Part of the problem is that war correspondents aren’t what they used to be. Gone are the Walter Cronkites, Ernie Pyles and Ward Justs, “upfront” reporters who landed with the first wave at Anzio, flew in bombing raids over Berlin and tagged along with patrols in Vietnam. Today’s war story comes from another breed. His or her base is more often a five-star hotel than a foxhole. Few have served as soldiers. Most of the almost 1,500-member U.S. press corps I saw during Desert Storm couldn’t tell a tank from a turtle. Only a score were qualified to report on military matters. Many arrogantly refused to learn even the basics like: this is a squad, that is a squadron.
It didn’t used to be that way. When I was a boy soldier in Italy right after World War II, Robert Ruark, one of the old shoe-leather war correspondents, turned up at my platoon. He wore a uniform that was the same as ours except for a “war correspondent” insignia. Our skipper didn’t tell us what to say or not to say to him. Ruark respected our mission. He got his story by being one of us. During the Korean War, all dispatches and photos were censored to ensure that the security of the troops was never put at risk. But the story still got told to the American people, who had every right to know how the war was going. A good war correspondent doesn’t have to be a man. My Wolfhound Regiment became the darling of the public because Marguerite Higgins of The New York Herald Tribune stayed with us for months. She made us famous and we loved her for doing it.
The right kind of war correspondent has plenty of experience, nerve and a sense of proportion. In Vietnam, reporters could go where they wanted to go. They sent their stories directly to their editors, bypassing the military. The best got the truth out. The worst didn’t. Once during a fire fight a reporter came in on a chopper wearing a yellow shirt and a baseball cap. “Where’s all the action?” he said. I pointed. A few minutes later, I noticed that he was poking his head up too high, taking photographs. “Hey,” I said. “Stick your camera up, not your head.” He ignored the advice. Not five minutes later he’d taken a slug between the eyes. We shipped his body out on the next chopper.
Of the many myths fathered by the Vietnam War, probably the biggest was that we lost because of uncensored, free-ranging press coverage. But most professional officers believed that myth and still do. Young Turk generals coming into power, like Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, said never again would reporters roam free to criticize our wars.
Until Somalia, the Pentagon had been working hard to muzzle the media. During the initial stages of the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the Pentagon shut the press out of the operation. The brass told the American people that Grenada was a splendid little victory. It took more than seven years before the full story came out: the planning and execution had been Keystone Cop, the wrong objectives were taken, 18 paratroopers were hit by our own airstrike, SEALs drowned because of stupid mistakes. Bluster and blunder cost many other lives.
After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, reporters became prisoners of war in their own hotels. Those few pool members who were out with the -troops became part of a military machine that imposed total control over what the public would see, hear and read. I tried to short-circuit the system by talking to grunts the way Walter Cronkite, Ernie Pyle and Ward Just had done. On sprints through the desert, I had more weapons pointed at me by “friendlies” trying to block my story than by anyone from Saddam Hussein’s side.
If trying to hamstring reporters is wrong, it also makes no sense to jettison all control. The idea in Somalia, apparently well meant, was to show the world that the good guys had arrived while signaling the warlords of Mogadishu to get out of town. But the result was the beach party at Half Moon Bay. The solution is for the Pentagon to go back to a revised version of the system used in World War II: the military fights the war, the press covers it and the American public is told what’s happening. But everyone agrees to play by sensible rules.
Reporters should be free to visit units without minders. Editors and the Pentagon need to work out a compromise on what constitutes reasonable military censorship. Mutual paranoia now distorts the issue along with the coverage. The two sides need to devise a way to reduce the size of reportorial contingents without returning to the pools that gave the Pentagon its one-sided advantage in Desert Storm. To cover the complicated world of modern soldiering, editors should assign people who understand the profession of arms, not people in little caps with the logo of their news organization on top. The most important thing is for everyone to quit treating military operations like celebrity weddings or bowl games. Nobody at home is going to trust reporters or press officers who run into battle yelling, “Ready, fire, aim.”
