I had seen a remarkable exhibit of photos by a young combat photographer, Lucian Read, who has spent nearly a year in Iraq embedded with the Marines. The exhibit, entitled “Devil Dogs: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy,” is on display in midtown Manhattan in a former Fifth Avenue storefront. The setting is part of what is called “The Guerilla Galleries” established by World Picture Network, the agency that represents Read, which is trying to put the important work of photographers in surprising places never before used for photo exhibitions.

Read followed a Marine company from Camp Pendleton in California to Kuwait and then Iraq, and was with them through fierce battles in Najaf and Fallujah. There are many terrific photographs in the exhibit that give insight into our “Devil Dogs.” (By the way, “Devil Dogs” is the name the Germans gave the Marines in the First World War and the name that Marines often call each other.)

There is one shot of exuberant, young off-duty soldiers doing back flips, and another of a Marine, reenlisting and taking the oath, as 100 tons of ordnance from a Saddam-era weapons dump explode in the background.

The most compelling photographs, however, are those taken in the heat of battle, of the wounded and the fallen. There is one especially gripping

photo in the “Hell House” of Fallujah. It shows First Sergeant Brad Kasal, covered with blood, being carried out by two fellow Marines after he nearly lost his leg. He is still holding tightly to his revolver.

He was shot seven times by insurgents and was peppered with shrapnel because he had used his body to shield an injured younger Marine, PFC Alex Nicol, from a grenade blast. Nicol lost the lower part of his leg in this encounter.

Kasal is a candidate for the Marines’ first Congressional Medal of Honor since Vietnam and is now recuperating in a hospital in California. Nicol is at Walter Reed and has already learned to skate board with his prosthesis. He and photographer Read spent a ski weekend together a couple of months ago.

“I didn’t know much about the military when I went to Iraq,” Read, who is 30, told me. “I never thought about going into the service. I went to college. I was on a different track. But being with these guys was an enormous, gratifying, powerful experience for me. I am so full of admiration for them.

“Of course they want to come home individually. But they think they are doing good things there.” Even after the battles and the loss of some of their buddies, Read said, “I never felt they didn’t think it was worth it. They take pride in what they are accomplishing.”

Too bad that Newsweek would devote a cover story to yesterday’s heroes without thinking that a story they have now retracted could endanger today’s.