Back From the TV Front

Monitored and cleared by Los Angeles Times censors.

It was weeks and weeks of grueling, frustrating, chilling, exhausting, sacrificing, menacing, aching, jolting, confusing, penetrating, brutalizing, maddening, eye-opening, ear-splitting, mind-boggling, life-changing service on behalf of the people.

Having to kick butt from inside a vast alien desert whose inhabitants behaved weirdly was an awesome, terrifying experience I’ll never be able to forget, no matter how I try. It was ugly out there. But that’s over, fortunately. Now, I’m back. Yes, finally back from the front.

The front of the paper.

I had been assigned to write a daily column about television’s reporting of the Persian Gulf hostilities that would be part of the paper’s regular war coverage.

Yes, somewhere out among stories of combat, of Scuds and Patriots, of political maneuvering, of military strategy, would be a profound analysis titled “TV and the Gulf War,” written by someone who had just polished off a snappy little piece on NBC’s vampire series “Dark Shadows.”

And you think CNN’s Peter Arnett has had it tough.

I started out doing seven columns a week, but then as Rick Du Brow began chipping in, cut back to six and finally a still-punishing five. The job was so consuming that my wife mounted a yellow ribbon on our bed, and when Dan Rather delivered a military salute on camera to U.S. troops at the start of the war, I knew Major Dan was saluting me, too.

My assignment required simultaneous watching of four sets (tuned mostly to CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC) virtually nonstop in my office at home. I lived there, ate there, did everything there.

Well, almost everything. During occasional visits to the bathroom, I kept in touch with the gulf by bringing along one of those little pocket TVs that reduces life to a few inches. It was on this miniscreen that I watched surrendering Iraqi soldiers chant “George Bush! George Bush!”

TV’s images--and especially its war analysts--were burned into my brain, so much so that I was certain that the nation’s think tanks had transferred en masse to the nation’s TV studios.

Who were some of these people? Rarely have so many said so much that meant so little. I’d bet that 80% of what they told America on TV proved mistaken, and even now, for example, the mere thought of arrogant, condescending Edward Luttwak forcefully arguing one of his erroneous positions gives me the sweats.

Sprinkled among the coverage were some commercials that I began to find profoundly offensive, among them a spot for Kellogg’s Bran Flakes that I would loved to have blasted with a Patriot. This is the one where a guy is in a supermarket checkout line when the smug young thing standing behind him makes a crack about the Bran Flakes in his cart.

“Who’s that for, your father?” she asks, smirking sarcastically.

Now the guy is truly embarrassed. He runs through his mind all the wonderful reasons for buying this cereal, only to ultimately cop out. “Yep, yep, they’re for Dad,” he replies. The woman’s laugh indicates her pleasure. Now that she knows he’s hip and doesn’t eat a square cereal, maybe she’ll even date him.

Although the commercial is meant to sell the bran flakes, the social message in its premise is obnoxious--that it’s not enough to live in the right house, drive the right car, wear the right clothes and know the right people. Now--in the shadow of a war that should have put such nonsense in proper perspective--it’s also your breakfast cereal that determines your image?

Perhaps I reacted so strongly to this imagery because I was myself in an advanced state of shabbiness that even the hippest of cereals could not have remedied.

I not only went unshaved most of the time, but also unshowered, fearful that taking time for personal hygiene might remove me from my TV world at a crucial time. So grungy did I become that there were times when the war on TV seemed far less violent and arresting than the furious clash of fungi battling for space on my mildewing body.

On one occasion when I had to answer the front door to sign for a package, the delivery woman winced at me as if confronting a decaying corpse. “I’m doing war coverage,” I explained. “Sure,” she said, backing away.

It was no wonder that I had the following recurring dream:

The war was over, and like John Wayne returning from Iwo Jima, I emerged triumphant from my office, a hero opening the door and expecting an emotional embrace from his thrilled wife, only to find her standing there wearing a gas mask to guard against the distinctive aromas.

I had another recurring nightmare that was even more terrifying:

Unable to write another column because of show shock, I took to my bed, tearful and trembling beneath the covers. Suddenly, the door to the bedroom was thrown open and in strode the editor of the paper, who immediately began slapping me around the way Patton did a shell-shocked GI in World War II.

Some of the time the experience only seemed like a bad dream.

When my wife told my aunt that I was being dispatched to the front of the paper, the woman really did think I had gone to the desert and began telling her friends I was covering the war. Even after I called her and explained that I was still covering TV, she never got it quite right. “Be careful anyway,” she said.

I followed Auntie’s advice, keeping my distance from the screen during Scud attacks and taking every precaution while venturing with TV into the mind of Saddam Hussein. However, it got a little dicey inside the mind of Tom Brokaw.

Meanwhile, the phone rang incessantly, many of the callers being radio and TV people requesting interviews, not because of anything I was writing, but because word had gotten around that a media freak of sorts had surfaced, that somewhere in Los Angeles lived. . . .

The Man Watching Four TV Sets.

My wife kept my ego in check, each morning delivering a verdict on my column ranging from occasional extreme praise to the more frequent “very nice,” her euphemism for a coarse word describing waste matter passed from the large intestine.

Just the same, I continued to persevere, committing the experience to memory, knowing that someday I would be able to pass on to future generations the painful lesson that I had learned during this trying period in our nation’s history.

Covering war coverage is hell.