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Brooke Medical. San Antonio. Texas. USA. August 2005..This was taken at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. I went there to photograph the treatment and rehabilitation of military personnel from the war in Iraq. I had arrived in Texas a day early for my appointment at Brooke and driven to the protest by Cindy Sheehan and others outside George Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. The anti-war protest had evolved into a very unfunny stand-off between anti-war protesters and supporters for Bush and the war. I was at Brooke the following morning. When I walked in, the atmosphere was charged with a forced positivity generated by the physios and trainers. As a result, the patients were very forthright and I struggled to keep my composure as I found myself shaking their hands which felt like hard rubber, devoid of any sense of flesh or life and staring into lost eyes housed in grotesquely disfigured faces. I got talking with this guy and his mother. I asked them to come into the hallway as I wanted to photograph them in a more neutral environment. The son is reaching out to his mother between shots. At the end she asked me jokingly to do some magic on the computer to erase the flaws in the photographs. Her flaws. What is extraordinary and wonderful to me is that what bothered her was how as a woman she would look in the photograph. She was any woman mindful of her appearance, any mother with her son. She just saw her son beside her, and was simply happy he was home.. (KEYSTONE/VII Photo/Seamus Murphy)