Iraq: Engel’s Documentary Shows “How Gruesome This Conflict Is”

Richard Engel‘s “War Zone Diary,” premiering tonight on MSNBC, has some pretty gruesome imagery.

“This is war and there are horrors when you have war,” Engel tells Stephen Battaglio in a TV Guide Q&A.

But he doesn’t want to give the impression that his day-to-day work has been sanitized. “I don’t think it has,” he says. “If you read the papers today or any other day, you get a sense of how difficult, how gruesome this conflict often is. But when you read about it, it’s different from when you actually see it. When you go to the Baghdad morgue and see bodies stacked four deep in a room that is supposed to be refrigerated but isn’t, just covered in flies and bodies that are decomposing — I don’t know if you can ever properly convey it unless you [show] it.”

He does tonight…

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting this Thursday, February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Michael Brito (Edelman Digital), and Tim Devane (bitly). Register now.