single lorry, kind of in the middle of a double-lane highway.

I was with a public affairs officer with the US Army and he said: "I don't really get my jollies out of making pictures of dead people."

And I said... I just thought of the first thing I could think of, and I said: "If I don't make pictures like this, people like my mother will think what they see in war is what they see in movies."

Two frames

He didn't try to stop me, he let me go and I just went over there. And he might have been the driver of the truck, he might have been the passenger, but he had been burned alive and it appears as though he's trying to lift himself up and out of the truck.

But I do know that he fought for his life and thought it was worth fighting for. And he's frozen, he's burned in place just kind of frozen in time in this last ditch effort to save his life.

At the time it was just something... well, I better make a picture of this.

I thought there might have been better pictures. I literally shot two frames and moved on to other things and I didn't really think a whole lot about it.

Unseen in US

The first Gulf War was done entirely under the US Department of Defense Pool system, which means any press organisation that was a member of that pool had access to everyone else's work.

Images like that are meant to cause a debate in the public: 'Is this something we want to be involved in?'



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They deemed it was too sensitive, too graphic for the editors of the newspapers that are part of the co-op - too graphic even for the editors to see, not even to let them make the decision of what the market they served could see.

So, basically, it was unseen in the US.

In the UK it was published by the London Observer and I was actually going through Heathrow and I picked up the newspapers and I saw it was quite big, and that was basically the scene I thought I was going to see in all the newspapers around the world, since everybody had access to the image.

It caused quite a controversy in London, which is what images like that are meant to do. They're meant to basically cause a debate in the public: "Is this something we want to be involved in?"

How can you decide to have a war if you are not fully informed? You need to know what the end result will be, what the middle result will be.

And since then, it's an image that has a life of its own. It's been published hundreds of times, you can find all over the internet, it just keeps going and it's published as much today as it ever has been.



Ken Jarecke gave this account to the BBC World Service programme, the World Today.