West of Eden

A band of paved road crosses the lower foreground. Beyond it, green and yellow grass partly conceals the tank's lower body. Its long barrel extends toward the viewer's right, nearly horizontally. A tall palm stands right of center, its thin trunk rising well above the low tank.

More palms and vegetation form a low horizon to the left. A broad pale blue sky opens above, crossed by thin diagonal wires. A dark edge of the Humvee cuts into the left side, with small pieces of hardware along the bottom. The low horizontal tank and upright palm are separated by open grass.

The tank barrel and road emphasize the horizontal plane; the palm is the sole strong vertical. Vehicle edges at the left and bottom make the camera’s moving-vehicle position visually present without showing the full vehicle.

Kenny Bass photographed an abandoned, inoperable tank from a moving Humvee during a counter-ambush patrol south of Baghdad. Its visible features are consistent with the T-54/T-55/Type 59 family, but the exact model has not been confirmed.

We inspected the abandoned tank and confirmed that it was inoperable. If it had been operable, we would have disabled it before leaving.

I don't remember exactly why I took this photograph. As a Marine anti-tank guided missile man trained in armored vehicle identification, I may simply have wanted a picture of a T-55-series tank up close.

By then, we'd passed so many destroyed vehicles and bodies that a tank among the palms seemed almost ordinary.

More than twenty years later, looking back at this photograph and considering the geographic region where it was taken, I see something a bit different.

Photograph by Kenny Bass.

Previously titled Tank and Palm.

Photograph 11 of 15.

• West of Eden connects the counter-ambush patrol to the open road and irrigated landscape south of Baghdad.

The exact tank model has not been confirmed.