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hail-and-farewell party is in full flow at a Spartan civilian restaurant in Clarksville, Tennessee. Clarksville is about fifty miles northwest of Nashville and is the proud home of the 101st Airborne Division and its 20,000 soldiers and their families. It is Friday night and, this being a military affair, everyone has arrived by the scheduled start, eighteen-thirty hours. There is no music. The floors and tables are bare.

The sound is the polite roar of voices of about fifty men and women: officers, senior noncommissioned officers, and their wives who are welcoming the new arrivals to the battalion and saying goodbye to those who are leaving before the unit deploys to Iraq in ten days. The drink of choice is American beer and it is being rapidly consumed straight from the bottles.

My camera crew and I are seated at a table next to one of the battalion officers, his wife, and his father–a retired general who has come to say goodbye to his son, a smart, likable young major who graduated as first captain from West Point. After about an hour of nonstop eating and beer drinking, the mood becomes more loquacious. The general shouts some advice over the noise to his son: “It is not a good career move to get a reporter killed while they’re with you,” he says, and then smiles. Everyone laughs and looks at me. I laugh, too. Then the general says as an afterthought, “Unless they’ve been chosen.”

The others laugh lightly. I say nothing. Another hour passes before I get a chance to sit alone with the general. The words have not left my mind. Since covering the Vietnam War, I have suspected that U.S. military personnel have occasionally gotten rid of unwelcome reporters by getting them killed or wounded...

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