I took this photo during the Ground War phase of Operation Desert Storm. It features a mortally wounded paratrooper being MEDEVACed off the battlefield in Iraq. The challenges we faced were numerous. I shot this photo on a day when we lost eight American paratroopers and many French soldiers while capturing the As Salman airfield deep in Iraq. We were taking machine gun fire and artillery strikes as we closed on As Salman. We were the first unit to deploy during Desert Shield and conducted continuous operations throughout both phases of Desert Storm, leaving us exhausted. My Nikon FA and FM cameras were battered, my film was stored in an ammo pouch filled with dust and sand, and the lenses were worn from nine months in the desert. I later scanned the negatives with a Plustek OpticFilm scanner using SilverFast software and edited them in Lightroom Classic. I decided to keep the dust marks and scratches on the photo during post-production to authentically represent the battlefield conditions. Currently, I use a pair of Canon 5D MK IVs.