Tuesday, February 01, 2005 @09:00AM

In April 2003, Robert Galbraith took off for Baghdad with little more than a tape recorder, a digital camera, two lenses and a laptop. One month later he would land back in Montreal 36 pounds lighter, hounded by a two-pack-a-day smoking habit but unshaken in his resolve to write a book about the horrors of the war he had just witnessed.

"I want to bring people's suffering, misery and hope to the public," said the 49-year-old photojournalist as we talked in one of his favourite coffee shops in Westmount, where he now lives. Throughout last year, Galbraith shelled out $50,000 to produce, edit and publish his book by himself, after the big publishing houses turned their backs one by one.

Completed in fall of last year, Iraq: An Eyewitness to War is a personalized and illustrated diary that outlines the human toll of war during the anarchical period that precluded the rise of the insurgency. Written in a colloquial style, and illustrated with 600 full-colour pictures, it takes the reader on a harrowing round-trip of a devastated country, of its people and its occupiers.

In a clairvoyant manner, the author exposes the failures of the occupying forces in controlling looting, providing food, water and electricity to the population and reigning in the black market weapons trade–all of which would later lead to a generalized climate of violence. Central to his book, however, are what he calls, "the common folk," who are often forgotten in the mainstream media coverage.

In Baghdad, Galbraith documents the plight of grieving relatives and maimed children after an American cluster bomb fell on a residential area.

"Young Ali is sobbing and writhing in pain with what looks like cigarette burns all across his body," he writes of a 5-year-old boy who was blinded by shrapnel, accompanying his text with an equally graphic picture.

In Mosul, a city in northern Iraq, he empathizes with the American soldiers, showing an astonishing understanding of the troops' living conditions.

"To not engage the enemy is discouraging for these men and women. They are trained to be fighters and to kill the enemy," he writes of U.S. Army soldiers who were depressed because they didn't get to experience combat.

And breaking with the journalistic principle of staying at arm's length from the subject matter, Galbraith delves at length into his feelings, his fears and his impressions of the people and places he visits. Interspersed among the ghastly pictures of devastation, corpses and haggard children, are pictures of flowers and of birds–soothing sights in a world of destruction.

"I used every tool I could to make people understand war," said Galbraith, for whom bird watching is a hobby.

"I went there as a father [of three], an environmentalist and somebody who loves life."

Slightly disheveled, unshaven, his hands trembling as we talked, Galbraith is seasoned in conflict coverage. He covered the Oka Crisis and the first Gulf War, and his pictures were published in newspapers across North America.

But in An Eyewitness to War, he took conflict reporting to another level by also turning the spotlight on the journalists and showing the risks and sacrifices they take in getting the story to the public. For Galbraith, recurring nightmares, a bout with post-traumatic stress disorder and a near divorce are only some of them.

Galbraith took a copy of the book to the Concordia and McGill bookstores. "The reason I brought the book to Concordia it's because of the clashes between Palestinian and Israeli supporters. That's where somebody might read [it] and it might change their attitude.

"I wrote the book with a preacher's mentality," he said. "We've got to be more compassionate. Right now, we're losing it."

For a complete list of the bookstores that carry this book and for more information on the author, go to: www.eyewitnesstowar.com