Though a few photographers relentlessly blare the 1st Amendment clarion, most said they found themselves on the battlefield balancing a more nuanced set of values and emotions.

Dean Hoffmeyer of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia found out how confounding such calculations could become a few days before Christmas, when a suicide bomber attacked the military mess tent where he was waiting in line with dozens of soldiers.

Blasted to the ground, Hoffmeyer pulled himself up and into the chaos of the deadliest attack of the war on any U.S. base. A young man bleeding to death beside him would be one of 22 to die that day.

Despite a broken lens, aperture wide open, Hoffmeyer fired off several frames of the mortally wounded soldier.

He continued taking pictures of the blast scene ? images that ran prominently in nearly every American paper in the days to come. But he never transmitted the pictures of the dying GI.

Seeing them weeks later, his editor would describe them as "horrible pictures, wonderfully made."

The married, churchgoing Hoffmeyer has struggled with the decision ever since. He has gotten plenty of support from other photographers and taken hits from a few others, who suggested he left his best work in his camera.

Hoffmeyer thought the pictures of the soldier ? his hand pressed over a neck wound streaming with blood ? might be too graphic for publication. If the vivid shots had made the paper, they might have infuriated the Virginia National Guard battalion he had covered, and threatened his plan to catalog the unit's postwar lives. Finally, he thought how terrible it would be if he ever had to see pictures of his own son, age 9, in such a position.

"I don't know if what I did was right," the 41-year-old onetime radio disc jockey said. "But it's what I felt was right."

Another photographer on the front line made the opposite decision, but the result for American newspaper readers was much the same.

Stefan Zaklin of European Pressphoto Agency transmitted the picture of a fallen U.S. Army captain during November's assault on Fallouja. It was apparently the only news picture to be published of one of the dozens of service members who died in the battle.

The photo ran in Thailand's Bangkok Post, in Paris Match and on the front page of Germany's Bild-Zeitung, the highest-circulation newspaper in Europe.

The Village Voice in New York became the first American newspaper to print it this week, along with an essay in which Sydney H. Schanberg argued that the war could not be covered while "omitting anything important out of timidity or squeamishness."

MSNBC.com had briefly posted the shot in November, but took it down after complaints from the officer's family.

"At first we thought it was a really iconic photo of the terrible violence going on in Iraq," said Dean Wright, editor in chief of MSNBC.com. But when it appeared the soldier could be recognized, "we thought it was too horrific, because it was more personalized then."

More than 1,600 American soldiers have died in this war that began a little over two years ago. Wounded Americans number about 12,000. No formal count is kept of the Iraqi civilian dead and wounded, but it is far greater than the military toll. But can you recall the last time your hometown newspaper ran a picture spread of these human beings lying crumpled at the scene of the slaughter? And when was the last time you saw a picture of a single fallen American soldier at such a scene?

Yes, some photos of such bloodshed have been published at times over the span of this war. But they have become sparser and sparser, while the casualty rate has stayed the same or, frequently, shot higher. At the moment, five GIs die every two days.

Some readers may object to my use of the word slaughter. I do respect other points of view. But I served in the military, and as a reporter I covered several wars — in India, Vietnam, and Cambodia. I came away persuaded that whether one considers a particular war necessary or misguided, the military goal in armed combat is always to kill and thus render helpless those on the other side. That being the case, what is a government's basis for depriving the public of candid press coverage of what war is all about? How else can voters make informed decisions about a war their government has led them into? The true reason why a government — in this case, the Bush administration — tries to censor and sanitize coverage is to prevent a public outcry against the war, an outcry that might bring down the administration....

I don't hold much esteem for the usual crime-and-catastrophe formula on most late-news shows, but I have even less for contentions that withholding information from the public is good for them. Because we are a country of diverse culture groupings, there will always be differences of view, about war photographs and stories, over matters of taste and "shock" issues. But, while the reporter or photographer must consider these impact and shock issues his primary mission has to be one of getting the story right. And getting it right means not omitting anything important out of timidity or squeamishness. When I would return from a war scene, I always felt I had to write the story first for myself and then for the reader. The goal was to come as close as possible to make the reader smell, feel, see, and touch what I had witnessed that day. "Pay attention," was my mental message to the reader. "People are dying. This is important."

A generation later, the photographer David Leeson [several of whose photos accompany Schanberg's Voice piece], whom I talked with on the phone, has similar passions.

He said: "I understand the criticisms about blood and gore. I don't seek that. When I approach a body on the ground after a battle, I'm determined to give dignity to that person's life and photograph him with respect. But sometimes, as with my pictures of child victims, the greatest dignity and respect you can give them is to show the horror they have suffered, the absolutely gruesome horror." Leeson went on: "War is madness. Often when I was in it, I would think of my work as dedicated to stopping it. But I know that's unrealistic. When I considered the readers who would see my photos, I felt I was saying to them: 'If I hurt inside, I want you to hurt too. If something brings me to tears, I want to bring you to tears too.'"