thedrifter
02-22-03, 08:01 AM
02-19-2003
Guest Column: Military and Media: Familiarity Breeds Respect
Editor’s Note: From Vietnam to Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. military and American journalists have struggled to balance their sometime competing requirements – protecting operational security vs. ensuring the people’s right to know – while working together in a wartime environment. In this 1996 speech to the U.S. Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., veteran military journalist Joseph L. Galloway spelled out a solution that is still applicable today.
By Joseph L. Galloway
I can think of no place more appropriate than the Air War College to share the following bit of personal data which was left out of the very kind introductory remarks by the general: I want you to know that I have personally been bombed, rocketed, strafed and napalmed by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marines, U.S. Army Aviation and the air forces of sovereign states of South Vietnam, India and Pakistan, and maybe a couple more I don't even remember now.
You will note that I am not an inconsiderable target and yet I am here today, unscathed, unscratched and ready to talk. I hold no grudges; I'm just eternally grateful that in those few instances some guys couldn't shoot worth a s--t. I hasten to add that in literally hundreds of other instances, when the chips were really down, close air support kept me and a lot of other more deserving guys alive.
I was asked to give you my reflections on the military-media relationship. That's awfully high-toned for someone who got his start covering Marine platoons in Vietnam in early 1965, worked his way up to infantry companies and the occasional battalion-size operation and has always felt slightly uncomfortable with anything larger than that. I will confess, right up front, that I am partial to the infantry; always have been. Some might find that puzzling if not perverse; that a civilian reporter, given a choice, would choose the hardest and least glamorous part of any war as the part he wishes to cover.
But there is method in that madness, and I would recommend it to my younger colleagues who may one day be called on to cover war. There, in the mud, is where war is most visible and easiest understood. There no one will lie to you; no one will try to put a spin on the truth. Those for whom death waits around the next bend or across the next rice paddy have no time and little taste for the games that are played with such relish in the rear. No one ever lied to me within the sound of the guns.
There, at the cutting edge of war, you find yourself welcomed and needed – welcomed by the soldier as a token that someone in the outside world cares about him and how he lives and dies; needed for the simple reason that an infantry company or platoon in combat always needs another set of hands to carry ammo or haul water to the wounded or to pick up a rifle when the chips are really down. There you earn the sort of friendship that cannot be acquired in any other field of human endeavor – there you forge bonds that will endure for a lifetime.
A few years ago I shook hands with one such battlefield friend and brother, agreeing on the terms by which we would jointly author a book. The lawyer who was negotiating the deal with the publisher asked to see the contract between us. We explained that there was no written contract; just that handshake. He looked horrified; we looked at him with pity. "You see," my buddy explained, "We have trusted each other with our lives; this is just a little matter of some money."
When I look back at the military/media experience in the [1991] Gulf war it is with sadness for lost opportunities on both sides of the equation. Because of poor planning, paranoia and over-control, the details of a great victory of American arms were virtually lost to history. The crucial Army tank battles took place far from the lens of any camera; the Navy was over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind; and although the Air Force contributed all that nifty smart bomb film the vital human element of the Air Force story was largely missing, and we were left with the false image of a Nintendo War. The only thing the Pentagon had to hide in the Gulf was the finest military force this country has ever put into the field, and it did that very efficiently.
I am here to argue for more openness, more contact, more freedom between your profession and mine. In this one instance, I believe familiarity would breed not contempt but trust and respect. My knowledge of and respect for you was born on the battlefields of Vietnam. That respect was reinforced by my experience in the Gulf, where I was the exception that proved the rule. There were around 1,000 correspondents accredited in the Gulf; 140 were permitted into the combat pools. There was precisely one reporter who went to war with a personal recommendation from Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in his hip pocket, and you're looking at him.
How this came to pass is just another war story. In 1965 in Vietnam, I marched along some bad roads in the Central Highlands with a Vietnamese Airborne battalion and made the acquaintance of a young Army adviser, Maj. Norm Schwarzkopf. The battalion commander who taught Charlie Hastings and me some important lessons in the Ia Drang Valley in November, 1965, was a splendid combat commander named Hal Moore. Long before that, Hal Moore taught infantry tactics to hundreds of young cadets at West Point, including one named Norm Schwarzkopf. He even persuaded young Schwarzkopf to choose the infantry as his branch, against the best advice of his father who warned him that he would be forever giving up any hope of making the rank of general as a mud-foot infantry officer.
I dealt fairly and honestly with both those men, as I have always tried to do with all men, and what goes around comes around. Life may be short but memories are long.
Thanks to that trust, I was sent down to the 24th Mech two weeks before G-Day. On my first night there the Division CG [then-Maj. Gen. Barry McCaffrey] called me to his TOC and pulled the cover off the battle map. What he said, as my eyes followed the arrows and the hair stood up on the back of my neck was this: I trust you because Schwarzkopf trusts you; but more than that, I trust you because you're coming with me. I never heard a more compelling argument for operational security in my life.
