Daily News photog gets Pulitzer
Jim MacMillan is on assignment with AP

Jim MacMillan discovered that the safest place for a photographer in Iraq is with the troops in battle.

He also discovered after a year photographing war and its horrors that there's no place like home.

"Until you've lived through more difficult experiences, you can't understand how good we have it back home," he said.

MacMillan, 44, a Daily News photographer who spent the past year with the Associated Press in battle-torn Iraq, will share the Pulitzer Prize with 10 other AP photographers.

The coveted prize, announced yesterday, was based on a portfolio of 20 photographs submitted by the AP staff. Three of the pictures were his.

Speaking by satellite phone from Baghdad, he said he was "thrilled" to be a winner with a photo staff that included five Iraqis and four foreign photographers.

"I'm sure this is the first time an Iraqi has won a Pulitzer Prize," MacMillan said.

"Jim went off to Iraq on a gutsy adventure and ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize," said Daily News editor Michael Days. "What an incredible statement about the excellence of his work, his photography. We couldn't be more proud."

Daily News picture editor Michael Mercanti said, "Winning this award confirms what we at the Daily News have always known. Jim MacMillan is one of the very best photojournalists on the planet."

MacMillan is finishing up his tour, which ends in 17 days, as a photo editor in the AP office in Baghdad, but he spent almost his entire stay in Iraq embedded with troops.

His most dangerous time was when he was with a patrol during the battle for Najaf. He spent three weeks with a combat patrol at the front.

"You lose track of what's normal," he said. "I had more close calls than I care to remember."

Other assignments were with troops fighting in Ramadi and Mosul, among other hot spots.

He also covered some car bombings, he said, but the AP decided the streets were too dangerous and pulled its photographers off.

"Combat missions are the safest place to be in Iraq," he said.

Of the war, he said, "It's tragic and horrible. It's a fullblown insurgent war. I was stunned that there is so little coverage of it. People are dying every day. I don't feel hopeful for the long term."

"I learned a lot about myself," he added. "I never imagined how much we have it made at home, how easy and safe and free."

He was also worried about running on a leg that was badly fractured when he jumped from the back of a truck while covering the Broad Street Run six years ago.

"But I never had any problems," he said. "I was running on rubble, on slippery ground. I only fell once."

MacMillan was one of the Daily News photographers who covered the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

He won the Distinguished Visual Award of the Keystone Press Association for his photo, "Ground Zero." In 1994, he won the Pennsylvania Managing Editors' photo award for a picture showing two grieving firefighters at the scene of a South Philadelphia church fire.

MacMillan, who joined the Daily News in 1991, plans to return to the paper on May 15.