Using one another as pillows, like a family huddled together for warmth in a house without heat, most of the Marines were catching a little sleep before their mission was to begin. But one sat wide awake at the edge of their huddle.

Tyler Hicks caught this quiet moment.

Another Marine gazed at a snapshot of himself and his wife. The picture’s tattered edge conveyed how well traveled it was. And how often it was so lovingly examined.

Mr. Hicks was there.

Along with members of Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, Mr. Hicks, a staff photographer for The Times, was preparing to go into battle.

I have to carry cameras, lenses, a laptop, satellite transmitter, chargers, batteries and cables. I bring duplicates of some chargers in case one shorts out because if I can’t charge, then I can’t file my pictures. A sleeping bag, enough clothes to stay relatively warm, three days of food and water. I also wear body armor, a helmet, protective goggles and some first aid gear — pressure bandages and tourniquets, mostly. Things begin to get heavy.

The Marja offensive, aimed at retaking a Taliban stronghold, involved the third major air assault Mr. Hicks has covered as an embedded photojournalist since he began working in Afghanistan nearly 10 years ago. Troops had been massing in Helmand Province for days and there had been numerous news reports detailing the impending assault. The Taliban had time to prepare. “In some ways this weighed on our minds as bad weather delayed our helicopters,” Mr. Hicks said, “but thinking about what lays ahead can be more stressful than the event itself, so I didn’t concentrate on it.”

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

I reminded myself that I only have to take pictures and, unlike the Marines around me, I have the freedom to get low and maneuver however I want, if needed. There had been particular anxiety among Marines about I.E.D.’s that would be easy to plant prior to our arrival but those did not become a major threat until later — at least not for a company landing by helicopter. The I.E.D.’s were mostly on the roads and the region’s outer belt. It turned out that they were not in the fields, which is where we landed. I worried more about snipers. We had a briefing before we joined the company that flew in. The officer told us that a few Special Forces units had operated briefly near where we were going, but they never managed to get up the place. They always ended up getting fired at by the Taliban, including single-shot sniper fire — a pretty rare occurence in my Afghanistan experience. So I thought a little about that, since we would be there a while. Sniper fire is nastier than random Kalashnikov fire.

Early on Feb. 13, Mr. Hicks and C. J. Chivers, a Times reporter, landed along with Kilo Company in absolute darkness. “The helicopters quickly departed, showering us with dirt and heat from the engines, and it was quiet again,” Mr. Hicks said. “We had arrived in Marja.”

Chris used his satellite phone in the landing zone to call the paper and tell them where we were. He gave them the latitude-longitude coordinates for the landing zone. And then the Marines got up and started to move toward some buildings. We followed them inside and I took pictures as they swept it. They had flashlights on their rifles and they turned them on as they entered rooms; this was the only illumination beside starlight. Once the first sweep was over, it was black again. I turned on my laptop and satellite antenna and sent a few frames to New York, so the paper would have some opening images of the offensive.

An Afghan man was surrounded, arms outstretched, lit by flashlight and framed by shadows of Marines pointing their weapons. The image made it to Page 1 of The New York Times later that day, next to a two-column headline: “Allies Attacking Big Taliban Haven in Afghan South.” Operation Moshtarak (Together) had begun.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

At first light, I was able to start taking pictures. The Marines were on the move, crossing fields of young poppy and bounding over irrigation canals. I would try to get into position to take some pictures and then catch back up to where I had been in the line. But carrying the gear, with the added weight of a Kevlar vest and helmet, made working difficult. Hours later we reached our pause, a bleak outcrop of mud-walled homes and compounds surrounded by flat deserted land. It seemed empty, until the shooting began.

Sometimes the most serene-looking war photographs speak volumes of the danger afoot: body language or the subtlest of expressions will betray it. Then, Marines scurry across a field, in a hail of bullets, and the picture making continues. A Marine’s brief glance towards the camera shows the fear in his eyes. Scenes of warriors seeking cover in a barren landscape feel timeless, reminiscent of other wars. Or perhaps every war.

