It is a paradox of war that some people who have lived through its
slaughter and madness never lose the itch to go back and live through it
again. Some soldiers feel the pull, lured by memories of the intense
bonding. Medical professionals and relief workers feel it too, still
carrying the images of the wounded they saved—and lost. And some
reporters also have the craving because war is life's most primal story.
I, for one, still hear the siren call.
One modifying remark: Most people who have survived war have little or no
or minus desire to relive the experience. Second, I really can speak only
about reporters, for it's the only skin I have.
Why have I chosen to write about this phenomenon of attraction to war? We
journalists so rarely explain ourselves to our audience—perhaps in fear
of letting you see, heaven forfend, our fallibility—that a gulf has
widened between us and the public. I thought a little self-examination
might help people better understand what they'll be seeing and reading in
the days of war ahead.
First—though you probably already know this—a lot of the people reporting
on the war have no firsthand experience with it, especially those working
from air-conditioned television studios an ocean and continent away from
the fighting. Probably they should begin their reports with some kind of
ignorance acknowledgment, but no matter, they are harmless if you hit the
mute button. Reporters in the war zones are, for the most part, quite
different. Some are new at it, as we all were, but they won't be innocent
for long. War vastly speeds up the initiation process. Clears the mind of
flotsam too. Journalists are already among the allied casualties.
My own initiation happened in Laos in 1970. The Laotian government flew a
small foreign press group by helicopter to a tiny, half-abandoned town
with dirt streets that was essentially encircled by the Communist Pathet
Lao. After touring the town we returned to the makeshift airstrip to fly
back to Vientiane. Several townspeople were waiting there, hoping to
escape with us. As the chopper revved up, they rushed for it. I was
blithely standing off, taking pictures of the scene. Then a puff of dirt
and smoke suddenly kicked up 50 yards to the left of the chopper. I kept
clicking. Another puff went up 50 yards to the right of it. I realized my
colleagues were screaming at me. I ran hard and jumped on with the
aircraft two feet off the ground. I learned that day about the military
art of "bracketing" a target. The two "puffs" were
aiming rounds fired from mortars in the surrounding hills; the next one
presumably would have landed in the middle—on the helicopter.
I learned two other things that day as well. One was that not all people,
including journalists, behave well under stress. As I was dashing toward
the helicopter, an aged and wispy Laotian woman was struggling to climb
on. A reporter already on board kicked out with his combat boots and
tried to dislodge her. Others lifted her aboard. She clutched my hand
through the entire flight, and when we set down in Vientiane, she knelt
and kissed the tarmac. The rest of us never discussed the incident with
the reporter in combat boots.
The day's other lesson was the adrenaline rush that comes after you
emerge alive from an incident that could just as easily have killed you.
After this happens to you a few times, subconscious notions of
immortality may begin to rattle around in your psyche.
Beyond the adrenaline high that fuels this news-gathering drive, there
are other motivations, such as career advancement and the urge to beat
the competition to a story or at least out-report them. After all, if a
conflict involves American troops or interests, rightly or wrongly that
war will likely be the biggest story around, since the United States is
now the world's dominant nation. All these factors—narcissistic and
self-referential as they are—help explain the draw that war can be.
I always know when the itch is at peak levels because, even when I'm in
denial about it, my phone will ring and an old colleague with the fever
will be on the other end. It began happening early last week, as the
attack on Iraq approached. Norman Lloyd, the best combat cameraman I've
ever known, needed to talk—just as I did. We tiptoed slowly up to the
subject, which was how we felt not being there. Disoriented, we agreed.
More than a little irrelevant. So far away from the scene of the story.
Norman is still covering stories, for CBS's 60 Minutes. But not combat.
"I know I could go if I wanted to," he said, "but
then"—here he broke into laughter—"then I think about my knees
and whether they could still handle jumping down from tanks."
Friday afternoon in the Voice office, as I was writing this piece, people
gathered around a television set to watch the opening air blitzkrieg of
Baghdad—a mesmerizing, death-delivering son et lumière spectacle. All of
this came to us live and in color, with a little box at the bottom of the
screen flashing the latest stock figures from Wall Street. The figures
seemed to rise with each explosion and plume of flame.
So why the reporter's urge to be near that carnage? I can only tell you
that after a reporter has tasted the war experience and acknowledged to
himself that many of the reasons he gets gratification from it are
narcissistic, he may still discover deeper reasons for keeping at it.
This may sound corny, even naive, but a reporter can come honestly to
believe in the importance of delivering the full face of war—families
decimated, bent refugees walking in endless streams, children orphaned,
uplifting acts of honor and friendship, unspeakable acts of cruelty and
depravity, bravery, betrayal, human lives saved by Samaritans, human
beings lying in pieces from explosive projectiles. People should have to
look upon all of that.
If ours is truly a democracy, the people should be told and shown—even if
they wish to turn their eyes away—exactly what is being waged in their
name. No sugarcoating. No sanitizing. Just a faithful picture of the wild
convulsion that is war.
So far, the Pentagon's about-face decision this time to allow journalists
to accompany battle units is a vast improvement over the sequestered and
censored conditions of the first Gulf War in 1991. America is seeing war
almost in the raw, and while the pictures and words are often unsettling,
they may be helpful—in the new world of scariness—to our coming-of-age.
http://villagevoice.com/issues/0313/schanberg.php
NOTED: Last week's third most-watched basic cable channel was
Nickelodeon, helped by a two-hour block of "SpongeBob
SquarePants."
