by Katie Dettman

Graduate Student

I was introduced as a person who was deciding if she wanted to go or not. It hit me what a sacrifice they were making, compared to my luxury of deciding if I wanted to go.”  When they met earlier this year, the unit was preparing to depart for a one-year tour of duty. She had found out about an opportunity to be embedded with the unit in Iraq through a friend at UO, a captain in the Air Force Reserves.

Bagby, a 2008 SOJC graduate, attended training with the company in Oklahoma in April before deploying with them in May, first to Kuwait, and then to Iraq.

Her decision to go to Iraq with the unit was not an easy one—it took her about two months to make the decision to go.

“I never knew anybody in the military,” she said. “It hit me what a sacrifice they were making.” She decided to go because she is interested in telling soldiers' stories from a local point of view. She knew the assignment would be a big boost for her burgeoning career as a journalist, but she also wanted to to do something she believed in. When she met with the commander of the unit and was introduced to the soldiers, she had just returned from a volunteer assignment in Bangladesh and Vietnam, where she did work for the Prosthetic Outreach Foundation.

Bagby, 25, is one of the only women on base at Balad in Iraq, where the C/7th-158 Aviation unit is currently stationed. “The greatest thing for me personally is being totally out of my comfort zone,” she says. “I'd never been in a military culture, and I was thrust right into the military.” However, she says that her   inexperience matters more than her gender does. But she is figuring it out as she goes.

“It's hard being away from home,” Bagby says. “It's hard being away from Oregon. Iraq is flat and a lot of it is just sand. Where we live is made up of concrete barriers and gravel – there is not a lot of color and no mountains. The only time I leave the base is to go fly.”

Bagby regularly goes on night deployments in Blackhawk helicopters with the members of C/7th-158 Aviation. They extract wounded soldiers from the field and bring them back to the base for treatment. But Bagby, who works as a photojournalist and has produced still photos, videos and articles about the soldiers with whom she lives, cannot publish photos of wounded soldiers.

Bagby has spoken to her family just once since she left, saying that it is just too painful to speak to them regularly. She has, however, had regular conversations with mentor Dan Morrison, whom she met when she took Introduction to Photojournalism (J365) with him as an SOJC student.

Morrison, an SOJC adjunct instructor, has worked inside war zones as a photojournalist and writer, and in addition to giving Bagby a “crash course” in multimedia journalism before her departure, has been a big support during her time in Iraq.

Morrison also helped Bagby land a relationship with KVAL. Journalists must prove to the Department of Defense that they have a relationship with a media outfit in order to be approved to be embedded. Bagby and Morrison produced a few multimedia stories for the channel before Bagby's departure.

“She's not allowed to talk about combat if she's seen it,” says Morrison. He is very clear that unlike Bagby, he was never embedded with a unit – the war reporting he did (in five war zones) was always on assignment. When Bagby called him for his advice about taking the embedding opportunity, Morrison recalls that he “knew she was professional enough to do it. I would not have told other students to do it.”

Morrison, who spent four years in the Marine Corps, put Bagby in touch with Mark Furman, web producer at KVAL, and KVAL agreed to publish her work on the unit and on the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq. Morrison gave her tips and training, he said, and provided a connection with KVAL, but “that was it,” he says. “The rest she did all on her own.”

On September 1, Bagby will join the 41st Infantry, also from Oregon, on their combat operations. Unlike the C/7th-158 Aviation, the 41st is directly involved in combat. After that, she may return to being embedded with the C/7th-158 Aviation, and will the go home for a month or two. After her return home, she plans to re-join the C/7th-158 Aviation at least until January. Although she can come home to the United States whenever she wants to, Bagby has not yet made the decision to do so.

Read about Bagby's experiences in Iraq on her blog, calibagby.blogspot.com. See her work at KVAL.com (http://search.kval.com/default.aspx?ct=r&q=iraq).