Despite the amount of action going on during a fight, I find combat the most difficult to translate photographically. You can be in the most compromising situation, surrounded by gunfire, but the pictures may only translate to someone firing a weapon. If possible, I try to get movement in my pictures. The less static, the more experience is captured. Facial expressions and emotion are just as important as the tactical part of a fight. I try to capture the experience of battle, while at the same time protecting myself. There are times you have to break away from the action, focus and gather yourself. Chris and I check on each other constantly. Working with someone you can rely on is one of the most important aspects of embedding in a place like Afghanistan. You can be protected militarily, but having a buddy system with someone you trust is invaluable in the field. Chris and I have been working together for years embedded in Afghanistan and have relied on each other under the most extreme circumstances. We look after each other always, and keep each other up. He knows I have his back. I know he has mine. Not having to wonder about who you’re with frees you up to work.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The Marines used an airstrike to hit a compound. The order came to go search the building’s rubble, and so Chris and I ran over and joined the squad that was going out there. It meant crossing back across the canal and the open fields, and then going by some high reeds. There were about 15 of us. The Taliban ambushed the patrol. It was brief, but a lot of fire. I was walking along a dirt road, just before dark, when bursts of automatic fire erupted from a patch of tall grass ahead of us. Chris was out in the field, in the open. The Marines returned fire and pushed the Taliban away. Chris couldn’t see me and was calling my name to make sure I was not shot. And I couldn’t hear him because my attention was on the bullets going by and I had tuned out everything else. The Marine squad leader, a corporal, told Chris he could see me and everyone was O.K., so far. Then he ordered the squad to get up and run right toward the Taliban, as soon as there was a lull in Taliban firing. We ran with them. For the next three days after that, we were under pretty much constant fire. Nights were quiet, though. The Taliban backed away at night.

In a dim blue light, Marines stood near a pocked wall, stunned after the loss of one of their men. Their expressions ranged from sadness to shock to mystification.

As their squads filtered into our compound just before dark, I could see the emotion of the loss on the Marines’ faces. These situations are delicate, and you have to approach them with respect for what they’re going through. I was able to shoot just a few frames before it was dark, but in this case was able to tell part of their story through that scene.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

During an intense firefight on Feb. 14, Mr. Hicks’s view of the war in Afghanistan grew terrifyingly close up. A Marine was hit by gunfire as he crouched behind a wall. Bullets were piercing the air as Mr. Hicks photographed the wounded Marine being treated by the medic. Minutes later, a rocket barrage hit a house nearby, killing 12 civilians. It was far too dangerous to move. Mr. Hicks was stuck.

These would have been important pictures, but I couldn’t move alone across an open battlefield to reach them in time. It was several hundred yards of open ground. A sniper had just shot a Marine near Chris, and I had taken pictures of the corpsman treating the injury. I knew how dangerous it was, and it would have put Marines at risk to ask them to accompany me out there. We never do that. Our ethical position is that we will take every step we can alongside the people we cover in combat, but never ask them to take a step for us, or to take us somewhere they would not go on their own. If they were to get hurt doing something we asked them to do, it would weigh on us personally forever. Chris and I follow this code. We believe in it and do not deviate from it. But even though I was on ethically firm ground, this was a personally frustrating moment for me, a thought that continues to harass me, because that would have been important to document. I remind myself of the reality of conflict that I’ve learned over the years. Time and distance become something completely different in battle, when a moment can make all the difference, and a few feet can feel like a mile, and where we have a responsibility not to get anyone else hurt, and to allow the events to flow naturally around us.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

In addition to the danger of making pictures in a war zone, something as mundane as lack of electricity can be agonizing and debilitating. In the age of minute-by-minute news, speed of transmission becomes nearly as important as the pictures themselves. To prepare for this, Mr. Hicks and Mr. Chivers brought a car battery. “It was like running with 100 pounds on your back and a big dumbbell in one hand and a camera in the other,” Mr. Hicks said. “I carried the battery on the first night. Once the sun came up, Chris took it so I could shoot pictures and have both hands free.”

However, the car battery failed. Then, after two days, the computer battery died. “For the first time in 10 years,” Mr. Hicks said, “I was sitting on pictures that I was unable to send.” Military vehicles eventually arrived and the pictures began flowing again to New York.

On his last day with Company K, Mr. Hicks focused on the Marines’ exhaustion. Under the threshhold of an ancient doorway, in a shallow indentation in the ground, a young man reclined in a cocoonlike blanket. Once again — however briefly, however furtively — it was time for sleep. And Mr. Hicks was there.