During the days before G-Day I visited every brigade and battalion in the division; saw the preparations; checked on the OR rates of the equipment; ate a lot of really bad chow; got lost traveling at night in the desert about fourteen times. Did a lot of listening and looking. And then we rode to battle together. I emerged from that experience with a damned good story of an American armored division at war ... and with something far more important: A whole new crop of comrades-in-arms and friends-for-life. We had trusted each other with our lives.
My regret, and one that I believe is now shared by the more thoughtful military leaders today, is that there was not an experienced team of reporters, photographers and cameramen traveling with every Brigade which crossed the berm into Kuwait and Iraq; stationed with every Air Force squadron which saw action; and on the bridge of every Navy ship offshore. Too much of the war either went uncovered, or the pooled dispatches and film took so long to reach the rear that the war was over and the stories never saw the light of day. More importantly, I think we will all have cause to regret the fact that a new generation of correspondents was not free to accompany a new generation of captains and majors of all the services to war – to learn the ropes, earn the trust and build the bonds that last a lifetime.
Some of you seated here today – the best and brightest of our nation's defenders – are convinced that the press is your enemy. In any similar gathering of reporters there would, no doubt, be some who believe the same thing of you. This is a national tragedy ... and one that each of us has an obligation and a duty to do everything we can to repair and heal. There is more than enough blame and fault to go around, but that is not the point. Somehow my mind keeps going back to what my old friend Hal Moore tried to explain to that lawyer: once we have trusted each other with our lives ... everything else is small change.
Since Vietnam, I've thought long and hard about the relationship between your profession and mine –professions that the founding fathers of this nation thought so important that they included specific definitions of our duties and responsibilities and rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
generation of officers emerged from that searing, bitter, orphaned war looking for someone to blame for the failures manifest in our nation's defeat in Vietnam. Many chose to blame the media: Walter Cronkite lost the war; Dan Rather lost the war; Peter Arnett lost the war. By choosing the easy way out they obviated the painful need to carefully examine the root causes of our failure to win. By placing full blame and responsibility on the press they could avoid delving deeper, peeling to the underlying layers of the onion and exposing the more important failures of political leadership at home and military leadership right down the chain of command from the Joint Chiefs to the commander, U.S. Forces Vietnam and on down to Corps and Division.
How much easier it was to simply shoot the messengers. This red herring was dragged through the 0 Club bars of a thousand posts for a decade and more after the end of the Vietnam War. It became an article of faith for a generation of officers, and that led directly to the over-control and the spin control that allowed the Gulf War to be fought in a near-vacuum. Note that I say near vacuum, because nature abhors a vacuum.
cont
Guest Column: Military and Media: Familiarity Breeds Respect
Editor’s Note: From Vietnam to Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. military and American journalists have struggled to balance their sometime competing requirements – protecting operational security vs. ensuring the people’s right to know – while working together in a wartime environment. In this 1996 speech to the U.S. Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., veteran military journalist Joseph L. Galloway spelled out a solution that is still applicable today.
By Joseph L. Galloway
I can think of no place more appropriate than the Air War College to share the following bit of personal data which was left out of the very kind introductory remarks by the general: I want you to know that I have personally been bombed, rocketed, strafed and napalmed by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marines, U.S. Army Aviation and the air forces of sovereign states of South Vietnam, India and Pakistan, and maybe a couple more I don't even remember now.
You will note that I am not an inconsiderable target and yet I am here today, unscathed, unscratched and ready to talk. I hold no grudges; I'm just eternally grateful that in those few instances some guys couldn't shoot worth a s--t. I hasten to add that in literally hundreds of other instances, when the chips were really down, close air support kept me and a lot of other more deserving guys alive.
I was asked to give you my reflections on the military-media relationship. That's awfully high-toned for someone who got his start covering Marine platoons in Vietnam in early 1965, worked his way up to infantry companies and the occasional battalion-size operation and has always felt slightly uncomfortable with anything larger than that. I will confess, right up front, that I am partial to the infantry; always have been. Some might find that puzzling if not perverse; that a civilian reporter, given a choice, would choose the hardest and least glamorous part of any war as the part he wishes to cover.
But there is method in that madness, and I would recommend it to my younger colleagues who may one day be called on to cover war. There, in the mud, is where war is most visible and easiest understood. There no one will lie to you; no one will try to put a spin on the truth. Those for whom death waits around the next bend or across the next rice paddy have no time and little taste for the games that are played with such relish in the rear. No one ever lied to me within the sound of the guns.
There, at the cutting edge of war, you find yourself welcomed and needed – welcomed by the soldier as a token that someone in the outside world cares about him and how he lives and dies; needed for the simple reason that an infantry company or platoon in combat always needs another set of hands to carry ammo or haul water to the wounded or to pick up a rifle when the chips are really down. There you earn the sort of friendship that cannot be acquired in any other field of human endeavor – there you forge bonds that will endure for a lifetime.
A few years ago I shook hands with one such battlefield friend and brother, agreeing on the terms by which we would jointly author a book. The lawyer who was negotiating the deal with the publisher asked to see the contract between us. We explained that there was no written contract; just that handshake. He looked horrified; we looked at him with pity. "You see," my buddy explained, "We have trusted each other with our lives; this is just a little matter of some money."
