Creaking Toward Iraq

I went to Iraq to report on the U.S. Marines because the American press has always followed American troops into war. If the press doesn’t send reporters along when our nation’s sons and daughters are sent into harm’s way, then just what is our reason for being in business?

I went to Iraq because I felt that Sept. 11 was a full mobilization call for Americans of all skills. Mine is hooking nouns and verbs. I went to New York two days after the terrorist attack and then with the Marines into Afghanistan. Those were Acts 1 and 2. Iraq was Act 3.

I became an “embedded” reporter with the 1st Marine Division because it was a privilege and a gold mine of a journalistic opportunity. If my sons--ages 12 and 16--were Marines or soldiers or airmen or sailors, I would want reporters to report the good and the bad, the wisdom and the folly, the successes and the failures of their mission. I went to Iraq for all the parents with sons and daughters in 1MarDiv.

I think America works best when the press--with all its fallibility and imperfection--is fully engaged in the action of public events.

These are the reasons I give when I’m asked why I volunteered to go to Iraq. The reasons are true ones and I’ve given them substantial thought. But there is also a private reason, which is equally true.

I went because I am 56 and did not want to concede to myself or others that--after 32 years as a journalist--I was too old to tackle an assignment at the center of what promised to be the world’s biggest news story for months.

The news business favors the young. They’re more energetic, less jaded, more eager to please their bosses. Also, they can be paid less, a not inconsiderable factor in these tight-budget days.

Reach a certain age, particularly if you are “still” a reporter and not an editor, and some younger reporters start to treat you as a fossil. Two years ago I had one of those experiences that leaves you staring at the mirror and wondering where the years have gone. I was assigned to work for several days alongside a young colleague whom I had known only by telephone. “You’re much older than I thought,” said the colleague with no trace of guile or effort to wound. I made a lame joke about having purchased a young voice to fool people on the telephone. I also made a secret vow to arrive earlier, stay later and work harder than this colleague. Much older, indeed!

Later I relayed the exchange to my wife as I complained about younger reporters and their lack of regard for their more seasoned colleagues. She understood but was decidedly unsympathetic. She noted that she and I were similarly dismissive of older staff members when we were reporters at a suburban newspaper in the late 1970s.

As part of the run-up to the war with Iraq, the Department of Defense put on boot camps at Quantico, Va., and Ft. Benning, Ga., where reporters spent a week learning the ways of the military. Editors suggested I attend. I demurred.

I figured I knew a bit about military culture from covering the Navy and Marine Corps in San Diego and from accompanying the Marines into Afghanistan. I also figured the military would engage in some subtle but unnecessary hazing.

But I kept to myself the main reason for avoiding the camps: I was worried that a sprained ankle or shin splint or other injury might keep me from being assigned to cover the war. News coverage of the camps confirmed my concern. Reporters seemed to delight in zeroing in on older participants. One story had a tone of incredulity that reporters as old as 53 were in attendance. Imagine, 53 years old and not dead yet! I remember seeing a picture of a reporter 15 years my junior sprawled out beneath a tree after a strenuous hike with a full pack. I felt I had dodged a bullet.

As hundreds of journalists flocked to Kuwait for embedding, only a handful were my age or older. Once I joined with the headquarters battalion of the 1st Marine Division, based in Camp Pendleton, I discovered that I was four years older than the commanding general.

“Good morning, general,” I said one sunny Iraqi morning.

“Good morning, young man,” he replied.

Young man. I liked that. I guess that part of being a general is knowing how to motivate.

In truth, age was an inescapable issue every day of my six weeks with the Marines, but not in the way I had expected. The physical demands were far less than I anticipated. The Army officers in charge of the embedding process had vastly overestimated its difficulty.

My knees ached on occasion from constantly jumping into and out of Humvees and 7-ton trucks; my lower back expressed displeasure at sleeping on the ground. But it was nothing that some rest couldn’t ease. Also, I discovered that adrenaline is a wonderful thing. It can mask pain and exhaustion until the body is more prepared to take the hit. In my case, I was fine until I returned home in late April, and then I slept for a week.

The age issue had to do with the difference between my perception of the world and that of the young Marines.

Sometimes that difference was almost comic. At the suggestion of an editor, I bought a CD player and some CDs in Kuwait City. I went off to war with Neil Diamond, the Righteous Brothers, Joe Cocker, the musical “Oklahoma,” and Foreigner. The young Marines took one look at my music collection and decided I was from a land far away and long ago, although one corporal did allow that he thought his mother may have liked Neil Diamond.

On the morning that the 1st Marine Division moved across the Line of Departure into Iraq, I gathered comments from the Marines as they hurriedly packed their bags. “Sleep, hot chow, showers, the Jedi craves these things not, I’m ready to go,” said a 20-something sergeant. I doubt Ernie Pyle ever collected a quote like that.

