Media : Reporters Wage Their Own Battles in the Gulf : With the military watching their every word and move, it’s tough to rise above the fray.

Colin Nickerson of the Boston Globe is traveling light, writing his front-line dispatches by hand on a legal pad. At the bottom of one, he scrawls a postscript to a colleague here in Dhahran.

Robby: If you can find time between Scud attacks, urgently need typewriter, writing pads this size and an Xtra - large sweat shirt. It is bitter cold on these desert sands, and I have no change of clothes except socks. Sleeping on the sand near foxhole. Lots of booms and fighter activity up here and we go closer soon. Be safe. Best Rgds.

The fog lights of the world’s press flicker as scattered dots across this sweeping theater of conflict.

But some war correspondents find the sensation of bringing this fight home in words and pictures like hurtling flat-out down the autobahn, no brakes and unable to see further ahead than the hood ornament.

Exhilarating, yes.

And full of surprises and doubts. Reporters worry about being garroted in their sleep by Iraqi commandos. They watch and wince as missiles fall over their positions. They have nightmares that the stories they struggle to write will be lost or misplaced by the couriers carrying them to headquarters areas for relay to home. They worry whether editors will appreciate their struggles. And perhaps most of all, they wonder if their tiny peepholes on the action are blinding them to bigger stories that need telling.

It’s confining work, too, with military public relations specialists looking over their shoulders to enforce controls on the flow of information, restrictions uncomfortably at odds with the American concept of a free press.

A reporter writes that pilots are “giddy” upon returning from a F-117 Stealth fighter mission. The military changes the dispatch to say that the pilots returned “proud.”

Another correspondent reports that Marines were “ordered” to add more sandbags to their bunkers. His military escort challenges the description and suggests that “asks” might be a better.

Malcolm W. Browne of the New York Times files a dispatch with a note explaining a vain effort to get an earlier report of Stealth fighter action back to press headquarters. “Even after the file was censored here,” he wrote to his colleagues, “it was held up (further) by the Pentagon and never reached Dhahran.”

Because this is war, complaints simmer but do not boil. Wars kill some soldiers and make heroes of others, and sometimes the difference is one’s concentration on the larger task. It’s a little of the same for combat journalists.

The 710 journalists here cannot escape the knowledge that the correspondents who emerged as heroes of the last war were those who peeled back the many layers of military misinformation and miscalculation in Vietnam to report the failures of U.S. efforts.

But that was a story that took years to tell convincingly.

Few if any here think they will have more than weeks or a few months to tell the story of the Persian Gulf War. If it lasts longer, the failure will be self-evident.

The journalism heroes of other wars also ghost through Dhahran.

“My editor told me to write like this,” said a young woman, who flew the 20 hours from America to the battle zone with the last flight into Dhahran. She held a copy of a book by Ernie Pyle, the legendary World War II correspondent who glamorized the drudgery and bravery of the ordinary fighting man. When war erupted, she boarded the plane in the pre-dawn hours with better-known journalists--like ABC’s Sam Donaldson, who brought his own small army to cover the fighting, including someone to patiently hold a flashlight so Donaldson could read his newspaper.

Arriving in the war zone, the problems are pretty much the same for both Donaldson and the young woman.

It’s a matter of access. Powerful officers of the Joint Information Bureau control where reporters can go in the military theater. Which is to say, they control everything.

At the point of a gun, they insist on “pool” coverage, in which small groups of seven journalists are deployed with field units, ships and air units. Their dispatches and film are relayed back to the Dhahran International Hotel, where they become the property of all reporters gathered here to cover the war.

At any given time, fewer than 100 men and women are deployed in the pools, or held back in a quick-response pool to be sent out at the discretion of the military. Each pool is a mix of photographers, writers and broadcasters, heavy on the latter.

“To have 16 print reporters covering a half-million men and women is ludicrous,” says Joe Albright, a reporter for Cox newspapers, who served for a time as coordinator for print pool correspondents.

Yet Albright and many others have not given up entirely on the system, thanks chiefly to their faith and determination to support the correspondents who are living the crusty, dangerous life of soldiers and Marines on the front lines.