When I look back at the military/media experience in the [1991] Gulf war it is with sadness for lost opportunities on both sides of the equation. Because of poor planning, paranoia and over-control, the details of a great victory of American arms were virtually lost to history. The crucial Army tank battles took place far from the lens of any camera; the Navy was over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind; and although the Air Force contributed all that nifty smart bomb film the vital human element of the Air Force story was largely missing, and we were left with the false image of a Nintendo War. The only thing the Pentagon had to hide in the Gulf was the finest military force this country has ever put into the field, and it did that very efficiently.
I am here to argue for more openness, more contact, more freedom between your profession and mine. In this one instance, I believe familiarity would breed not contempt but trust and respect. My knowledge of and respect for you was born on the battlefields of Vietnam. That respect was reinforced by my experience in the Gulf, where I was the exception that proved the rule. There were around 1,000 correspondents accredited in the Gulf; 140 were permitted into the combat pools. There was precisely one reporter who went to war with a personal recommendation from Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in his hip pocket, and you're looking at him.
How this came to pass is just another war story. In 1965 in Vietnam, I marched along some bad roads in the Central Highlands with a Vietnamese Airborne battalion and made the acquaintance of a young Army adviser, Maj. Norm Schwarzkopf. The battalion commander who taught Charlie Hastings and me some important lessons in the Ia Drang Valley in November, 1965, was a splendid combat commander named Hal Moore. Long before that, Hal Moore taught infantry tactics to hundreds of young cadets at West Point, including one named Norm Schwarzkopf. He even persuaded young Schwarzkopf to choose the infantry as his branch, against the best advice of his father who warned him that he would be forever giving up any hope of making the rank of general as a mud-foot infantry officer.
I dealt fairly and honestly with both those men, as I have always tried to do with all men, and what goes around comes around. Life may be short but memories are long.
Thanks to that trust, I was sent down to the 24th Mech two weeks before G-Day. On my first night there the Division CG [then-Maj. Gen. Barry McCaffrey] called me to his TOC and pulled the cover off the battle map. What he said, as my eyes followed the arrows and the hair stood up on the back of my neck was this: I trust you because Schwarzkopf trusts you; but more than that, I trust you because you're coming with me. I never heard a more compelling argument for operational security in my life.
During the days before G-Day I visited every brigade and battalion in the division; saw the preparations; checked on the OR rates of the equipment; ate a lot of really bad chow; got lost traveling at night in the desert about fourteen times. Did a lot of listening and looking. And then we rode to battle together. I emerged from that experience with a damned good story of an American armored division at war ... and with something far more important: A whole new crop of comrades-in-arms and friends-for-life. We had trusted each other with our lives.
My regret, and one that I believe is now shared by the more thoughtful military leaders today, is that there was not an experienced team of reporters, photographers and cameramen traveling with every Brigade which crossed the berm into Kuwait and Iraq; stationed with every Air Force squadron which saw action; and on the bridge of every Navy ship offshore. Too much of the war either went uncovered, or the pooled dispatches and film took so long to reach the rear that the war was over and the stories never saw the light of day. More importantly, I think we will all have cause to regret the fact that a new generation of correspondents was not free to accompany a new generation of captains and majors of all the services to war – to learn the ropes, earn the trust and build the bonds that last a lifetime.
Some of you seated here today – the best and brightest of our nation's defenders – are convinced that the press is your enemy. In any similar gathering of reporters there would, no doubt, be some who believe the same thing of you. This is a national tragedy ... and one that each of us has an obligation and a duty to do everything we can to repair and heal. There is more than enough blame and fault to go around, but that is not the point. Somehow my mind keeps going back to what my old friend Hal Moore tried to explain to that lawyer: once we have trusted each other with our lives ... everything else is small change.
Since Vietnam, I've thought long and hard about the relationship between your profession and mine –professions that the founding fathers of this nation thought so important that they included specific definitions of our duties and responsibilities and rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
generation of officers emerged from that searing, bitter, orphaned war looking for someone to blame for the failures manifest in our nation's defeat in Vietnam. Many chose to blame the media: Walter Cronkite lost the war; Dan Rather lost the war; Peter Arnett lost the war. By choosing the easy way out they obviated the painful need to carefully examine the root causes of our failure to win. By placing full blame and responsibility on the press they could avoid delving deeper, peeling to the underlying layers of the onion and exposing the more important failures of political leadership at home and military leadership right down the chain of command from the Joint Chiefs to the commander, U.S. Forces Vietnam and on down to Corps and Division.
How much easier it was to simply shoot the messengers. This red herring was dragged through the 0 Club bars of a thousand posts for a decade and more after the end of the Vietnam War. It became an article of faith for a generation of officers, and that led directly to the over-control and the spin control that allowed the Gulf War to be fought in a near-vacuum. Note that I say near vacuum, because nature abhors a vacuum.
cont