Rangefinder Magazine
December 2004

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Profile: Thomas Michael Corcoran by Larry Singer
Marine Photojournalist

In the film Full Metal Jacket, the protagonist, a Marine war combat photojournalist named “Joker” (Matthew Modine), develops a definite distaste for the violence of war.

In real life, 26-year-old combat Marine photojournalist Mike Corcoran began his career entranced by the images of war, but after living through the real-life violence he experienced in places like Afghanistan shortly after September 11, 2001, the combat environment he has caught on film taught him that wars, even wars fought for good reasons, definitely have a downside.

During a patrol, patrol leader Staff Sgt. Snyder looks over the map routes and enjoys a Twizzler (licorice).	A self portrait of me hanging from an airborne CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter during a helicopter-rope suspension training program.	Light armored reconnaissance patrol leader, Staff Sgt. Snyder, makes a cup of instant coffee over a barrel fire near a mosque before heading out on the night patrol.

“ You know, I didn’t see Full Metal Jacket before I joined the Marine Corps,” Corcoran says. “I had people calling me ‘Joker’ all the time, and thought it was because I was a funny guy.”

From Art to Photography
For Corcoran, being a photojournalist was almost a natural goal.

“ My whole family just kind of nurtured my artistic ability, from the time I was a very young child,” Corcoran says.

“ When I was a kid,” he explains, “I used to collect keychain 110 cameras. I thought they were really neat because this little tiny camera could capture an image, and I used to take pictures of my friends riding their bikes.”

During school at Wilmington High School, in Wilmington, IL, Corcoran admitted to being not all that impressed with some of his classes and not possessed with the urge to show up to those classes with any degree of regularity, so he received an invitation from the administration to leave school a bit before the end in both his junior and senior years.

Fortunately, he turned his early release into a not-to-be-missed opportunity by enrolling at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and studying visual communications before the rest of his high school class received their diplomas.

Corcoran primarily credits his father, who carried around a camera bag everywhere he went, for his own love of, and dedication to, photojournalism.

“ When we were riding down the road in his pickup truck, I used to get the camera out of his case and while looking through the viewfinder, focus the lens in on everything we passed.” Corcoran says, “And, one of the things he taught me about photography was that a picture with somebody in it was more valuable than a picture of a landscape.”

U.S. Special Forces gather around a campfire they made in a bomb crater on the tarmac at Kandahar Airport.	This is a fight that broke out on the busy sidewalk of Market Street after last New Year’s fireworks display in San Francisco.	Caption 1

While in the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Corcoran took his first photojournalism class while officially studying visual communications. “Visual Communications,” he says, “was an area specializing more in advertising and design, than hard-edged news photography.

“ In my second, and final, year there,” Corcoran says, “I took a photojournalism class, and I really got into the assignments. One time I was assigned to cover police calls at the Greyhound Bus terminal, and I ended up with an A+ in the class.”

Six months after graduating from the Art Institute, Corcoran joined the Marine Corps.

“ I was looking for ways to pay off my student loans,” he says, “so I went to an Army recruiter first, then I went to an Air Force recruiter, and then I went to a Marine recruiter. The Marine Corps was the only one that wouldn’t go back and pay my student loans, but my stepdad had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps, and I guess, deep down, I always wanted to be a Marine.

“ When I was a kid,” he continues, “I used to draw pictures depicting war based on movies that I saw because, to me, they conveyed really strong emotions. I thought it would be interesting and fun to be a news correspondent in places like South America because they had all those guerrilla wars there at the time.”

Combat Photography
Corcoran’s first 14 weeks in the Marine Corps were spent at Parris Island, SC, in boot camp. He then received four months of training at the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, MD. Upon graduation, he was assigned to the Marine Corps New River Air Station in Jacksonville, NC.

Two Marine combat engineers rest near the tarmac at Kandahar Airport waiting for the call to execute a TRAP (Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel) mission in Northern Iraq.	A Marine engineer rides in the back of a light-armored vehicle with his weapon at the “ready.” He is part of a patrol investigating an early morning small arms attack on the Kandahar Airport.	Checking for improvised explosive devices or anything else that might be of harm, Cpl. John Rybkiewiczja makes sure buildings surrounding Kandahar are empty of inhabitants.

While at New River two of his more interesting assignments as a photojournalist were swinging from the end rope while dangling from a helicopter and being “inserted into the water,” after jumping from a helicopter.

“ I also had an assignment,” he says, “at Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert. I got to shoot a machine gun out of the side of Huey (UH1B helicopter) wearing night-vision goggles while listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival on headphones. It was a real Vietnam flashback.”

The unit to which he was assigned was also the one to respond to crisis that was sparked by the April 19, 1999, death of a Puerto Rican security guard for the Navy, David Sanes Rodriguez, who was killed when two bombs dropped by an F-18 fighter missed their target within the Navy range on Vieques Island.

Corcoran also covered the two crashes in which a total of 23 soldiers were killed, of the Navy’s NV-22 Osprey, a 44 million dollar vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

Although tragic, these events gave Corcoran, whose work had been carried to Marine bases around the world, his first photographic exposure in civilian newspapers.

