Ms. Trieb, 28, said she found it far more daunting to photograph the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder among the same soldiers when they returned to Fort Drum in upstate New York in December 2009. “Almost every soldier I talked to said they were having problems,” she said. These included drug abuse, binge drinking, attempted suicide and spousal abuse.
She would like to do something about it. On Tuesday, Ms. Trieb plans to open the Homecoming Project, a Web site intended to encourage discussion about the aftermath of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to connect soldiers and their families with the assistance they need and to offer opportunities for service to organizations and individuals. She is raising money through Kickstarter to expand the site and keep the project going. In addition, her work will be shown Saturday at the Look 3 photo festival in Charlottesville, Va.
“I‘ve been privileged to see things behind closed doors that others don’t get to see,” Ms. Trieb said. “It’s a sacred exchange that comes with responsibilities.”
In the two years that she’s spent documenting the young soldiers she’d come to know in Afghanistan, Ms. Trieb focused on three in particular: Specialist Adam Ramsey, Staff Sgt. Cody Anderson and Specialist Dirk Terpstra.
Specialist Ramsey told her he had joined the Army in the hope of getting clean from drugs. “You can’t hide in the military from your problems,” Ms. Trieb said. “The military is a great place for some people. But if you already have mental or emotional instability in your life and you join hoping the military will be a safe haven and then are sent off to war, I think the repercussions can be detrimental.”
At one point, Specialist Ramsey was on leave and Ms. Trieb stayed with him at his home in Carson City, Nev. He would awaken in the middle of the night, seeing people who were not there and searching for a rifle he didn’t have.
“The first time it happened, I didn’t photograph it,” Ms. Trieb said. “It was too hard, and I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to help him. I knew that he needed help when he told me the hallucinations he was having were telling him to hurt himself.”
Just before Valentine’s Day last year, Ms. Trieb said, Specialist Ramsey called her from Fort Drum to say he had cut himself badly. She drove from Brooklyn on the 14th and accompanied him to a civilian hospital.
“Adam and I reconnected after he got out of the hospital,” Ms. Trieb said. “I’m really proud of him. He’s my victory story. He’s the one person I saw who actually did reach out for help and ended up coming out on the other side. He gives me faith to keep telling this story and that these soldiers can get better.”
In March 2010, Ms. Trieb moved to Watertown, NY, near Fort Drum, so she could more closely document the 10th Mountain Division.
The story of Sergeant Anderson took a much different turn. “He was really charismatic and funny and a great leader,” she said. “A lot of people in his unit looked up to him.”
It came as a very unhappy surprise when she learned in a phone call that he had died. The police in Watertown, N.Y., told her the cause was pneumonia.
“I saw Cody at the welcome-home ceremony,” she recalled, “and he told me that he had been diagnosed with P.T.S.D. and had assaulted someone the day after he returned from Afghanistan.”
At the memorial service, Ms. Trieb met Sergeant Anderson’s fiancée, Stefanie Strausser: “We began talking and she revealed to me that she was the one Cody had assaulted. She said that after the incident, he didn’t remember any of it.” Ms. Trieb said the sergeant had been getting help before his death from the mental health department at Fort Drum.
After learning of Specialist Terpstra’s death, which was reported as a suicide, Ms. Trieb drove from Brooklyn to Kalamazoo, Mich. She approached his mother, Gail Jarboe, saying she had known him in Afghanistan, and was welcomed into the family’s home, where she heard story after story. “I think a big part of our job as journalists is to sit, listen, absorb and empathize with the people you’re spending time with,” Ms. Trieb said.
“Some families want to talk about their situation to help prevent this from happening to other families,” Ms. Trieb said. “I think sharing these stories of loss can make a difference.”
As the soldiers were changed by their experiences, so was Ms. Trieb in covering them. She approaches her work differently now. (She is in the mentor program at VII photos, under Gary Knight.)
Before, Ms. Trieb said, it was mostly about capturing the best image to tell a story. Now images are secondary, the result of her connection with her subjects. She said the opportunity to bear witness and act compassionately are more important.
“One of the hardest lessons I have learned is that you have to humble yourself,” Ms. Trieb said. “It has to be about the people. I learned that it’s appropriate to interact with the people I photograph, and not just be a fly on the wall. And at certain times it’s right to interact, especially if you see someone suffering whom you can help.”
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