War Reporters Deserve a Salute on Memorial Day

Books have come in from journalists writing about themselves and their craft, from the TV debacle of Election Night 2000 to a career crossing six decades.

You’ll be pleased to know that CNN’s Jeff Greenfield (“Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!”) still wields a potent brain and self-effacing wit, that NPR’s Daniel Schorr (“Staying Tuned”) remains formidable well into his 80s.

Because this is Memorial Day, though, catching my eye is “Rough Cut From a Bygone War,” a work of fiction from Bert Quint, a first-rate foreign correspondent when he worked for CBS News and covered so many hot spots that they nicknamed him “the Fireman.”

Although Memorial Day honors armed forces members, there’s room on this pedestal, too, for reporters covering stories in regions of conflict where they often face extreme danger themselves. Enough have been killed on the job to fill several mass graves, from ABC news correspondent Bill Stewart, who was gunned down by Anastasio Somoza’s troops in Nicaragua in 1979, to Dan Eldon, a young freelance photojournalist stoned to death by an angry mob in Somalia in 1993.

This subject may seem extraterrestrial in Los Angeles, where the only media casualties these days are coming from getting trampled in the stampede to cover the murder of Bonny Lee Bakley.

Yet the romance of combat reporting endures for some of us, however, illogically, death often being an abstraction when you can’t smell it yourself.

While admiring “The Killing Fields” as a film, for example, I also respond, adrenaline pumping, to the peril Sam Waterston faces as New York Times reporter Sydney Shanberg being terrorized in Cambodia by the brutal Khmer Rouge.

Same goes for “Under Fire,” a lesser film with Nick Nolte and Joanna Cassidy as a pair of U.S. journalists fleeing government troops in Somoza-ruled Nicaragua. I always live its thrills vicariously, even after seeing Gene Hackman’s network anchor shot dead almost like Stewart.

Quint put such minefields behind him when leaving CBS News in 1993 at a time when networks were already peeling back news budgets and staffs, both domestically and abroad, leaving day-to-day coverage of foreign stories largely to CNN and sources feeding them footage from afar. Not much has changed today, with networks still ignoring global nuts and bolts but rushing en masse to the Big Story as if summoned by the same trumpet, and suffocating it with coverage before moving on and then forgetting it ever existed.

The resonant voices of Quint’s novel are a cameraman named Camden and a veteran network correspondent named Sloane. Not unlike the former Quint, Sloane is at odds with the corporate values of modern newscasting and still haunted by memories of covering war in Southeast Asia:

“The whimpers of the wounded. The screams as someone’s morphine wore out. The screech of shells that, no matter where they landed, seemed ever closer.”

How wide the gap between reality and a kid’s naive dreams. Whimpers, screams and screeching shells were not on my radar when I decided in my callow youth that being a foreign correspondent was the life for me. Nor was the reality that covering combat could get you killed, as it did the great World War II correspondent, Ernie Pyle. I have vague memories of Burgess Meredith as Pyle in the movie, “The Story of G.I. Joe,” trudging along in uniform with U.S. troops in Italy. Somehow, though, learning later of Pyle’s dying gave way to the glamour of him being there on the screen with Robert Mitchum.

Glamour--that was the ticket. As a kid growing up in the 1950s, one of my favorite TV series was something called “Foreign Intrigue,” which had Jerome Thor as a Stockholm-based correspondent for a U.S. wire service. He covered no wars, but was always at risk while traipsing across snowy Europe after old war criminals and neo-Nazis. Best of all, he wore his trench coat magnificently.

At what point all this morphed for me into Ernest Hemingway, I don’t quite recall. But it was Hemingway, best known as a fiction writer, who also filed news dispatches from the Spanish Civil War and World War II that were later published as part of a collection. Even before Steven Spielberg sent in Tom Hanks to save Pvt. Ryan, Hemingway hit the coast of France on D-Day, June 6, 1944, with some kids from Brooklyn, Orange, N.J., and Saugus, Mass., and wrote about it for Colliers magazine:

“Meantime, the destroyers had run in almost to the beach and were blowing every pillbox out of the ground with their five-inch guns. I saw a piece of German about three feet long with an arm on it sail high up into the air in the fountaining of one shellburst. It reminded me of a scene in “ ‘Petrouchka.’ ”

By the time I read this, I had already been rejected by newspapers and wire services on London’s Fleet Street when hitchhiking through Europe after college, and was a cub reporter in (sob) Moline, Ill. No trench coat or war stories there.

I did get to Israel and the West Bank for The Times briefly in 1988, writing columns about TV coverage of the earlier intifada. But no stones, bullets or bombs came even remotely my way, and I’ve felt more jeopardy in West L.A.

During one of many trips to England for this paper, moreover, I went to Belfast for a piece on a TV station operating there amid great turbulence. Tensions were high in Northern Ireland at the time, and British troops and military checkpoints were highly visible. But bummer. Ripe for action, all I got was a glib station executive talking about syndicated programs he hoped to see at a conference in the U.S. As I left, he handed me a promotional pen.

Not all was lost, though. I did get to wear my trench coat.

Quint’s Sloane isn’t hung up on wardrobe, of course. He’s the real thing. What he, Camden and actual combat reporters experience in their careers doesn’t necessarily make them heroes, but does earn them a bit of the spotlight given others on this Memorial Day.

As Sloane recalls at one point about his tour in Vietnam: “We tidied up as best we could, stuffing bits and pieces of men we had known and loved into body bags.”

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.