Smart Missiles, Dumb Media : MARTYRS’ DAY: Chronicle of a Small War, <i> By Michael Kelly (Random House: $23; 351 pp.)</i>

It can’t be long now before some grammatical tribunal rules that use of “the media” as a singular noun (as in “the media was against us”) has ceased to be a solecism and become a simple statement of fact. Most people who aren’t journalists tend to think of the media as a cloven-hoofed beast with a single interest, a single point of view and a single bad prose style--an opinion largely justified by the way journalists now cover great political events like wars and presidential campaigns.

“By the press bus” often would be a more accurate byline than the conventional “By John Q. Reporter.” Never was this more dismally true than in the day-to-day reporting of the Gulf War, when the military echoes in the term “press corps” became deafening as the Pentagon sent its journalistic brigades into action and the Iraqi Ministry of Information fielded its ragged platoon. The war of the smart missiles was a war of dumb video cameras and even dumber laptops.

During that time, readers of the New Republic and the Boston Globe could turn for relief from the martial Muzak of CNN to the genuinely singular dispatches of Michael Kelly, who sometimes appeared to be the only American journalist in the Middle East with a voice and a pair of eyes of his own. As a stringer, Kelly enjoyed the “certain shabby independence” which Samuel Johnson held to be the redeeming privilege of the free-lance; as a stylist, he brought to the war a kind of icy lyricism.

He wrote beautifully about terrible things. He was a great noticer of details that other journalists missed, and he saw that the journalists and their activities were an essential part of the story. He got into trouble and had adventures. Kelly in the Gulf was heir to Stephen Crane in Greece, Evelyn Waugh in Abyssinia and Hemingway in Spain: His New Republic pieces were biting reminders of the necessity of the first person.

“Martyrs’ Day” is three good books condensed into one. It is--against the odds--an unquenchably happy travel book about the Middle East, full of sights and smells and chance encounters, with a chipper rolling stone for a hero. It is a finely pitched narrative of the war, told from a succession of different viewpoints as Kelly samples and circles the hostilities, going from Baghdad to Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Kurdistan before returning to Iraq after the war’s end. It is also a book about journalists, a true-life “Scoop,” in which the author is not afraid to cut himself with his own razor.

In January, 1990, when the hacks of the world gathered in the Al Rashid Hotel to wait for the beginning of the story, a French photographer busied himself taking portraits of his colleagues, anticipating that good money was soon to be made out of the sale of pictures of famous journalists, to go over their obituaries. On the first night of the bombing, journalists (Peter leaning out the window with a mike, Bernie under the table on hands and knees) were the news, and there was an eerie sense in which the Allied attack was itself a network spectacular--a horror show designed to give the creepy-crawlies to a single mustached viewer in his underground command bunker. The networks were in close touch with the Pentagon; 90 minutes before the show began, CBS correspondents in the hotel received a coded message from their New York headquarters, “Your wife is fine, but your children have developed a cold,” which sounds so like A Message In Code that one wonders if it, too, was really intended to reach the ears of Iraq’s chief couch potato.

When the bombing started, Kelly was getting gently drunk with a bright young Englishman from the London Times, with whom he stood admiring the brilliant firework patterns in the Baghdad sky: “The tracer rounds made lines of incandescent beauty, lovely arcing curves and slow S’s and parabolas of light.” The studied aestheticism is a Kelly hallmark. It is his interesting way of being hard-boiled. While other reporters pull out the stops on the shock and the horror, Kelly is usually to be found elsewhere on the battlefield, whittling nonchalantly on a simile. Never one to toe the party line, he is at pains to remind the reader that he smokes cigarettes--which in 1993 is tantamount to talking about your drooling problem. Both the similes and the cigarettes are emblems of his detachment from the press corps, whose members he regards with a mixture of comradely affection and exasperated amusement.

The bombing of Baghdad was a one-night story. By next afternoon, after everyone had filed his piece on the destruction of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, the journalists were desperate to get out of town before dark, and the price of a cab ride to the Jordanian border rocketed to $3,000 (a fit of tantrums thrown by Spanish television put it up to $5,000). Kelly’s regular driver, a retired army officer named Adnan who spends a good deal of the first few chapters of “Martyrs’ Day” bemoaning the fact that he will never be able to marry off his son since he lacks the wherewithal to pay the bride-price, finds himself suddenly, improbably in the money. At the end of the nightmare ride to the border (one brilliant sequence among many in the book), Adnan is in tears. There will be a wedding after all, courtesy of the media.

In Amman a few days later, Kelly finds someone else in the money--Fouad Afghani, owner of a shop selling tourist souvenirs, who has had the wit to commission lapel buttons depicting Scud missiles raining on Israel (“East or West, SCUD is best,” “Israel is a Cancer and Scud is the answer”), along with watches with pictures of Saddam Hussein on their faces and other memorabilia. His store is full of jostling TV crews, catching the mood of Jordan on film, and nearly all his customers are journalists, whose demand has created this inexpensive and easily accessible supply of local color. The uglier the button’s message, the stronger the story, and so the mood of Jordan grows uglier as Fouad Afghani gets the hang of prospering in this business. I cannot think of a more compact and telling example of the sickly co-dependency that so often exists between journalism and the world it pretends to report.

Yet Fouad Afghani’s little private-sector news factory looks innocent when set beside the Pentagon’s media production line in Dharhan, Saudi Arabia, where CENTCOM, the pool system, was based in the International Hotel. The deal was ruthless: Trading access to the troops in exchange for tight control over the journalists, their movements and their language, the Pentagon took hold of the reigns of narrative and told its own story of the war. Scripts and articles by accredited reporters, duly processed by CENTCOM, were officially known as “pool products,” as if they were algae filters or chlorine crystals. So numerous flights of military wishful thinking came to be filed as accomplished facts.

Fleeing CENTCOM, Kelly and a friend from the Baltimore Sun rented a four-wheel-drive Nissan, dressed it up as a military vehicle, and struck out on a free-lance course through the desert, in pursuit of the fast-receding ground war. In a scene worthy of Evelyn Waugh, the two reporters reluctantly accepted the surrender of 10 frightened Iraqi soldiers, whom they handed over to an excited Saudi army unit, which then gallantly captured the Iraqis with terrifying screams and gunplay.

The mood of “Martyrs’ Day” darkens as it enters Kuwait City, the world capital, for a week, of the notebook and camera, a city of stories. Wherever there were journalists, lines of storytellers formed. In the press hotel, a “media advisory” was posted in the lobby: “If Tortured Families Are Desired, Please Contact the Kuwaiti Information Press Office.” One recoils with nausea from the tales of Iraqi atrocities--of people’s eyeballs wrenched from their sockets before they were killed, of torture with car batteries, ropes and belt buckles. Yet interleaved with these stories are others--tales of heroism and derring-do in the Kuwaiti resistance--that have the ring of obvious fabrications. In storyland, there is always a false floor to what seems to be reality, and fact slides seamlessly into fiction. Kelly keeps his footing by moving through Kuwait City with the imaginative guile of a novelist, planting himself in other people’s shoes and trying to look out through their eyes.

The climax and the triumph of the book is Kelly’s description of driving north from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border along the highway where retreating Iraqi troops were strafed and bombed by the Allies --a trail of wrecked Jeeps and trucks, each with a cargo of putrid corpses. He was not alone on this expedition, for the road had become a favorite resort of gloating carloads of Kuwaitis, and Kelly found himself following a pair of fat businessmen in a Mercedes, whose sport it was to stop at each wrecked vehicle in order for one businessman to spit in what was left of the faces of the occupants, while the other businessman filmed the proceedings with a Sony Camcorder. In this ghoulish parody of journalism, Kuwaiti pride was being avenged, and another story made, a story that (one imagines) is still regularly played to an appreciative audience in the divan.

Meanwhile Kelly, with a pencil, not a camcorder, was making his own record:

“The dead man’s face was green. Not mildly green, like seawater, but a strong rich green, with some yellow in it, the color of a not completely ripe lime. . . . Wherever gravity tugged at his flesh, it drooped and sagged alarmingly, like wax warmed by a candle.”

And so Kelly moves north up the highway, describing corpse after corpse with the kind of slowed-down, rapt attention that writers usually bestow only on the features of their lovers. He is an epicure of the colors and textures of death. The “butterflied” body of a boy blown apart by a bomb has “innards cooked into hard ebony coils and curves.” Across each of these precise portraits, disgusting and beautiful in equal parts, fall the corpulent shadows of the two businessmen and their Sony Camcorder--as the media, print and video, dog each other’s steps through a landscape closely resembling that of hell. This is not an image--or a book--that will fade easily.