By ERNESTO LONDOÑO
NOV. 30, 2014
Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, May 2009. CreditMoises Saman for The New York Times
During the eight years I covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I came to see being embedded with American military units as a bit like going on blind dates.
Some were exhilarating and fascinating. Others were mind-numbingly dull. It paid to do legwork upfront, vetting units and missions closely before committing. When things got off to an awkward start, there was no easy way to flee. But sometimes, you’d get lucky.
As the United States winds down its combat mission in Afghanistan this year, the embed program, an arrangement fraught with risk, ethical dilemmas and a fair share of drama, is coming to an end. The Pentagon began embedding journalists with ground units on the eve of the Iraq invasion in 2003, hoping that letting reporters inside the tent would garner more positive coverage of a controversial war. Access to the interesting parts of the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan fluctuated over the next decade, but journalists who learned to work the system always managed to get revelatory stories.
We got unvarnished glimpses into how the wars were being waged, yielding coverage that was by turns raw, disturbing and heartbreaking. This program also helped reporters produce nuanced portraits of the men and women in the armed forces — an insular and often-misunderstood part of the population. Much of the coverage was critical, but, over all, officials at the Pentagon feel it served them well.
“If we hadn’t done it in these very complicated missions, we would have been in far worse shape,” the Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John Kirby, said. “We learned a lot from critical coverage. There were times when reporters saw things in the field that headquarters didn’t know about.”
Being critical comes easily to most journalists. But in austere and dangerous places, we depended on the military for transportation, food, shelter and safety. That dependency at times created a sense of indebtedness that was hard to shake off when it came time to write. It was often tempting to see the war mainly through what the soldiers were experiencing, particularly in areas where it was too dangerous to go out alone to report a story.
“I think for many news organizations, especially television, it became the only narrative,” said Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, who spent years working in Iraq for The Associated Press and later NPR, her current employer. “I think it was only very experienced journalists who really knew how to navigate the us-versus-them question. I remember being shot at when I was with the U.S. military and just thinking: kill them, kill them.”
On embeds, there were plenty of compelling scenes of combat. In my experience, though, the biggest payoff was gauging the morale of troops and getting a sense of how they thought the mission was going. While some were wary of speaking to reporters, there was no shortage of grunts willing to speak critically and skeptically, casting doubt on the official line.
Commanders often pushed back aggressively against coverage that conflicted with the narrative they wanted to present. At times, military officers saw us as an unmanageable curse when events were so chaotic or violent that portraying any sense of progress was impossible.
As Ms. Garcia-Navarro recounts, during one mission in Baghdad in 2007, the infantry unit she was with became so overwhelmed by the number of casualties it suffered one day that the unit’s public affairs officers panicked and stuck her in a broom closet for nearly a day to prevent her from reporting. In May 2009, I spent a few nights with a unit in Sadr City, a Shiite area of Baghdad that had seen some of the worst fighting of the war. I wrote an article about the anxiety of American soldiers and Iraqi troops facing a June 30 deadline the Baghdad government had set to get foreign troops out of the cities. The public affairs team responsible for units in Baghdad was wary of me, but the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Timothy Karcher, a brainy leader known for his sense of humor, decided to give me the benefit of the doubt — and free rein.
I wrote about the anxiety some Iraqis in Sadr City felt about the imminent closure of American bases in urban areas and quoted Iraqi and American officers who feared security would deteriorate. Some military officials in Baghdad were not pleased.
I never heard from Lt. Col. Karcher, who has since been promoted to colonel, and worried that he might have felt I abused his openness. Weeks later, I was covering a boisterous celebration in a Baghdad park with fireworks crackling as the sun set to mark the nominal withdrawal of American troops from the cities. In an instant, my mood changed when I received an email from a colleague telling me that Colonel Karcher’s legs had been blown off by a roadside bomb. He was fighting for his life.
I never doubted that I had written a fair and accurate story. But for years, I was haunted by the thought that it might have upset him during his last days in Sadr City. I closely followed a blog his wife wrote documenting his recovery but did not reach out to him. Earlier this year, however, I did, after noticing he had been copied on an email from a mutual friend.
His response was comforting. “For a long time, I’ve wanted to tell you how much I appreciated that short time that we shared back in 2009,” he wrote, adding that he had come to see journalists who reported dutifully as “good guys.” He concluded by saying: “You help us (the military) to ensure that we remain the good guys also.”
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