Joe Darby was a reserve soldier with US forces at Abu Ghraib prison when he stumbled across those images which would eventually shock the world in 2004.
And then he was sitting in a crowded Iraqi canteen with hundreds of soldiers and Donald Rumsfeld came on the television to thank Joe Darby by name for handing in the photographs.
“I don’t think it was an accident because those things are pretty much scripted,” Mr Darby says.
Rather than turn on him for betraying colleagues, most of the soldiers in his unit shook his hand. It was at home where the real trouble started.
His wife had no idea that Mr Darby had handed in those photos, but when he was named, she had to flee to her sister’s house which was then vandalized with graffiti. Many in his home town called him a traitor.
Mr Darby and his family have moved to a new town. They have new jobs. They have done everything but change their identities.
But he does not seem himself as a hero, or a traitor. Just “a soldier who did his job — no more, no less.”
“I’ve never regretted for one second what I did when I was in Iraq, to turn those pictures in,” he says.
Read original by Dawn Bryan, BBC News
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