I met a corporal--a graduate of the California public school system--who had never heard of Winston Churchill. He had heard of World War II but was unclear whether the British had been involved. He did have some rather strong and colorfully expressed antipathy toward the French, based on overhearing officers talk about the French government’s lack of support for the American position vis-a-vis Saddam Hussein.

On other occasions I was stunned by the earnestness, the purity of thought of the young Marines. You get to a certain age and you forget that not everyone is coated with cynicism and ironic detachment.

I remember talking to a 19-year-old six months out of high school in Oregon. We were standing in a particularly desolate part of the Kuwaiti desert amid a wicked sandstorm. I asked if it bothered him that his buddies were back home having a good time, going to the beach, chasing girls, staying out late, not worrying about catching a bullet or pleasing some maniac gunnery sergeant.

“Nope,” he said. “They’re just enjoying the freedom that I provide.”

Later I became a kind of unofficial camp counselor for Marines in the throes of Dear John trauma. A Marine from the Midwest told me that his longtime girlfriend had dumped him a month after he arrived “in-country.” He had since decided that he was deeply in love with another girl back home whom he had never dated. He was on the verge of asking her to marry him despite his parents’ misgivings.

He asked my advice.

I suggested he might want to go slow on making lifetime commitments while in a war zone. And I added that sometimes parents have wisdom worth taking seriously. He was polite but gave me a look that said: “How can you possibly know what it’s like to be young and in love?”

In Baghdad, I listened as a corporal from California read aloud a letter from his beloved. When he got to a slightly X-rated part, he dropped his voice so that his buddies could hear but I, on the edge of the group, might not. I never figured out why. Did he think I had never heard such language or known a young woman to express libidinous sentiments?

But youthful immaturity had a much more ominous downside. These, after all, were Marines, not Boy Scouts, and they were given life-and-death responsibilities. One day my lovesick swain from the Midwest instigated a friendly fire incident when he shot at an unidentifiable noise several hundred yards away. The noise in the bush started firing back, and suddenly Marines were shooting at Marines. One was wounded, and it was a miracle that someone wasn’t killed.

Sometimes I am asked when I was the most scared in Iraq. The answer is easy: during a lights-off, dark-of-the-moon convoy in the back seat of a cramped Humvee driven by a young Marine reservist severely lacking in common sense. Twice within 30 minutes the Humvee came within inches of a head-on collision at 50 mph; it was 3 a.m. and I was convinced I would not live to see the dawn. I am not surprised at the fatality toll among U.S. troops from vehicle accidents.

For all of their physical fitness and faux toughness, I found the young Marines vulnerable to the notion that the American public might not support the war. I got three questions repeatedly: Are you a volunteer or were you ordered here? Are you making more money for being here? (No.) Does the American public support the war? I cited polls showing 73% support.

Maybe they had grown up with tales real or apocryphal of public hostility that awaited returning Vietnam veterans. Maybe their sense of unity wasn’t as strong as they pretended. Maybe their letters from home weren’t as supportive as they had hoped. Maybe they were concerned about someday having to make a decision about not just the tactical smartness of a military mission but the morality of it--the kind of decision posed for young men of my generation during the Vietnam War.

The Marine Corps likes a quotation from “Henry V”: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/For he today that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother.” It’s a marvelous quotation and ran through my head continually on the road to Baghdad and Tikrit. (I was on the verge of writing a doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare in 1971 when the lure of journalism got me; sometimes I have flashbacks.)

There is an earlier, less famous passage from “Henry V” that is more troubling to those engaged in the profession of arms. It suggests that a soldier’s duty to follow orders does not absolve him of higher responsibilities to act morally. The young king walks in disguise among his troops and one of his soldiers questions the morality of the impending battle. The soldier suggests that since his duty is to obey the king, he cannot be held responsible if the war is of dubious morality. Henry cuts him short: “Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.”

I concluded one night in Baghdad that for all the challenges and hardships that lay before these Marines, they were, for the foreseeable future, lucky. The home-front debate over Iraq was on tactical grounds, not moral ones.

These, however, were intellectually ethereal issues and there were more concrete things ahead. After the fall of Baghdad, I was stuffed into a Humvee for a harrowing all-night ride to Tikrit, the ancestral home of Saddam Hussein, the stronghold of the Baath Party.

On the third night there, I was invited to one of the despot’s palaces that was serving as a Marine Corps headquarters. The Iraqis are barbecue devotees, and the palace had a barbecue pit and a large outdoor patio on a hilltop overlooking a bend in the Tigris River. A pair of free-ranging gazelles had been brought down, and two dozen Marines--mostly corporals and sergeants--were feasting.

It was my first meal in weeks that did not come preprocessed in a plastic container. An officer I had come to know introduced me to the group and said some things about my coverage having been fair and accurate. I returned the compliment by telling the group that I was proud to have been a witness to what the Marines had accomplished and that I agreed with the commanding general that they had done something noble, risking their lives to give the people of Iraq a chance for a better life.

The young warriors responded with a Marine cheer of approval and acceptance. Suddenly the generation gap didn’t seem all that wide.