Every day of his 10 weeks in Iraq with the 48th Brigade Combat Team, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Dave Hirschman saw reasons to be hopeful about conditions in Iraq.
Happy and excited children. Brave and energetic Iraqi soldiers and their courageous Americans counterparts training and befriending them despite language and cultural barriers. Electricity and water being restored.
There were also reasons to be “horribly discouraged” about conditions in Iraq, he said. “Not so much by gore and destruction, because I didn’t see that every day.”
Focusing on the 48th Georgia’s National Guard unit as the AJC has done this year shows readers the personal side of the war and the thousands of lives it has changed forever. Since Georgia’s citizen soldiers were called up for duty last November, AJC staffers have written 42 front-page stories and dozens of other stories throughout the newspaper about the soldiers’ training, their missions and their lives before and during their time in Iraq. AJC home-front reporters Jim Auchmutey and Anna Varela and photographer Rich Addicks have chronicled in great detail the stories of the families and small towns they have left behind.
“We want to demonstrate that these guys aren’t just a number. They are our neighbors, people we see in the grocery store. They are a part of the whole fabric of this state. We want to humanize them as much as possible in the stories we do and to highlight their sacrifices,” said Ron Martz, who is coordinating this coverage.
Martz, a former Marine, knows the toll of war. Nearly 40 years ago, he worked in the casualty section, helping families cope with the loss of their soldiers. He has been to Iraq several times for the AJC as a reporter covering the 3rd Infantry Division.
“One of the issues with the embed process is you do get a narrow focus on what’s going on in the overall war. With our coverage of the 48th, we’ve tried to demonstrate the different types of missions they have everything from combat patrols to humanitarian missions. They are trying to restore electricity and water and training the Iraqi army, which is vital to the withdrawal of the troops,” said Martz.
Hirschman and AJC photographer Curtis Compton recently returned from Iraq. Hirschman, who covers UPS and Lockheed for the Business section, has no military background. Both he and Compton, who is back to photographing the Atlanta Falcons, volunteered for the duty.
Hirschman’s most interesting assignment in Iraq was covering a group of 70 Georgia soldiers living and working with the Iraqi soldiers they were training in Mahmudiyah. “It’s an extraordinary mission they’ve taken on,” he said. The Georgia soldiers have almost no resources no language training and poor equipment. Every week they go on live missions with the Iraqis, the main targets of insurgents.
“Despite these huge obstacles, they threw their heart and soul into this desperate and incredibly challenging mission and succeeded despite every reason not to,” Hirschman said.
Hirschman was surprised at the amount of access he had to U.S. troops, who were always happy to see the media. “In so many ways the world has moved on from the war in Iraq. They don’t want to feel like they are forgotten,” he said.
One of the most fulfilling aspects of his time in Iraq was submitting e-mails for ajc.com’s blog, “The 48th Goes to War,” which has become a popular lifeline for soldiers and their families. The same is true for the photo galleries from Iraq on ajc.com.
“If their name and picture appear on our Web site, it is tangible proof to the folks back home that they are OK,” he said. With about 30 minutes of computer time each day, Hirschman detailed the everyday aspects of life in Iraq. He regrets not being able to answer every e-mail but relished the opportunity to pass along a few personal messages.
“There was a woman in Manchester, England, who hadn’t heard from her son and was very worried about him. I was able to say to her that I’d just seen him that morning and he was fine. Those couple of sentences meant so much to her.”
Not all the news from Iraq has been good. AJC reporter Moni Basu and photographer Bita Honarvar arrived in Iraq just about the time the 48th Brigade had a horrible stretch 11 dead soldiers in 11 days. For the folks here in Georgia, it was a tense and somber time.
Some readers have complained about a perceived emphasis on war deaths. But death is a reality in war, and not writing about the enormous sacrifices of our military families in a prominent way won’t change that.
