BY ROBERT TANNER
 Associated Press

 NEW YORK -- The photograph he snapped still troubles the nation, but it isn't the images that disturb Alan Diaz's dreams. It's the sounds.

 Two weeks after Diaz caught on film the instant when federal agents with goggles and assault weapons snatched a crying Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives, the moment still burns.

 Now the boy is reunited with his Cuban father in Maryland as the international custody dispute continues. New photos show him smiling.

 For Diaz, a 43-year-old free-lance photographer on assignment for The Associated Press, it often seems as if he never left the all-day, all-night vigils outside the Little Havana home.

 Now Diaz, who is in New York to speak at the AP annual meeting today, sleeps up to 16 hours a day, piecemeal, after nearly five months of constant watch broken by occasional half-hour naps. But rest is elusive. ``I snooze off, I'm there. I'm still there, you know?''

 ``All I hear is that kid's crying,'' said Diaz, who has raised four children of his own. ``The most awful cry you could ever hear in your life.''

 He can't shake the sounds of the crowd, either -- the hundreds jammed outside the family's home, the dozens that spent the night talking, praying, sipping coffee.

 ``I can hear this noise of the Cuban protesters,'' Diaz said. ``It was like a monster breathing, but with the sounds of some talking, some chanting. . . . I can hear that every day, every night.''

 Diaz, Bronx-born and of Cuban descent, refuses to offer a judgment on who might be right and who wrong, or even the emotions his photo inspired. ``To me, it was just another assignment.''

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald