Military Photographer Christopher Muncy Wins Top Honors

It was a dark November night when a small team piled into a boat to begin its journey up the river. Coolness hung in the air as the engine revved and the boat sped upstream.Only a few moments had passed before they came under fire.

The U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers and U.S. Navy Special Boat Team 22, which was participating in a simulated training exercise in Mississippi, returned fire into the trees and along the banks of the river while navigating to a nearby village—the target of the mission—to gather intel.

And as they did, Air National Guard Staff Sergeant Christopher Muncy grabbed his camera and started snapping photos on board, capturing two men in the heat of the action, one of their guns mid-fire—an image that recently secured the photographer a first-place finish in the documentation category of the Air National Guard media contest.

“This is the one I’m happiest with, because it’s very kinetic,” Staff Sgt. Muncy said of the photo during a recent telephone interview. “I have the coolest job. If they do it, you do it. And, as cheesy as it may sound, it’s the opportunity to see history right in front of you and take part in it.”

Staff Sgt. Muncy works as a military photographer for the 106th Rescue Wing of the Air National Guard at Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach. He discovered his love for photography during high school in upstate New York—a passion that only continued during his studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

He enlisted as a reservist in Riverside, California, in 2003, before moving to the Lower East Side of Manhattan three years later. He took one year off between 2005 and 2006 when he moved. He commutes to the East End from the city, he said, because he continues to freelance for major media outlets, including the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, Newsday and the Village Voice.

“If you’re at all into photography, it’s one of the most amazing jobs in the military,” the 33-year-old said, “because you get to do absolutely everything.”

Though Staff Sgt. Muncy has never been deployed, the Mississippi training exercise is one of many that he has captured with his camera. That cool November night, the team continued firing blanks at the “enemy,” who were actually soldiers playing the part, until they reached the plywood village created for the training simulation.

“I only had night vision on the camera, kind of like looking through a cardboard tube,” Staff Sgt. Muncy recalled. “It gives a very narrow frame of view.”

The photographer also received a first-place award in the portrait category for his shot of Senior Airman Jonathan E. Mazura with the 106th Rescue Wing Aircraft Maintenance Squadron—a photo that was a happy accident, Staff Sgt. Muncy said.

“It was really a lucky shot,” he said, explaining that he wasn’t planning to take photos during a blizzard on that February day. “No particular training was going on and I happened to come across him when he was coming out [of the hangar] from work.

“[This is] something I’ve wanted to do most of my adult life,” Staff Sgt. Muncy said of combining his military career with photography. “I couldn’t picture myself doing anything else.”