Phil Taylor's papers
|
BACK TO : WAR & CRISIS REPORTING
The Embedded Life by Gordon Dillow 
Columbia Journalism Review, May-June 2003 DISPATCHES Grunts and Pogues: The Embedded Life BY GORDON DILLOW As an embedded reporter during the war in Iraq, I found myself at what the U.S. Marines call "the point of the spear." Along with Mark Avery, an Orange County Register photographer, I was assigned to Alpha Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, an infantry or "grunt" company based at Camp Pendleton, California. The 200 men of Alpha Company (there are no women in Marine infantry units) would be the first major U.S. ground combat unit to cross the Iraq border on the first night of the war and then would push more than 300 miles across Iraq, all the way to Baghdad. During the war they would arguably engage in more intense combat than any other Marine infantry company. Journalistically, there was no better place to be. But covering the spear point wasn't always easy. Marine grunts are often an insular, standoffish bunch even among other marines; they pride themselves on being leaner, harder, somehow more marine-like. Rear-echelon types are dismissed as "pogues" - rhymes with "rogues" - a term said to stand for "Persons Other than Grunts." And to the marines, no one occupies a lower, more miserable place in the pogue world than reporters. They had been warned about us, I found out later. Be careful what you say to them, the marines of Alpha Company were told before we joined them in early March, while they were camped out in the barren Kuwaiti desert. Don't bitch about the slow mail delivery, don't criticize the antiwar protesters back home, don't discuss operational plans, and for God's sake, don't use ethnic slur words for Arabs. Better yet, don't talk to the reporters at all. They'll just stab you in the back. The Baghdad fight was close enough that at one point a marine gave me a hand grenade to throw if the enemy started to overwhelm us. I knew that my having it violated written and unwritten rules. Still, it felt comforting in my hand.Some marines didn't take the advice; they were open and approachable from the start. (For example, it took about five minutes to learn that the marines called Arabs "hajis" - pronounced HA-jees, derivation unknown - and that, in the marine grunt view, antiwar protesters were traitorous scum.) It also helped that I'd already had some war experience. I'd been an Army sergeant in Vietnam, an ancient, almost mythical war to the grunts, most of whom are nineteen or twenty. But most of the Alpha Company officers and senior NCOs initially acted as if having journalists along was like having snakes crawl into their tent; some were convinced that reporters were little better than spies. It took a couple of weeks of sharing their hardships and dangers before they realized that we weren't using our Iridium cell phones to alert the Iraqi army high command to the Marines' next move. The physical hardships were constant. Sandstorms, rainstorms - once in southern Iraq there was a rainstorm during a sandstorm - mud, dust, suffocating heat in the day, teeth-chattering cold at night, sleeping on the ground, or in the ground in shallow "fighting holes" that we had to dig ourselves with entrenching tools. In the desert, precious water was for drinking only; like the marines, I went more than a month without a shower. (Because of a packing mix-up, I had to wear the same unwashed underwear for three weeks, until I could rinse it out in a scummy canal on the outskirts of Baghdad; then I wore it another week.) Compared with the constant physical misery, the periodic danger seemed almost like a minor irritant. Although the Iraqi army didn't put up much of a fight, Alpha Company got into two serious scrapes. One was at the dawn of the war, at an oil-pumping station just across the border, where a few die-hard Iraqi soldiers in a speeding truck shot and killed Lieutenant Shane Childers. (Three other marines were wounded by a mine.) The other was deep in Baghdad, where fedayeen fighters with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades blistered the company with thousands of rounds of fire during a running four-hour firefight, killing Gunnery Sergeant Jeff Bohr Jr. and wounding twenty-five Alpha Company marines, half of them superficially. The Baghdad fight was a close enough thing that at one point a marine gave me a hand grenade to throw if the enemy started to overwhelm us. It had been more than thirty years since I'd held a grenade, and I knew that my having it violated written and unwritten rules. Still, it felt comforting in my hand. (I never had occasion to throw it.) The discomforts and dangers of the war were easily dealt with; accurately conveying the reality of it to the readers back home was not. Part of that was unavoidable. The astonishing crudity of young men in wartime - your average marine wouldn't say "I have to go on guard," but rather, "I fucking have to fucking go on fucking guard." It wouldn't fly in a family newspaper; neither would the constant jokes about sex and bodily functions. The result was that the marines sounded much more like choirboys in my stories than they really are. And some things were simply too gruesome to describe in detail. Reporting casualty figures also presented problems. The ground rules for embeds prohibited reporting the names of dead or wounded until their relatives were officially notified, usually within forty-eight hours. It was a sensible rule, but I also knew that back home a large network of First Battalion, Fifth Marines families were following our reports in the paper and on the Internet - and when I reported that the battalion had suffered an unidentified KIA or WIA I knew it could, and did, cause all of them great anxiety. But the biggest problem I faced as an embed with the marine grunts was that I found myself doing what journalists are warned from J-school not to do: I found myself falling in love with my subject. I fell in love with "my" marines. Maybe it's understandable. When you live with the same guys for weeks, sharing their dangers and miseries, learning about their wives and girlfriends, their hopes and dreams, admiring their physical courage and strength, you start to make friends - closer friends in some ways than you'll ever have outside of war. Isolated from everyone else, you start to see your small corner of the world the same way they do. I didn't hide anything. For example, when some of my marines fired up a civilian vehicle that was bearing down on them, killing three unarmed Iraqi men, I reported it - but I didn't lead my story with it, and I was careful to put it in the context of scared young men trying to protect themselves. Or when my marines laughed about how .50-caliber machine gun bullets had torn apart an Iraqi soldier's body, I wrote about it, but in the context of sweet-faced, all-American boys hardened by a war that wasn't of their making. And so on. The point wasn't that I wasn't reporting the truth; the point was that I was reporting the marine grunt truth - which had also become my truth. I'll leave it to others to decide if it was good journalism. But it was easily one of the greatest experiences of my life. And for all the misery and hardship and pain, I was sorry when it was over. © 2003 Columbia Journalism Review at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism |