Oxford English Dictionary.
At dusk one day in late March 2003, an editor got through on my satellite phone somewhere out in the desert north of Najaf, where I was embedded with the First Brigade of the Army’s Third Infantry Division as it pushed toward Baghdad.
This post is the third in the At War series Embedistan, which looks back at war reporting done on embeds, and outside them.
She wanted to know about some fighting that CNN was showing. A fair enough question, but I swore like a soldier would and, being nowhere near CNN’s correspondent, said something along the lines of, “How should I know?”
The truth was my view of the American invasion of Iraq was as limited as that of the soldiers who were fighting in it. Except for the occasional updates with the division’s commanding officers, I knew nothing more than what I saw directly in front of me.
Embedding has been called a “soda-straw view” of war – usually derisively and generally unfairly – or much worse, a tool of the Pentagon’s war propaganda. That it has been fodder for the seemingly endless debate over how to report on war misses the point.
My assignment wasn’t to cover the war or its disputed rationale, the strategy of the generals or the effects on the Iraqis. The New York Times and other news organizations had plenty of reporters doing various pieces of that, and no one doing it all at once.
I was there to report on the experience of American soldiers invading a foreign land, enduring war at its most visceral: exhaustion, hunger, thirst, tedium, fear and death. To fail to do that would be as egregious a lapse of journalism as not covering the experience on the other side, handled then by John F. Burns, The Times’s correspondent in Baghdad.
War, up close, is uglier than most people will ever know. I remember one soldier saying he’d seen combat for the first time in Kifl, a small village on the Euphrates. “And I didn’t like it very much,” he said, laconically.
Embedding then, as now, imposed restrictions on reporters. We were not allowed to report exact location and size of units, their planned operations or the names of those killed. While we were still in Kuwait, the brigade’s commander, Col. William F. Grimsley, showed a group of us the exact attack plan on Baghdad’s airport.
The New York Times I kept my end of the bargain and only wrote about it when the issue was moot and the division was already there. It was the same with the soldiers killed, nameless until their kin could be told the news. I did my best to memorialize them in articles I wrote later.
In the end, I never encountered an effort to restrict anything I wrote, though an officer complained that I described how two American tanks had been destroyed (missiles from the rear). I felt I never compromised my obligation to be fair and honest. And some of what I wrote as a result was hardly flattering to the American war effort.
A day after a suicide bomber killed four soldiers at a checkpoint north of Najaf, I described a sign posted on the road warning cars to stop and turn around, leading to what may have been a mistaken killing of unarmed civilians:
“At the checkpoint, the consequences of the new restrictions were nonetheless evident. American bulldozers uprooted palm and eucalyptus trees along the road and leveled a two-story home to clear fields of fire for troops on guard.
“A few hundred yards up the road was the burned-out shell of a car that had failed to heed the new sign. A second car, with a man and a woman, also tried to bolt through the checkpoint early today. Soldiers opened fire and killed the man.
‘His wife watched him die,’ [Lt. Col. Scott E.] Rutter said.”
The problem with embedding, if any, belongs to reporters, those who lose their objectivity and cheer, those who accept what the military says without a necessary dose of skepticism, those who presume what they write is the all-encompassing truth and not just one slice of it.
For example, during the invasion I saw very few Iraqis and spoke to fewer still. I knew that, and largely for that reason, I went back to Kifl eight months later and wrote about the invasion and its chaotic aftermath from the village’s perspective.
Frankly, the embedding vs. unilateral debate tires me whenever it surfaces again, as it did after Rolling Stone’s profile of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal brought his career to a swift end.
Some of the commentary afterward suggested that the reporter, Michael Hastings, was doing something embedded reporters don’t do: reveal damaging or critical information about the military.
In fact, he was doing what the best of them often do: writing what he saw and heard, not only the sophomoric and insubordinate comments of the general’s inner circle, but also the more striking doubts of soldiers in Afghanistan whom the general was failing to persuade of the wisdom of his strategy.
The article vindicated the “embed” as a necessary part — I won’t say a necessary evil — of reporting on war.
I returned to Iraq to work regularly in 2009, and circumstances mean it is not an either-or choice in reporting here anymore, as it was in 2003 or later in some of the war’s worst years.
While I spend far more time with Iraqis, I still embed with the American military, as most reporters here do, because its role still merits coverage as troops gradually withdraw and wrap up the American combat mission at the end of August.
If the military tries too hard to control the message, as my colleague Tim Arango and I have experienced on recent embeds, that’s just one more obstacle to overcome in the reporting, one more thing to report.
(Also see Steven Lee Myers’ report on the drawdown of U.S. troops and the American legacy in Iraq.)
Steven Lee Myers is the Baghdad bureau chief of The New York Times.
This is the third in the Embedistan series, which examines embedding in Iraq and Afghanistan through posts from New York Times journalists and others who have worked embedded, unembedded, and a mixture of both.
We welcome your comments, below, and invite you to share your own thoughts and experiences. Particularly if you have reported from either conflict zone, or have served there in the military.