Looking At Dozens Of Photographs for our D-day special this week, I was struck by how vividly the images caught the chaos of that famous day, a day that claimed the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers. And then I noticed something else: there are very few images that show the casualties. As it turns out, the goriest images were censored, and many pictures of American soldiers killed in combat were not allowed to be shown until later. How times have changed. Since Gulf War II began, I've looked at thousands of pictures from the battiefront. We've published dozens of them across two-page spreads, including the now famous hospital photograph of Ali, an Iraqi boy who lost both arms in a U.S. bombing. We've never tried to prettify war. Sometimes, however, I saw remarkable images that I felt were too graphic to print in TIME. Case in point: a series of photos taken last spring of U.S. soldiers carefully picking up limbs of dead Iraqis after a battle northwest of Baghdad.
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