Posted on 04/23/2003 10:10:37 AM PDT by 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.
I caught that too. As far as I know, three or four reporters actually died in combat, one died of an embolism, one stepped on a land mine at an abandoned Fedayeen military facility, two were murdered by a homocide bomber (one was a reporter, the other a cameraman), and two (? or was it one??) died in the crossfire at the Palestine Hotel during a heavy firefight between US and Fedayeen forces. That doesn't come out to a dozen, but there may be some I missed. The media tends to forget the public might be concerned with dead coalition soldiers as well as media people.
The deaths are no less tragic for the fact that they weren't all from combat. Looks like combat hasn't entirely cured Nelson of leftist hyperbole. He should have left that out, but maybe this is his way of proving to his bosses that living and facing death with evil US soldiers didn't taint his 'objectivity' after all.
In this artical there is no mention of FRee Republic or that they came to us for the interview, I have better things to do with my time if they can't State where they got the resorces. I talked to a lot of the Enlisted people at the Globe and they are with us, drop the rag a Line.
Like, this is a BAD thing?? "Stockholm syndrom"?? How 'bout REALITY?? Why isn't he PROUD of ponting out the point of origin of the ambush instead of apparently questioning what he did (or did I miss something - am I just being overly sensitive about a media type??)?
Seems to me he is trying to defend his actual grasp of the reality of what he was reporting with the liberal, touchy-feely BS of his know-nothing liberal media scum peers (much worse than "rear-echelon" types!).
VERY interesting post - thanks!!
Not embedded. But there were lots of reporters running around by themselves, not associated with any military units.
And decided that he hates himself for having understood it - even if but briefly.
Funny, they're not as introspective when cozying up to Hollywood and liberal politicians.
That depends on how you define combat. There were a few ambushes, the two that died in the hotel, and some few I haven't heard details on. I'm not aware that any embedded reporters were killed in combat oe while part of a unit as the author implies.
So very true. Excellent point.
There have been a number of articles like this in the past week or so. One of the most interesting was from an Anglo writer working for an Arab news service who was with the US Marines. She left her unit just before they pushed in into Iraq because she felt conflicted about her job. She had become so attached to the Marines that she couldn't bear to watch them go into combat argainst Arabs. She wrote "it would be like watching my brother fight my cousin".
She was in for an even greater surprise when she ran into a Marine from that unit later on. She was aboard a hospital ship when a wounded Marine recognized her. He was overjoyed to see her. The unit thought that she had been killed along with several photographers she'd been embedded with.
Much of the piece revolves around how surprised she was at how the Marines treated her and looked after her. Though she doesn't say so explicitly, you can tell that she was expecting something more in line with Iraqi propaganda.
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