Dear Tony,
I’m glad to be watching from a distance, too. All but some very exceptional (or exceptionally twisted) people I know who have been around shooting and killing prefer not to be. I have some good friends embedded with the troops this time, so I listen for where their units are, half hoping they are among those racing in the vanguard toward Baghdad and the fight, so they get the story, but hoping just as hard that their units remain REMFS—rear echelon motherfuckers—so they can come home and bitch heroically about missing the action. In fact, that’s a good prayer for those going off to war: “God grant that you win the war but miss the action.”
Having written a book about a battle, I have been falsely awarded the title “war correspondent.” I have never actually covered a war. I’ve been in some hairy places in my nearly 30 years as a journalist, and have always been deeply relieved to get out. I know many journalists who seek out danger, and I understand the various reasons why they do, but I recognize that at a basic level they are unlike me.
In 1988 I was in Ramallah, in the West Bank, racing around looking for trouble against my better judgment. I had no business covering a conflict at that time. My wife was at home pregnant with our fifth child, wondering what kind of idiot she had married, and what the hell was she going to do if I failed to return—a prospect we, of course, had never even considered or discussed. In truth, there was relatively little danger. This was the first Palestinian uprising, a relatively polite contest by today’s lethal standard. The shibab (the Palestinian protesters) were throwing heavy stones at the Israeli Defense Forces, and the Israelis were mostly breaking the protesters’ arms and legs—although there were some casualties on both sides, and it was the first time in my life I encountered the violently and recently dead on a fairly regular basis. I noticed after a few weeks of reporting this story that photographers had a better instinct for action than writers did. A writer could happen upon the blood and wailing after a clash and do nifty reconstructions that made it sound like he had been right there in the middle when the shit went down. For photographers this was not an option. They had to bring back pictures—ideally ones that would make viewers at home flinch and duck when they saw them, or at the very least ruin their breakfasts. So I attached myself to a terrific, smart, and utterly nerveless photographer named George Azar.
Every morning in Ramallah, the shibab would get themselves all worked up in one of the local mosques, and then come chanting out en masse to defy the Israeli ban on such gatherings, throw stones, and provoke gunfire and other expressions of hostility. Usually the Israeli soldiers shot rubber bullets, but not always. It depended on how threatened they felt and, I guess, how pissed off they were that morning. Some of the photographers had world class welts and bruises from the rubber bullets, so I wasn’t eager to find out how it felt to get hit. And the stones thrown by the shibab were not the baby pebbles that we call stones in the United States, but mighty grapefruit-sized missiles like the ones the English use as a unit of weight. George steered us confidently to an empty street that afforded a perfect view of the ranks of chanting shibab as they emerged from the mosque, turned a corner, and began trotting right at us. Great spot, I thought, congratulating myself for teaming up with George, until I turned around and noticed that a platoon of Israeli soldiers in riot gear had formed directly behind us. George, kamikaze shooter that he was, had positioned us directly between the clashing forces … on purpose! The last thing I remember seeing as I ran for my life, tear-gas canisters popping, stones crashing down, and the alarming pop of the soldiers’ rifles (high SF quotient), was George pulling a gas mask out of his Domke bag and holding his ground, shooting away.
George got his pictures, and I managed to watch from a safe distance until the melee ended before walking down and interviewing the combatants. I’m sure I managed to write it in such a way that readers imagined I was right there with those pictures. I’ve thought of that incident whenever people assume that I was present for the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, which I wrote about in my book Black Hawk Down. I always patiently explain, “I didn’t even start working on that book until nearly three years after the battle,” but the illusion of my blood-splattered exploits in combat journalism persist. Maybe this note on Slate will put an end to it.
I admire soldiers, because I admire courage and commitment. I hope your students and all the other people who oppose the war don’t forget to respect the men and women who are putting their hides on the line, who—as you illustrate so well in Jarhead—have nothing whatsoever to do with setting policy.
For the record, I favor this war. One big reason is well-illustrated in the movie Three Kings: We owe those Iraqis who were encouraged to rise up against Saddam Hussein by Bush père and then left to suffer his homicidal revenge. We let the tyrant fly his helicopter gunships to put down their rebellions. It was one of the starkest betrayals in U.S. history.
So I’m watching it all unfold from a distance, surrounded by mes amis who think Les Etats Unis has gone fou. I respect Bush for sticking (quite literally) to his guns, but mostly I respect those fierce young Americans speeding across the desert to an uncertain and sphincter-puckering fate.
MarkB
