A New Gloucester native takes a break from covering the war to visit home.
LEWISTON – Jim Bartlett looks like a soldier, even in civilian clothes.
A cell phone hangs from the collar of his leather bomber jacket, a patch-covered coat he wears despite the July heat.
The Maine summer seems cool to the New Gloucester native. He just returned from the Iraqi desert.
In Iraq, as he did in Bosnia and Chechnya, Bartlett followed the fighting: taking pictures of soldiers and ordinary people, of crumbling buildings and corpses.
And he’s headed back.
“I’m applying my skills,” said Bartlett, though he’s unsure where he’ll go or what he’ll do when he returns. “I’m bearing witness.”
His stories have been published in some of the biggest newspapers in the United States and Canada. But since he works for no one publication, it’s been a hardscrabble career.
“I didn’t know I could get across the Iraq border, but I had to try,” Bartlett said. “I’m going to see the world. And if I’m going to go hand-to-mouth, so be it. I’ve got the rest of my life to have the steady job.”
During the war in Iraq, he was embedded with troops from the 101st Airborne Division. He was with them as they faced fighting from direct assaults and sly skirmishes. He focused on the regular troops, whom he believes were often left out of much of the war’s reporting.
“These guys don’t have an Ernie Pyle to stick up for them,” he said, referring to the legendary columnist who wrote about World War II’s ordinary G.I. Joes.
Among the stories Bartlett reported this April was one of troops burying the Iraqi dead. It was published in the United States and Canada.
He described the stacking of the dead outside an Iraqi airport and, according to Muslim tradition, the facing of each body toward Mecca.
“It’s what Americans do,” he wrote in the UPI-carried story, dated April 24. “It’s the kind of people we are. Even for our enemies. And so that’s where they lay, those soldiers of Saddam, with an iron picket for a headstone, blown away for a guy who didn’t see fit to even buy them steel helmets. No glory whatsoever.”
A simple start
Bartlett, now 36, began taking pictures as a kid in Gray-New Gloucester High School. He took a photography class. Soon after, he began submitting photos of school sports to the Lewiston Daily Sun.
“I don’t think I was paid the first year,” he said. He would develop his own film, then submit the black-and-white negatives to the paper.
It never seemed like a prelude to journalism, he said. Bartlett graduated from high school in 1985 and entered the U.S. Army.
By the early 1990s, however, he was attending Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va., and working for the school paper.
Bartlett used his press pass on the college publication to gain United Nations credentials and entry to his first conflict: the war in Bosnia.
He met war correspondents, learned how to make a living by sending stories and photos to wire services, magazines and newspapers.
And he began making his own rules for when he would stop taking notes, put away his camera and lend a hand.
People who were trying to bring water to their homes didn’t need their picture taken, he said. When the clique of journalists got their story and left, he’d sometimes stay behind.
“To me, being from Maine, you help your neighbor,” Bartlett said. “I can’t just leave. I take the journalist hat off, pitch in and help.”
Comments are no longer available on this story