“Those reporters are out there because they have been here the longest, they know the country the best and, compared to the crap we’re getting from most of the briefings, the texture and color we’re getting from the pools is the best stuff here,” Albright says.

If you’ve noticed a repetitive echo in the coverage, the pools are the cause.

On a given day, a pool of reporters--print and broadcast--may be taken on a C-130 aerial refueling mission. The next morning in the United States and in Britain and France and Saudia Arabia, newspapers offer accounts of these aircraft, the pilots and load masters who make them fly. That night, the story is broadcast on television and radio.

The next day, something new emerges from another pool and seems to dominate the coverage.

These limitations on the press come at a curious time. Just as the news reporters see their access to stories and the freedom to tell them grow smaller, the profile of the news media is larger than ever before.

Live coverage on CNN has shrunk the world.

One correspondent here in Dhahran, slightly loopy from long hours and an 11-hour time difference with her office back home, dreamed of sleeping through an air raid. She awoke to turn on the television and see a CNN report about the fiery collision of Patriot and Scud missiles in the skies above her hotel. Maybe it was a new missile attack. Or maybe it was one that occurred a few hours earlier. She was groggy and couldn’t tell. Oh, well. She pulled a pillow over her head and tried for a few more minutes of sleep.

Many reporters, particularly writers accustomed to spiking rumors instead of spreading them, have grown testy at the free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness accounts of live television. Some joke about stabbing themselves in the leg with an ink pen--maybe it would have a protective effect, like injecting yourself with the nerve gas antidote atropine, in this case counteracting “an overdose of CNN.”

But no one came thinking this would be easy.

Like everyone else at the front, combat journalists wear dog tags with their blood type and rarely venture far from their gas masks. Those on the front lines and those who are best equipped in the rear also carry chemical protection suits. Some of the others tote plastic Glad bags and rubber gloves as protection if rope-a-dope Saddam Hussein bounces back with a nerve gas attack.

The bushy beards of some reporters have been shaved or trimmed tight for fear they will interfere with how the gas mask seals on their faces.

British journalist Richard Kay wrote a dispatch from the trenches with the famed Desert Rats. He didn’t mind telling of his personal fears. He had no conditioning for this work. “For someone used to a great newspaper office where the lights of industry burn late into the night, life without so much as a candle is an extraordinary experience.”

Kay recalled his first encounter with the brigade commander who “asked if I had thought through what was going to happen.”

“Not to the troops, but to me. He didn’t say it, but he was talking about death. About a 7.62-caliber bullet round that comes out of the dark or a mist of poison chemicals that dusts the ground like a deadly crop spray. . . . And the Iraqi special forces, said to be at large in our area, will surely show no quarter with their piano wire and stealth.”

But for most, the bigger fear for journalists is the fear of failure. That they will miss the critical event of the war. That someone will get into Kuwait city and it won’t be them.

And they also fear for the lives of the men and women they cover.

For all their frustrations about the press controls imposed by the Pentagon and military brass, reporters, particularly the young ones covering their first war, have found themselves drawn close--deeply close--to the military men and women they weren’t sure they would like.

“I didn’t believe it would happen. But these people have become my friends, my soul mates. These are really great people,” said one wire service reporter after a stint at the front.

The comradeship of the foxhole is nothing new in war. But the Pentagon pool system seems to encourage this between reporters and the men and women they cover. The pool groups are small and the shared dangers with the soldiers is large. Their time together is extensive. Several pool journalists say the best stories of the war will come later when the security restrictions come off and they can take Americans into the command bunkers, into the trenches and . . . into Kuwait.

Los Angeles Times reporter Douglas Jehl left his room at the Dhahran International Hotel before the outbreak of war. He left behind his keys, his wallet, his stereo tapes, his briefcase and a supply of tennis balls. The room has been taken over as the newspaper’s central news bureau. Jehl moved to the front with an Army corps, filing stories for the pool and, like hundreds of thousands of soldiers, waiting to move forward.

He slipped far enough back from the front lines the other day to reach a telephone. He called his editor with words of support for loved ones and a request for fresh notebooks and some paper. And, oh, yes, a supply of money.

Jehl’s editor reported: “He said he felt he was going to end up at a place where he might be able to use money.” Finally.