Whole view of war, one scene at a time

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-edppubcol050403050403may04,0,2522572.column?coll=orl%2Dopinion%2Dheadlines ^ | May 4, 2003 | Manning Pynn, PUBLIC EDITOR

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The United States military rolled the dice when it decided to take the news media along on the invasion of Iraq -- and seems to have made its point.

"I think they [military leaders] got just what they wanted," said Roger Roy, one of two Orlando Sentinel journalists recently back from the war.

Roy, with the Marines, and photographer Hilda Perez, with the Army, made the trek from Kuwait City to Baghdad, chronicling for Sentinel readers what they saw.

Perez described the assigning of journalists to specific military units, termed "embedding," as "incredible. . . . I was amazed at how much freedom I was given."

Roy gave the process a qualified thumbs-up, as well, saying, "I'm glad I did it."

The Pentagon, too, has reason to be glad.

More than 600 journalists lived, traveled, ate -- and bonded -- with U.S. troops, with little or no access to Iraqi civilians, who may have had a different view, until the military reached Baghdad. That resulted in Americans seeing the war from the perspective of the U.S. soldiers and Marines who were winning it -- and that helped win something else: hearts and minds on the homefront.

Embedding differed radically from the military's practice in recent conflicts -- in which the Pentagon seemed to accord the news media a status only slightly above that of the enemy.

Acknowledging the improvement, both Perez and Roy found that embedding posed some challenges. One of the most notable was having to report about -- without becoming a part of -- the war effort.

"After a couple of weeks," Roy said, "you're writing about people that you know. . . . I don't see how it cannot color how you do things." In retrospect, though, he could not think of anything he failed to report that he would have written under other circumstances.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

This is probably why so many reporters don't think they are biased. When they hang with LIBERALS, they think and write like LIBERALS. When they're not hanging with LIBERALS they get a broader picture.

[Restorer]

Welcome to the real world.

Soldiers have always seen wars just from their own limited perspective. It's inevitable, since trotting all over a battlefield trying to get an overview generally results in winding up dead.

BTW, most of the journalists' Godlike "overview" during the Vietnam War was simply an illusion they successfully projected back to America. For instance, they managed to portray the Tet Offensive, a catastrophic defeat for the Vietcong, as a victory for them.

And most of their writing was done from the perspective of Saigon bars.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

They knew what their publishers wanted to advocate.

[Search4Truth]

I would think that anyone spending time on a battlefield would be snapped out of their child-like Kumbaya dillusions, and into the reality that the world is a dangerous place, and to be weak is to be dead.

I suspect there were more than a few battlefield conversions for those embedded journalists. God bless those who had the courage to go, especially those who lost their lives doing so.