Isaiah Thomas reported the “shot heard round the world” from the Battle of Lexington in 1775. George Wilkins Kendall, a correspondent for the New Orleans Picayune, told the world about the fall of Mexico City in 1847. William Howard Russell watched 800 men ride in the charge of the Light Brigade and only 200 come back in 1859. B.S. Osbon told readers of The New York World when the Stars and Stripes were hauled down from Ft. Sumter, S.C., marking the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861.
These brave reporters stepped in to write the first draft of history as they witnessed the smoke, the roar of ordnance, the surreal lights and the pallor of death that come with the human struggle of war.
The flowery language of early American and English journalism has been replaced by a more neutral voice in reporting, but still the witnesses to battle and victory are human, so they put a human face on what they cover.
The planned assault on Iraq by U.S. and, probably, British troops will mark a revolution of sorts in war coverage. For most of the 20th Century, the American reporters and photographers who covered war were a different breed, one that chased the first rumors of conflict and took notes in foxholes as bullets whizzed by their heads.
In all the dispatches remembered from World War II, there was a sense of struggle on a cosmic basis where evil bubbled up in the most urbane spots.
In reporting the exodus of civilians from Paris in 1941, former sports reporter Quentin Reynolds described not the death of people, but the death of the city when he wrote:
“There was no dawn.
“This was puzzling at first because it had been a clear night. Now the air was heavy with a smoky fog so thick that you could reach out and grab it with your hand. When you let it go your hand was full of soot. Then you realized that this was a man-made fog, a smoke screen thrown over Paris to hide the railroad stations from the bombers. But for the first time in its history, Paris had no dawn . . .
“And now the Germans were pounding on the gates of Paris. Already their mechanized forces had encircled the city on three sides. Within a day the thing that couldn’t happen was inevitably going to happen. They would be in Paris . . .”
War correspondents covered the loss of Europe and its taking back by the Allies; they covered the terrible back and forth of GIs in Korea as they would take a hill and then give it back after it was relinquished over the table at peace talks.
Then came Vietnam, when the Pentagon went into overdrive in lying about battle body counts and did its best to sanitize what fast became a war mired in loss where boys from Des Moines and Rapid City became men in minutes as they fought in rice paddies and jungles a half a world from their homes.
And, for more than a decade and a half after Vietnam, the Pentagon specialized in attempting to manage the American press corps. In fact, there was a war of the wills that often became apparent to TV viewers as they watched the first battles over Iraq, the result of Iraq invading Kuwait.
This was a war in real time. The delays of the past in getting dispatches to newspapers or film to TV networks were history. Americans sat riveted in front of their TVs as CNN reporters gave a blow-by-blow description of the bombing of Baghdad complete with eerie pictures of tracer rounds through the eyes of cameras with night-vision lenses.
This time around in Iraq, the Pentagon has decided cooperation with the press may be the best course. Learning lessons from its behavior in Grenada, when it refused to allow any media to travel with troops and in Somalia, where it again tried to outfox the press and ended up looking foolish, the Pentagon is “embedding” reporters and photographers with individual units of U.S. soldiers. The news media will eat, sleep and march along with soldiers. It will be an interesting experiment for these eyewitnesses, many of whom have been put through a media boot camp to learn how to survive.
This will again be a real time war. Americans will watch it unfold on TV and read newspapers for context. Reporters will need a careful eye for detail and a careful ear for the sounds of war, the same kind of care used by former science reporter William L. Laurence, who witnessed the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki:
“Then, just when [the cloud] appeared as though the thing had settled down into a state of permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the height of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward and then descending earthward, a thousand Old Faithful geysers rolled into one . . .
“It still retained that shape when we last gazed at it from a distance of about 200 miles. The boiling pillar of many colors could be seen at that distance, a giant mountain of jumbled rainbows in travail.
“Much living substance had gone into those rainbows . . .”
