Military Still Wants to Manage the News

Tom Hayden is one of those people you never forget.

That is, Tom Hayden the tough-talking lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton, not the California assemblyman who used to be married to film star Jane Fonda.

“I was south and she was north,” he offers with a clear note of contempt for the woman who demonstrated her opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War by visiting North Vietnam.

Hayden was facing the press on an August morning, shortly after the crisis in the Persian Gulf began. And, like the military men who controlled information during the Vietnam War, he had firm ideas about what he wanted the press to carry away from this encounter and what he did not want them to know.

He did want the press to believe that the American soldier was ready to withstand the horrors of chemical warfare.

But he was not pleased with the skeptical questions that arose from the gaggle of reporters invited there for a demonstration of equipment designed to protect against chemical weapons.

Iraq was threatening to employ its estimated 2,000 to 4,000 tons of material in its poison gas arsenal. The chemical weapons, mostly made up of mustard gas which causes blisters and burns the lungs, were used by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the war with Iran against Iranian targets and his own citizenry.

Although American troops have trained in desert-like conditions, military officials said they believed the protective equipment to guard against a chemical attack has never been used by U.S. forces in combat. The news media had asked to see how the equipment worked and Lt. Col. Hayden appeared eager to demonstrate that if called on to fight a war, the troops would be ready.

“If the enemy thinks he can drop that stuff on us and not suffer the consequences, he’s out of his mind,” Hayden said, minimizing the likelihood the chemical weapons would be used. “I think the people we would go up against are well aware of the retaliation capability of the United States.”

Reporters had just witnessed a Marine demonstrate, step by step, how to don the charcoal-lined clothing, a protective hood equipped with an air filter, and rubber boots and gloves. In order to protect against the chemicals, no skin could be exposed.

But since the start of the crisis, numerous news reports had pointed out the 110-degree-plus desert heat in the Middle East.

The fair-skinned Marine was in the full gear for only a few minutes. But as he removed the hood, his face was turning red, and beads of sweat had formed on his forehead. He was standing on the California coastline in weather dozens of degrees lower than what he might encounter in the Saudi Arabian desert.

How long could the troops stay in those heavy suits in that heat? What if an attack lasted longer than just a few minutes?

Those were questions Hayden did not want asked.

“You put that in the paper or whatever you are writing for,” he sternly scolded me, “you are going to do a disservice to the people who have to wear them. You are going to let the enemy know how long it will be before he is in discomfort.”

My observations were included in my report the following day.

Having come from San Antonio, where five military installations help make the defense industry the city’s largest employer, I was accustomed to military personnel being touchy about having news reporters on their bases, even during peacetime.

And with the threat of war in the Middle East, I expected strict limits on what we would be able to see and photograph. I did not expect to be warned by Hayden that my report would be helping the enemy.

Later, I remembered his comment about Fonda and Vietnam.

For the first time in American history, citizens watched that war from their living rooms as nightly television newscasts chronicled the number of U.S. servicemen killed each day.

And as citizens became more cynical about U.S. involvement in the undeclared war, the military intentionally distorted or kept secret information that would have shown just how badly America was losing the war.

Perhaps if the American public, through the news media, had been dealt with more openly early on and been given a more accurate portrayal of the war, then maybe Vietnam would not have become a long, embarrassing nightmare for the U.S. government.

And maybe, if citizens could be told how unbearable those anti-chemical suits are in the scorching heat, then maybe their expectations of a successful campaign in the Persian Gulf would be more realistic.

A few weeks after my first visit to Camp Pendleton, several newspapers across the country carried a photograph of a Marine dressed in desert camouflage fatigues, suffering from heat exhaustion and being carried off by a buddy.

The picture was taken by a friend who was reporting on the conflict from Saudi Arabia.

I wondered if my friend, a former Marine, thought he was helping the enemy when he took the photograph.