Slate's Bizbox
war stories: Military analysis.

Combat ConfessionalWhat to make of the New Republic's Baghdad Diarist?

By Phillip Carter
Updated Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2007, at 6:43 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

As an old combat veteran reminded me last week, American soldiers have certainly done worse. Nearly three generations removed, we forget the unspeakable savagery of the Pacific campaign during World War II. Paul Fussell, a combat veteran and historian, recounted 40 years later how the so-called greatest generation of American troops mounted Japanese skulls on the fenders of their combat vehicles, and how one Marine carried a severed Japanese hand with him, asking his mates, "How many Marines you reckon that hand pulled the trigger on?" Life magazine even printed a photo of this brutality in its May 22, 1943, issue, showing a young American woman with a boiled Japanese skull sent home to her by her boyfriend overseas.

The American military has changed over the decades, becoming a much more educated, professionalized, and disciplined force. Yet bad things still happen in war, and anyone who finds Beauchamp's story incredible merely because it's upsetting has no idea what war can do. The truth will eventually come out in this case, but larger questions about the credibility of incredible wartime narrative will remain.

How, then, should journalists (and here I lump together newspapers and opinion magazines like the New Republic, which frequently commissions reported pieces and first-person narratives) tell the story of what happens in wartime?

First, journalists must expect that their truths will be challenged when writing about a subject as divisive as Iraq. They must do everything possible to bolster their own credibility prior to publication. Although some of the greatest opinion journalism in American history has been written under a pseudonym, including the Federalist Papers and George Kennan's famous essay on containment, those were not pieces of factual reporting. The New Republic erred in granting Beauchamp a pseudonym. In this instance, Beauchamp's personal credibility as a combat infantryman would have bolstered his reports immeasurably.

Secondly, when journalists do use anonymous sources to report critically about the military, they must do so with the greatest care. Sy Hersh would not have broken the Abu Ghraib story but for anonymous sources, but he also took great care to obtain photographs and documents to corroborate what he was being told. Dana Priest's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on secret prisons has been so good because it has been so right. The lesson here is that in war reporting, as with all reporting, you can certainly use anonymous sources, but only with the proper due diligence. Further, editors should balance the need for anonymous sourcing with the value of a story published with named sources, like the Post's series on the Walter Reed Medical Center, which relied almost exclusively on soldiers willing to stand by their stories.

Fewer than 1 percent of Americans serve today in uniform, and fewer still have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. At best, the American public is getting a filtered picture of the battlefield today, and at worst, it's getting pure garbage from both sides of the aisle. The American public needs to know the truth about the wars its sends its sons and daughters to fight—even when it's ugly.

The Beauchamp dispatches show the extent to which the discourse over Iraq has been poisoned and how quickly the left, the right, and the military were willing to go to the mat to defend their version of what is—or what they thought ought to be—true. No one cares anymore about the troops, the truth of their reports from Iraq, or the serious issues of professional journalism associated with a series of this type. The troops have become pawns in this debate; their stories a kind of Rorschach test that reveals more about how we view the war than its reality on the ground.

VIEW AS SINGLE PAGE
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Phillip Carter, an Iraq veteran, is an attorney with McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP and a principal of the Truman National Security Project.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Remarks from the Fray:

Slate's article on this controversy gives pause. Media coverage, particularly the extent of embedded coverage imposed by US authorities in this case, has seemed less than objective from the start; journals and newschannels are too readily typed as for or against. Many seem enchanged by Al-Jazeera as a voice of balance. They are doing a good job, but is it that much better than or in conflict with the BBC or CNN?

It is heartening to read--and should not surprise--that the US military is taking its job seriously. It is not a soldier's place to question the foreign policy decisions that put the conflict in play. Sadly, even if only partially credible, reports of atrocities, cruelty and suffering remind those of us who sit in salons and boardrooms that it is imperative to hold those charged with responsibilities accountable on the most fundamental of terms.

This real war seems awash in too much rhetoric, noise and ignorance.

--hommesuisse

(To reply, click here.)

I think it would be unlikely that someone would tease a stranger about disfigurement to her face, but not at all unlikely that soldiers would joke about it with each other. Gallows humor is always prevalent in the Army.

Other things that he claims, like chasing down a dog, sounds unlikely, only because it would further endanger the vehicle and crew by going off road. Plus, you still have to clean all that stuff up, and who wants to wash dog guts off a truck in a 130 degree weather? Plus leaving a carcass in your route just provides a new place to hide a bomb.

On the otherhand, not stopping or swerving to avoid a dog makes sense, so you stay on your route, do not smash your gunner around in the turret, or impede the convoy. It may still leave the carcass, but the driver avoids getting kicked really hard by the gunner once he recovers...

I don't find the skull thing too surprising, either, unless the claim is it was visible outside the uniform. That would be corrected pretty quick.

Anecdotal snippets like that offer little to understanding this war. I also think there are many men who don't need a war to make fun of someone with his friends, run over a dog, or find skulls fascinating. That Beauchamp found himself doing those things is an indictment of his upbringing and gender more than it is the army or the war.

--clown_nose

(To reply, click here.)

This war has already produced many well-documented stories of murder, rape and torture inflicted by American servicemen on civilians or prisoners of war. Why should it be so hard to believe American soldiers taunted a disfigured civilian or ran over a dog? That stuff is perfectly consistent with how American soldiers have behaved in every war (with the possible exception of WWI, in which most of the combat was somewhat isolated from the civilian population).

As an interrogator in Vietnam, I arrived at a field hospital to talk to an incoming POW who had been reported by radio as having "light" injuries. The people at the hospital showed me a body with a bullet hole in the chest.They said he arrived that way. Draw your own conclusions.

I also interviewed a farmer the tip of whose penis had been shot off. Someone in a passing truckload of GIs had popped one at him. Couldn't identify perpetrator, so CA gave him some money and let it go at that.

Another problem we were aware of was GIs shooting water buffaloes--again, usually from passing vehicles. Aside from the fact that it was common for kids to be riding them, the water buffalo was a typical farmer's biggest investment, comparable to an American farmer's tractor. Its loss was a major financial blow. Yeah, we'd pay them for it in some cases. But that scarcely made wanton destruction all right, from either the military discipline or the civilian relations points of view.

Many times I saw GIs verbally abuse Vietnamese civilians (never called anything but "gooks," or "goddam gooks") or force Vietnamese women to listen to what the GIs considered very witty sexual banter. GIs thought nothing of bluntly offering a woman money for quick sex, regardless that the woman obviously was not a prostitute. I spoke with Viets who thought that most Americans were little better than animals in the coarseness and stupidity of their behavior.

The simple fact is that war almost invariably degrades conduct, and that Americans have for too long believed that American soldiers are somehow exempt from that. Bullshit.

--Fritz_Gerlich

(To reply, click here.)

(8/8)

Washington Post