Embedded reporter comes away from front lines torn

Boston Globe | 4/22/2003 | Scott Bernard Nelson

[LavaDog]

BAGHDAD - A funny thing happened on the way home from Iraq this week: I found myself scoffing at the rear-echelon soldiers for how little they knew about war. About the real war, the one I had experienced, with enemy AK-47 rounds buzzing over your head and the smell of burning flesh and metal filling your nose. About enduring four weeks on the front lines, sleeping in open foxholes you'd dug to avoid shrapnel in the night. About looking terrible, smelling worse, and seeing people die.

Where were the headquarters Johnnies then, I smugly asked myself this week as I walked the former headquarters of the Iraqi secret police, now home to the US Marines' First Division. Probably drinking coffee, eating hot meals, sleeping on cots in canvas tents, and moving arrows around on wall maps.

My line of reasoning was patently ridiculous, of course. The men and women who wear the uniforms are professional soldiers; I'm a professional reporter. And not a particularly brave one, at that. Before the war, I wrote about bank presidents and insurance contracts and mutual funds for The Boston Globe's business section.

Look up Stockholm syndrome in the dictionary, though, and you'll get a pretty good idea about what I was going through in those first hours away from combat. I had lived so closely for so long under such extreme circumstances with the Second Battalion, 11th Marines, fighting their way through Iraq, that I began to think and feel like a Marine.

Therein lies the quandary for the hundreds of ''embedded'' reporters and photographers who covered Gulf War II and the editors who paid them to go. Did we sell our souls as journalists for access to the death and destruction at the front lines?

As part of a first-ever war correspondents' partnership between the Department of Defense and media organizations, we reporters signed contracts limiting what we would say and when we would say it. In return, for the duration of the conflict the Pentagon let us eat, sleep, travel - and sometimes die - with the military forces we covered. (More than a dozen journalists died in combat.)

Over time, it was inevitable that we would begin to view at least some things from the grunt's perspective.

When the battalion I'd been living with drove into an ambush April 6 north of Iraq's capital, I did more than just empathize with the soldiers. I helped them in the battle.

Like the other troops behind us in a convoy of Humvees, seven-ton trucks, and armored reconnaissance vehicles that day, I saw muzzle flashes coming from a window as we passed a squat building about 60 yards away. Several bullets skipped off the road in front of us, but nobody else in my vehicle saw where they were coming from.

I yelled to the first sergeant in the gun turret above my head, telling him which building and which window the gunfire came from. He wasn't sure to where I was referring, so I yelled again, leaning out of the window to point out the location to our right. That's all he needed. He fired nearly 100 rounds out of his .50-caliber heavy machine gun into the building as we rumbled by. The muzzle flashes ended.

We later learned that the gunman inside that building was among four members of Saddam Hussein's fedayeen militia who died in that failed ambush. No Marines were hurt.

The ambush provides the most dramatic, although hardly the only, example of how I came to identify with the Marines over time. Other embedded journalists, including my Globe colleague Brian MacQuarrie and Jules Critten den of the Boston Herald, told similar stories of their time on the front lines. Whether I acted out of self-preservation that day or because of an affinity with the soldiers I was covering hardly matters. The question is whether the coverage I provided during the war was tainted as a result.

I'd like to believe it wasn't. I'd like to believe mine was one of many diverse voices The Boston Globe used to tell the story of this war, and that good editors back home kept everything balanced and in perspective. I'd like to believe that, if nothing else, all of the embedded reporters added something worthwhile to the big-picture stories other journalists were writing from newsrooms, the Pentagon, and the armed forces central command in Qatar.

In the end, it will be for someone else to decide. Big thinkers in both the media and the military will at some point begin to analyze whether the embedding program worked, from their various perspectives.

Like the soldiers who fought on the front lines of this war, I just want to go home at this point to spend time with my family and think about something else for a while. We'll have to leave it to those rear-echelon guys to figure out how and when future wars will be fought - and covered.

[alisasny]

How can reality be tainted?

[TopQuark]

Did we sell our souls as journalists for access to the death and destruction at the front lines?

A morally lost person: when you describe an event from a more informed position, you do not necessarily sell your soul (that is optional).

Moreover, as most journalists nowadays, he has an overly elevated sense of importance: who expected him to report, while embedded, on the pros and cons of war, analyze our strategy, or critique diplomacy?

He was embedded with the troops and was supposed to report what he saw. And from the trench you see nothing strategic at all: you see details, individual people and machinary. That's all. JUst write what you see --- honestly and completely. Leave it to us to integrate this information.

This idiot thinks that, since he did not interview Iraqi soldiers before thet died, he lost objectivity.

[Lee Heggy]

Back atcha Sean.

[Incorrigible]

Pansy huh? I take it your wartime experiences are more heroic?