A week after September 11, Corcoran found himself on a ship headed out to hunt down a tall guy named Osama with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, based at Camp Lejeune, NC. This unit is a Marine Air-Ground Task Force comprised of infantry, light- armored vehicles, artillery and amphibious assault vehicles and an aviation combat element.

Unknown to Corcoran at the time, their destination was Afghanistan.

It took two and a half months from the time he got on one the three ships in the expeditionary force, to the time he, and the 2200 other marines he was with, actually got on the ground in Afghanistan, and it took three days from the time he got off the boat in Pakistan till the time he got to Kandahar.

Two Mujahudeen fighters pray as the Marine patrol they are aiding uses the time to grab a smoke and a snake.	Marines are greeted as they enter a village east of Kandahar.	Caption 2

“ We left the boat on a hovercraft,” he says, “took a convoy to an airport, and took a C-130 aircraft to another airport. To get there I had to stay in three different places. One of them was a CIA base, for one night, where they were complaining because I was there with a camera. When we were finally on our way to Kandahar in the C-130, we got turned around due to anti-aircraft fire, landed back in Pakistan, and 45 minutes later we were back on the plane going back to Kandahar again. It was really an intense time.”

When asked how it felt to actually experience war instead of only imagining it, Corcoran responded, “I had a lot of butterflies in my stomach when we landed, and the ramp came down on the plane, and there was small arms fire. Ours was the first fixed-wing aircraft, during the war, to land at the airport. There were only about 60 marines at the base when we got there, and I didn’t know what to expect. You always had to be ready for anything, but one of the things they drum into you in the Marine Corps is ‘Be ever vigilant.’”

Corcoran arrived in Kandahar on December 10, 2001, but shortly after Christmas came down with a case of meningitis and got to experience the thrill of aero-medical evacuation firsthand. “I was sent to an Air Force hospital at Seeb Air Force Base, in Oman,” he says, “where I got a spinal tap and recovered from my meningitis for about three days. They were supposed to send me back to the ship, but I went to the passenger terminal, and went back to my unit instead of reporting back to the ship like I was suppose to.

“ When I got to Afghanistan, “ he says, “I saw stuff that was exactly what I thought war would be like. While we were there, we were attacked at the airport by small arms fire. I saw people with their legs blown off by mines. I’m now totally against unnecessary war.”

Corcoran was discharged from the Marine Corps on September 21, 2002, but before his discharge, he was placed on terminal leave to attend Corcoran College in Washington, D.C. Since that time he’s been a full-time student.

“ I’m still glad today that I got the training the marines gave me, because even as a civilian, having been a Marine has saved my life,” he says. “I impaled my leg on a fence since I got out and ripped my femoral artery in half, but I was able to do enough initial first aid treatment of the wound where I now have close to 100 percent recovery in my leg. I still have some nerve damage, but I’ve recovered enough to have ridden my bike on a 1000-mile bike trip.”

Since becoming a civilian, Corcoran said he’s invested some of his savings in digital photography equipment, and for the past two years has been shooting whatever assignments he could pick up to keep his photography career moving forward.

“ Up until recently,” he says, “the only freelance work I had done had been design work. I did a logo for one of the bigger bars in D.C. I got a commission to do the layout and design for a lingerie catalog. That,” he adds, “was strange.”

Corcoran has also shot a few weddings in a photojournalistic style, and currently he’s working on a feature photo story for the humane society about mentally ill people who hoard animals. He is also working on an assignment about the religion Santeria.

One of the ways Corcoran hopes to spread the word about his evolving photojournalistic talents is his web log. He says changing it daily forces him to shoot every day, stay sharp, and let prospective employers—whether photo agencies, daily newspapers or people at monthly magazines—know what he’s doing.

Although Corcoran currently has two more years left of formal schooling (at the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington, D.C.), he is formulating his plans for the future.

“ When I graduate,” he says, “I want to use my knowledge and skills in photography to contribute as much to photography as I can.”

In addition to all that he has been doing, Mike has recently begun doing freelance work for ESPN, The Magazine. He is also delivering work on an almost daily basis to three stock photo agencies, and still finds time to teach three high school photojournalism classes a week.

Samples of Mike Corcoran’s current photography, as well as his portfolio, can be viewed at www.thomasmichaelcorcoran.com/.

Larry Singer is a writer, photographer and artist now living in Lauderhill, Florida. He has taught photography in Florida and Denver and now has an obsession with hearts. He can be contacted at larrysinger@mac.com. Samples of his work can be viewed at homepage.mac.com/larrysinger/.

Captions:

1. This is a photo of the first battlefield detainees to be transported and held in a makeshift facility at the Kandahar Airport. This is also the most historically significant photo I may ever have taken. It ran in practically every major paper in the United States including the front page of the New York Times.

2. Some guests at a wedding I shot pose for a photo of their own. Something unique about this photojournalistic-style wedding I shot was the fact that I didn’t know the bride’s family was Korean until I arrived at the shoot. Their kimonos were a very pleasant surprise.