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It’s hard to calculate the consequences of a photograph’s absence. Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices. The image, and its anonymous subject, might have come to symbolize the Gulf War. Jarecke took the picture just before a cease-fire officially ended Operation Desert Storm-the U.S.-led military action that drove Saddam Hussein and his troops out of Kuwait, which they had annexed and occupied the previous August. Or he might have been an unlucky young man with no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad. He might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait and fight the Americans. He’d fought in Saddam Hussein’s army and had a rank and an assignment and a unit. At one point, before he died this dramatic mid-retreat death, the soldier had had a name. On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him.

Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck.