This is the final part in a series about the life of an embedded reporter in Iraq.
FALLUJAH, IRAQ — When it was time for me to leave Echo Company and make my way back to Baghdad, and then home, Capt. Pinion arranged to have me catch a ride with the “Road Show” — a weekly convoy from Camp Fallujah that brings a traveling PX (the military’s “general store”) out to units in the field.
Before I left, I spoke with 2nd Lt. Frederick, who had led a late night patrol the evening before and picked up a suspect. Seems that the guy in question was shining a laser light at one of the Marines in a Humvee, and, all things considered, was probably lucky to be taken in one piece. He was being processed in a little building Echo had set up apart from the main train station, with a sign spray-painted “Detainees Only.”
The “Road Show” shoved off in the early afternoon for a stop at Golf Company, on the outskirts of Fallujah. Our convoy consisted of a few large trucks loaded with Marines and the PX goods and a couple Humvees, one of which I squeezed into the back of, next to the feet of a machine gunner who manned his rooftop gun. As we drove, the terrain changed from the brown, winter desert landscape of Fallujah to green farmland, dotted with small villages and palm groves. We bounced through the countryside, keeping to the rough dirt roads for a bit before banging our way up to the highway, where we were more exposed and the danger of improvised explosive devices (IED’s) was much greater.
Golf Company operates out in the countryside. From what I had been told, they tend to see quite a bit of action, and encounter many more IED’s than the units in the city itself. Their base of operations is a large, crumbling four-story building set back from the highway in a palm grove, floating today — thanks to the rain that had been off and on all morning — in a thick, muddy swamp that sucked in your boots as you walked. Golf shares the building with an element of the Iraqi Army, and when I asked if they share the same living quarters, a Marine laughed and said, “different floors.”
I decided to wait in the front room of the building while the Marines lapped up cigarettes, magazines and junk food, small comforts to help them get through another week. There, I met Toby Morris (as civilians, we immediately recognized each other as such), a photographer working through an agency back in the States. He had been to Iraq a few times before, and was doing another multiple-month stint, part of which he was going to spend with Golf.
Like other reporters I met, he had seen quite a bit of action in his various trips to Iraq, and was furious that he had missed what he considered a great story the day before. Seems some Marines from Golf were out manning a checkpoint when they saw a car full of masked men coming at them. They signaled for the car to stop and fired some warning shots but it kept coming, so they shot out its tires and engine block, but still to no avail — so they shot to kill, stopping the car in its tracks. Once the car stopped rolling, the Marines searched it and found an Iraqi man in the trunk who had been kidnapped by the masked men to be held for ransom. The Marines told Morris that the guy was ecstatic, and kept saying how he loved the Marines, who had just accidentally saved him from certain death. In a weird way it was a funny story, and it would have been even better if anyone had been around to record it and get all the little details.
All of which got us to talking about the dwindling number of reporters that are embedded in Iraq. Iraq’s a big place, and with the fighting being scattered in small pockets over a wide area, reporters can’t be everywhere, but from the anecdotal evidence I collected it’s clear that news organizations have scaled back so much that there are fewer and fewer reporters to go out on embeds with the military. As a result, everyday stories like the kidnapped Iraqi are being lost.
I’m not saying that those stories would be front-page news if they were told — most of the time, they probably wouldn’t even make the back pages. But the fact is that the grinding, day-to-day reality of the war is essentially being forgotten. Some will undoubtedly take that as an indictment of reporters in Iraq, which it isn’t. With a dwindling number of people assigned to cover the war, there is only so much that can be done, resulting in coverage restricted to the “big” stories, while many of the small, daily victories and defeats go unnoticed. And in that, the enormity of the story itself gets diminished.
Pick up any American newspaper on any given day, and unless there has been a major attack, an election or some kind or a power struggle between the major political players, you likely won’t find the war mentioned on the front page.
Iraq is unquestionably the biggest story of our time, and one which will affect American foreign and domestic policy for the rest of our lives — but if news organizations won’t invest the money and manpower to cover it from top to bottom, it will end up becoming a story told only through its major disasters and victories, without many of the small, personal narratives and struggles that give the story its humanity.
It’s an enormously difficult undertaking to try and digest an event as big as a war, especially one as chaotic, decentralized and piecemeal as Iraq, and I can’t pretend to say that I was there anywhere near long enough to have fully grasped its enormity. The reporters I met were all there by choice, and were doing everything they could to cover the story the best they could — but there just aren’t enough of them to give the conflict its due.
Which is too bad, because from time immemorial, the best war reporting has been done down in the dust and the mud, elbow to elbow with the soldiers doing the killing and the crying and the sweating and the dying (see Pyle, Ernie) — not from command posts, and certainly not from press centers.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.