Reporters thrive on action, search for 'big' war story-"It's such an honor to see those young men…."

On Thursday, members of the 101st Airborne, 3rd Brigade were "wondering when and if they're going to get a piece of the fight," CNN's Ryan Chilcote said. On Friday, they got their piece.

The 101st launched a "deep attack" Friday night from a forward base in central Iraq, pounding suspected Republican Guard placements less than 100 miles southwest of Baghdad.

Based in Fort Campbell, Ky., the 101st has more helicopters than any other Army division, Chilcote said. It uses Apaches for air assaults and Black Hawks for troop movements.

Chilcote, whom the Chronicle has been following regularly, said some personal supplies are running low.

"I've learned the art of negotiating with soldiers for stuff, and we've been trading," he said over the phone. "Yesterday I got some good stuff, some soap and toothpaste, just on my charm. I got a camel bag, which you wear on your back; it carries water. I promised I'd pay the soldier back for that.

"We're like scavengers," the embedded reporter said. "I let a guy use my phone for a box of water. You're not supposed to do that. There's an organized way to get all this stuff, but when you're running low -- if it's not bolted down, you take it."

As a "unilateral" reporter not traveling with the troops, CBS' Scott Pelley has seen firsthand some of the war's biggest stories.

Sunday, he was in Umm Qasr, where he witnessed a firefight between British Marines and Iraqi irregulars. Wednesday, he was back in that southern Iraqi port city as the first humanitarian provisions were unloaded.

"It was a tremendous scene to see people running, sprinting out of their houses with every kind of jug and bottle and pan, just to get water," the 60 Minutes II correspondent said by phone. "We've been able to cover quite a variety of things, including stories about these Iraqi people and what's happening in these towns once they're liberated, which I also think is something these embeddeds are not allowed to do."

"We got ourselves a house on the Iraqi border and set it up with our uplink equipment, food, water and gas," he said. "We were on the roof of this house when an attack helicopter flew right over our heads and started launching missiles into an Iraqi position just across the border. I got in front of the camera, got New York's attention, they got Dan (Rather), and we were able to report the beginning of the war during a time when the embeds were blacked out."

He and his team have not bathed in 10 days and are subsisting on a soldier's diet of MREs.

"Having said all that, we are all journalists who live for a great story, and this is a great story," Pelley said. "It's such an honor to see those young men -- 18, 19, 20 years old, so disciplined, so well-trained -- being extraordinarily careful about not shooting at children and friendly fire issues. I was so impressed with their good order and discipline during that firefight. All of that has a bearing on the morale of our guys."

George Stephanopolous arrived in Houston on Friday. He has an interview this morning with the former secretary of state, the former secretary of the treasury and the former White House chief of staff. They are all James A. Baker.

"He built the coalition in 1991, was central to that effort and hasn't spoken out yet on this conflict," Stephanopolous said. "However he analyzes the situation will be interesting."

Baker and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld are among the guests on the next edition of This Week, the No. 1 Sunday talk show in Houston.

Stephanopolous, the show's host, spent the first week of the war in Doha, Qatar.

God bless our troops.

A U.S. soldier rests while on patrol near Harir airbase north of Arbil, in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, March 28, 2003. The United States moved more troops into northern Iraq overnight, advancing plans to open up a northern front in the war to oust Iraqi President Saddam. Reuters journalists arriving at Harir airstrip at around 7 a.m. (0400 GMT) on Friday saw transport helicopters and vehicles and troops which had come in overnight, on top of the first wave of 1,000 paratroopers who arrived early on Thursday. REUTERS/Caren Firouz

Fri Mar 28, 3:00 PM ET A Romanian holds a U.S. flag during a demonstration in support of the U.S.-led war in Iraq ( downtown Bucharest, Romania, Friday, March 28, 2003. According to statistics more than 80 percent of the population in Romania is opposed to the war in Iraq, but the government is supporting the U.S.-led action. Romania has sent up to 300 NBC military specialist troops to the gulf area. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

AP - Locals flee Basra

Iraqis fire on Basra civilians - Posted: Friday, March 28, 12:28pm EST Christian Science Monitor [Text] Iraqi paramilitary forces in Basra fired mortars and machine guns Friday on about 1,000 Iraqi civilians trying to leave the besieged city, forcing them to retreat, British military officials and witnesses said. Britain's 7th Armored Brigade apparently tried to fire back, but stopped out of fear that civilians would be wounded, said Lt. Cmdr. Emma Thomas, a spokeswoman for British forces in the Persian Gulf. As a result, the civilians retreated into Basra in trucks, she said.

British forces have ringed the southern city - Iraq's second-largest, with a population of 1.3 million - in hopes of eliminating units loyal to Saddam Hussein and opening the way for badly needed humanitarian aid. A senior British defense official said there had been reports in recent days of significant numbers of Iraqi civilians coming out of Basra every day to get food aid from points outside the city and then returning. The official, who spoke on condition that he not be identified further, said that scenario appeared to have happened again Friday, but Iraqi paramilitary forces opened fire on people to block them from leaving. [End]

Uneasy evolution of war coverage - By Daniel Schorr [Full text] WASHINGTON - The Iraq war and a revolution in communications technology may have opened the way to reconciliation between the American military and the American news media.

I can remember back to World War II when journalists, in the language of the day, were not "embedded" but "accredited." They wore Army and Navy uniforms, they ate in mess halls and officers' clubs, and they lived comfortably with official censorship in the interest of the common cause called "the war effort."

A generation later, the Vietnam War, with its "body counts," "news management," and "Five o'Clock Follies," turned a cooperative arrangement into an adversarial relationship. The generation of military leaders that came out of Vietnam resented the perceived role of the press in eroding support for the Vietnam War. They took active measures to keep news people away from operations like the invasions of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.

An officer to whom I complained about the lid put on the Grenada invasion replied, "Next time we invade we'll put you in the front wave - alone."

During the first Gulf War, reporters, still suspect, operated under onerous restrictions as they tried to get where the action was and the soldiers were. But the development of highly mobile cameras and satellite transmitters opened the way to a totally new dimension of war coverage.

In planning for the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon decided to make the news media an offer they would find hard to refuse - a front row seat at the battleground. Some 500 news people were offered the opportunity to be "embedded" in fighting units, witnessing what the warriors witnessed for instantaneous transmission to America. Frequently live on camera, the reporters were given a vivid opportunity to become the hero journalists of this war.

However dramatic the pictures, they are only a small part of the war - "slices of the war," as Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld termed it. But they tend to make the combat reporters true comrades-in-arms. And, if at times these reporters are asked to withhold their location and their movements, that is generally accepted as part of the package. However, differences of judgment are already emerging. At press time yesterday, the Monitor's contract reporter, Phil Smucker, was being evicted from Iraq by the US military for being too explicit about his location with US troops in a broadcast interview with CNN.

The new-age-war live coverage also presents other new problems of professional ethics about how far to accept official dictation. Last Sunday a dozen American soldiers were captured near a Euphrates River bridge. The Arab Al Jazeera network broadcast some grim scenes showing dead soldiers and others being interrogated.

The tape was available to American networks, but most of them acceded to urgent Pentagon requests to withhold broadcast out of regard for relatives not yet aware of what had happened to their loved ones. Suddenly live coverage had become something more than a video game.

On his website, Matt Drudge asked the obvious question, "If anchormen and others in the media have viewed it, why can't the average citizen?" It is one of many professional questions bound to arise in this era of Live from the Battlefront.

And there is no easy answer.

o Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst at National Public Radio.

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