Embedded Journal: Why We Write

It’s strangely quiet in Kuwait City today. A beautiful sunny day after the duststorms and rain of the last few days. There’s a power outage down at the Mubarakiya Souk, so it was even quieter than usual there during the national four-hour midafternoon nap… not even the Indians were working.  
   
As you read this, we’re probably already headed into the desert to live with the Joes, to wait with them for George Bush to pull the trigger on Saddam Hussein. I’ve got my hair cranked down in a high-and-tight … no need of dirt-trapping hair in the desert. I’ve got my gear cranked down in a ruck and a duffle. All my errands are run, and now it’s a matter of waiting until 7 a.m. Tuesday, 11 March, when we are due to show up at the military press center at the Hilton for training in gas masks and chemical protective gear prior to our ride out to the desert camps. I suppose this is a little like it feels for an 18-year-old the night before he heads off to boot camp to be transformed into a soldier.

You have to envy the soldiers. Asked to do the most insane, life-threatening things, they have ready answers for why they do it.

It’s their duty. God, King and Country. The Constitution and the American Way. They are given orders and they follow them. No one questions this. Almost everyone these days is ready to honor the soldiers even though they might protest the orders. I remember the response of a U.S. Army Ranger sergeant during media training at Fort Dix in January, when asked by a reporter why he would go to war when he is the father of two small boys.

“Well, somebody’s father has to go. Might as well be me,” he said. (He added later, as out-of-shape reporters undergoing military training slogged along on a five-mile march, “If Ah was running this show, there’d be a whole lot more misery.” Rangers love their misery, and don’t mind sharing.) 

Then, of course, there is the primeval warrior’s motivation — best summed by an image of nubility under the heading “Why We Fight” — that my Green Beret brother forwarded via e-mail for laughs.   

But this is what my Amy, a reporter’s wife, gets in the supermarket in our town south of Boston:
“Why did you let him go? Are you crazy? I wouldn’t have let my husband go …  Why is he there? Aren’t you afraid something might happen to him?” And this in front of the kids, who are under the impression that I’m on some kind of extended Arabian cultural exchange to be followed by a big camping trip with the Army.

My wife has several speeches ready ranging from “This is what he does” to “The First Amendment is a great American right that must be defended.” Old high school buddies on the Internet and the Joes I’ve encountered out in the sand ask me the same thing, “Why are you here if you don’t have to be?”
 
Here is what some of the people around me say:

“We are war tourists.” This was a joke that came from a TV man who thrives on the thrill of war. You’ve probably seen his footage of intense firefights in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and he has earned his right to speak this way. Another highly experienced and unquestionably brave war photographer here remarked the other day, “I hope it doesn’t happen. I hope …” He mimicked Saddam Hussein getting shot in the head. This photog has seen enough in his life and is just doing the dirty job that brings home a paycheck.

This reporter’s life is wrapped up in thrills and depression. I do have a couple of high ideals that have brought me here. They mainly involve sticking the world’s ugly realities in the faces of my fellow citizens, safe behind our sheltering oceans, for whom the rest of the world beyond those seas might as well be marked “Here be Dragons.” In America –- Sept. 11 and the Beltway sniper notwithstanding –- the vast majority of people can feel secure in the knowledge that they can go to work, go to the supermarket, pick up a six-pack and settle in for a night of “The Bachelor”  without fear of shelling, landmines, extortionary roadblocks or diseases that will cause your digits to fall off.

It may sound perverse, but I consider it a privilege, raised in four third-world countries in my engineer father’s family, to have first seen a man without a nose, a leper, at age seven. As an adult, I have been privileged to visit the hospitals where women, children and old men lie riddled with shrapnel due to the inability of world leaders to sort out age-old disputes that have little to do with those targeted. I have briefly experienced the fear and chaos of a shelling, and had to tread carefully through mine-ridden fields. These are not things most Americans need to contemplate as daily realities.  

But this life is short, and for far too many of the people on Earth, it can be brutal. In my years here, I have been immensely privileged to be one of those who can keep the horrors at an arm’s length and raise my family in the peace and relative wealth of a small New England town. It is beyond my power to correct the injustices of the world, and I don’t delude myself with the thought that I am somehow doing that. But to live this privileged life without being able to share the knowledge of exactly how safe and wealthy we are would be a waste.

This life is short, and for far too many of the people on Earth, it can be brutal.Now, if all goes according to the plans others have laid, I am off to another conflict zone. This time, the Pentagon has opted to “embed” 500 reporters, photographers and TV crews with combat units, returning to a model last used in World War II. They tell us it is an effort to dispel the mutual suspicion with which the military and the press have viewed each other for the past 30 years. They want us to tell the stories and show the images of Americans at war.

Among the reporters to be embedded, there are thoughts that this is an effort to co-opt us. There is some thinking that at a time when the United States faces accusations of targeting civilians, and the Iraqis allegedly are putting troops in U.S. uniforms to conduct massacres for propaganda purposes, the Pentagon wants as many witnesses as possible to the professionalism of American soldiers. There is also the thought that after the limited press access of the first Gulf War, the Pentagon has done the math and figured out that if you don’t want Saddam Hussein and bombed out “Baby Milk Factory” images to dominate the 24-hour news channels, then you have to feed the beast with alternative images.  

They promise us there will be no censorship. Reporters will be allowed to attend classified operational briefings, but will be asked not to broadcast what they learn there in advance, so as not to jeopardize the lives of soldiers or their own lives, seeing as they will be riding with those soldiers.  There will be no live “We’re now going through the berm, here it is, we’re in Iraq!” standups.

There is concern that we are being used for propaganda purposes. Well, propaganda is a dirty word, but if what we report is true and of our own choosing, then it is no harm, no foul. For those of us embedding, it is not our job to present the total picture of the war. There will be independent chase crews out there in their own vehicles. There may be western reporters in Baghdad, if they weren’t frightened off by Pentagon warnings of a horrific bombing campaign to come. Other reporters are waiting in Jordan and northern Iraq. From all of this, perhaps, the total picture will emerge.  Our piece of it is the soldiers.

To live this privileged life without being able to share the knowledge of exactly how safe and wealthy we are would be a waste.I don’t have a problem with this. I come from a family that has sent at least seven men to war over the last century, including an uncle who was killed in World War II in a cause that no one today questions, a grandfather who survived a U-boat attack and a distant cousin who spent his remaining years coughing his lungs out from a World War I mustard gas attack. I am glad of an opportunity while war remains a fact of life on this Earth to witness it and write about what I see. I hope and expect that the American soldiers I ride with will give me reason to honor their execution of duty and their sacrifices, should it come to that. There are risks inherent in this for us, but they are no greater and certainly less than the soldiers who will go before us.

That’s all a little heavy. So much for the noble thoughts on why we write. For the past few weeks, my attention and those of most of my colleagues have been devoted more to how we will write, specifically in this harsh desert environment we are moving into tomorrow. 

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