You are correct sir!  In fact, my post in that thread says as much.

I will take my drubbing however for parroting the overwhelming opinion in that thread.

[Vic3O3]

poing

[myprecious]

"O.K., Dan, now let's suppose that you were walking in the middle of the group of soldiers when you looked up and saw the snipers before anyone else did. Now what do you do?"

In reply #57, Sloth corrected my reporter error. It was Mike Wallace.

I think the general at the table commented something to that effect. It was a great exchange.

[CyberAnt]

Not only that, but I remember the guy from 60 Minutes (Mike Wallace) saying that if he were in a foxhole and he saw an ambush of the USA forces was about to take place, he would not warn our forces. He would just report the story.

I believe this embed process has raised up a whole new generation of reporters who see the reality of life - unlike the Mike Wallace's of the world who only see "the glory of the story". Thank GOD the Mike Wallace's of the world are dying off.

[RippleFire]

bump

[ErnBatavia]

This young man's rather full of himself, isn't he?

Yes...and his lack of "staying power" is obvious by the last paragraph.

[verity]

Media REMF. What irony. LOL

[No Truce With Kings]

"This young man's rather full of himself, isn't he?"

And he admits it:

"I found myself scoffing at the rear-echelon soldiers for how little they knew about war. About the real war, the one I had experienced, with enemy AK-47 rounds buzzing over your head and the smell of burning flesh and metal filling your nose. About enduring four weeks on the front lines, sleeping in open foxholes you'd dug to avoid shrapnel in the night. About looking terrible, smelling worse, and seeing people die.

Where were the headquarters Johnnies then, I smugly asked myself this week as I walked the former headquarters of the Iraqi secret police, now home to the US Marines' First Division. Probably drinking coffee, eating hot meals, sleeping on cots in canvas tents, and moving arrows around on wall maps.

My line of reasoning was patently ridiculous, of course. The men and women who wear the uniforms are professional soldiers; I'm a professional reporter. And not a particularly brave one, at that."

But if you think about it, anyone who is part of a group that shot its way from the Gulf to Baghdad in three weeks has earned some measure of right to be full of himself. Brave or not, full of himself or not, he took the same risks as the soldiers he was traveling with. So, I say yeah, he's full of himself, but cut him a little slack, because you would have to be Albert Schweitzer not to be a little full of yourself after that.

He has learned from this exercise. With luck he will no longer be reflexively hostile to the American military.

[rwfromkansas]

Most were not American and often violated rules to get killed.

[rwfromkansas]

He shouldn't be second-guessing himself. I am dogmatic about the need for journalists to be objective, btw. But, Quite frankly, by reporting on the war from the frontlines, that creates a pro-war perspective by itself and it is not necessarily wrong since you can't avoid it...it comes with being in the midst of battle.

The objecive, "here is what is happening pro and con" reports should be left to the writers in the newsrooms back home.

[xm177e2]

The shockwaves emanating from the whole "embedded reporters" experiment are still echoing throughout the insular world of journalism. They came to see things through the grunt's viewpoint--which would be a good thing, except they started seeing things exclusively that way--which is very bad for a journalist. Maybe they will take a minute to think about how strong an effect the embedding had on them--and how they are effected by similar things on the domestic side. How they are "embedded" in the teachers unions' rectums, how enjoying access to certain politicians can make them more favorably disposed to those same politicians and effect their writing (like Dubya before the election), how they more often "embed" themselves in their imaginations in the role of environmental crusader instead of businessman--and how that slants their writing. But I doubt they will learn much from this, except "embedding with the US military is bad, because we write pro-US stories."

[Deb]

Embedding was the most brilliant idea to come out of any administration...EVER!

Torie Clark is a GENIUS!!!

After the never-ending complaining and kvetching about "No Press Access" in the past couple of wars, I absolutely love reading these stories of "conflict" and struggle because every one of these reporters absolutely fell in love with the military.

I can't wait for the first cafeteria brawl when some smug lefty puts down the military or the war to one of these guys.

[tet68]

To reporter..........it's not stockholm syndrome you idiot!
It's Esprit d'Corps.

[tet68]

As part of a first-ever war correspondents' partnership between the Department of Defense and media organizations, we reporters signed contracts limiting what we would say and when we would say it. In return, for the duration of the conflict the Pentagon let us eat, sleep, travel - and sometimes die - with the military forces we covered. (More than a dozen journalists died in combat.)


Note to reporter, look up Pyle Ernie and WW II.

[WOSG]

"But, Quite frankly, by reporting on the war from the frontlines, that creates a pro-war perspective by itself"

not sure about that ... I think honest reporting from the front lines during WWI would have created a sense of the uselesness of military action. thousands of lives for a few yards of dirt?

I think factual reporting ends up showing up the good guys, which is what USA is in this case.

[sit-rep]

He's from Boston...