More than a quarter million American soldiers were deployed at the start of the Iraq War, but they weren't alone. Nearly 800 reporters, prepped for the battlefield and assigned to military units, embedded with the military. NPR's John Burnett was one of them.
Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The Pentagon still believes that critical reporting of Vietnam sapped the nation's will to fight, so ever since it's kept reporters far from the theater of war. But the Defense Department was unhappy that its successes in the first Gulf War went unchronicled, so it sought a solution to the problem of bad coverage versus no coverage and found it in the newly-minted embed program.
Hundreds of reporters would be assigned to military units. If at any point they chose to leave them, they would lose their places to the next in line. They could write what they wish if it didn't compromise operational security, but they would be tethered to the troops responsible for their safety.
The military brass was delighted, including Major General Victor Renuart.
GENERAL RENUART:
In terms of bringing the media onto the battlefield, I think this has been really an historic event.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And Brigadier-General Vince Brooks.
BRIGADIER-GENERAL BROOKS:
We have embedded media so that the truth does come out.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And General Tommy Franks.
GENERAL FRANKS:
I'm a fan - of it. I think it was a very good thing to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We spoke to Chris Kramer, then head of CNN International, after it aired a live firefight between U.S. Marines and Iraqi snipers near Um Kasar.
CHRIS KRAMER:
I thought as I drove home that night that, you know, no longer would many children around the world have to ask their fathers what they did in the war, because in one way they could actually witness it on television. And that's when I realized that television news had made a paradigm shift.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
For the six weeks of what came to be called major combat operations in Iraq, NPR's John Burnett was embedded with the Headquarters Battalion of the First Marine Division slated to lead the invasion. We spoke to him shortly before the war began after a military briefing in Kuwait.
JOHN BURNETT:
We had a meeting here in Kuwait City with some of the public affairs people with the military last weekend, and some of the Q&As they had emailed to us said that you will all have an escort while you're in the theater of operations. And, well, whoa! What's this? I mean any reporter who gets an "escort" is, is immediately suspicious that this is a "minder" - this is someone who's going to be, you know, the eyes and ears of the Pentagon.
And so I raised that with the Marine public affairs guy who will sort of be in charge of us, and he said, let me tell you about escorts. An escort is somebody I pay 75 dollars a night for and take to a hotel room. [BROOKE LAUGHS]I don't care for escorts.
Ha, ha, ha. The press laughed it up. And then he followed up and said, what you're going to have is a Marine buddy. And so, all the laughing stopped. And we all looked at each other - and what is a Marine buddy?
And he said, this Marine buddy is going to be assigned to each one of you and he's going to keep you safe and he's going to explain how we war-fight, and he's going to help you get interviews, and you'll be glad you have him. We're very curious what our Marine buddies are going to be like.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Are you concerned that you'll come to love your military colleagues, your comrades, so much that you'll be less included to report the warts?
JOHN BURNETT:
You really get to the heart of what my greater concern is. I'm not as worried about how the Pentagon wants to control our message. I'm more concerned about human nature and what's going to happen to me when we get in a combat situation, and we are with these men and women who are fighting, and there's incoming, and they may have to save my life. How much am I going to identify with them?
One of the things that a veteran war correspondent told us when we trained at Fort Benning to do this is the greatest threat out there is to remember you're not one of them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We also wondered what would happen to John, so we called him every week. And in the next segment, you'll hear what he told us about reporting the war through a soda straw.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What came to be called major combat operations in Iraq began with shock and awe on March 19th and ended with the President's announcement of mission accomplished on May 1, 2003. There were two ways to cover this war – as a so-called unilateral, unprotected and on the periphery of the fighting, or as an embed.
NPR's John Burnett was embedded with the First Marine Division and we called him every week. On March 14, he had just been embedded.
I remember last week you were a little skeptical about the presence of an escort – not an escort – of a Marine buddy to help you along your -
JOHN BURNETT:
[LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
- newsgathering tasks. Has your buddy presented himself?
JOHN BURNETT:
Yes. [LAUGHS] In fact, the U.S. Marine Corps has assigned me my Marine buddy. He's a very sweet young corporal, 19 years old. His name is Kwana and he is anything but a censor or a minder or anything that we would associate with trying to spin the content of what I'm doing. If anything, he's here to help me get my gas mask on when we have chem-bio alerts. He's here to show me around the camp.
And so far, I'm really encouraged that the military is following through with what they said they were going to do. I mean, I've only actually been out here in the desert with the troops for three days now.
But in those three days we've met the commanding general of the First Marine Division, we've met the chief of staff, we've met the assistant commander. They've all said - what can we do to help you do your job, which is just not something you really expect from the Department of Defense. So I'm encouraged so far.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Are there any concerns that remain as you look ahead to covering a possible war?
JOHN BURNETT:
Well [SIGHS] a sense - I mean, this is all a dress rehearsal, Brooke. Nothing really matters until the war starts.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week two: The coalition forces invade Iraq. Burnett returns to Kuwait after a brief incursion by his Marine battalion over the border.
It's obvious you really like these guys, and they're protecting you. Do you think that some judgment other than news judgment is going into what you choose to report?
JOHN BURNETT:
I don't know. I mean [LAUGHS] I don't feel any constraints to say what I want to say, and if the time comes to rake them over the coals for an operation gone awry that's exactly what I'll do.
What's interesting is that I think when you come over here and when you embed with this group and you, in a sense, become sort of part of the project of the invasion and pacification of a country, you cease to hear the dissonant voices against that project.
We're not going to have as much access to the civilian centers where there are going to be collateral damage and civilian casualties, and so we're going to depend on our colleagues tremendously to come behind us and to do that important reporting, to find out how this invasion is influencing, you know, the people of Iraq and what they think about it.
So, you know, once again, we see what we see and we don't see what we don't see in this operation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week three: Burnett is inside Iraq somewhere between the Euphrates River and Baghdad.
JOHN BURNETT:
We are clearly being used by the Pentagon and, in some cases, for propaganda purposes. And let me give you an example. We talked with the head of the Intelligence section a week or so ago and he was telling us all about the fearsome firepower that the Marines were going to bring to bear in this battle and how, you know, they were going to overwhelm their opponents with air power and ground forces and really send a message to Baghdad that it's pointless to fight.
And I commented, it sounds to me like you're using the journalists as your mouthpiece for this. And he said, you know, well yes, we are.
At this point, John Kifner with The New York Times, who's with us, just kind of leans back in his chair and says, I think I'm getting queasy. So there's that sort of covert use of us. And then also it's kind of an ongoing commercial for the U.S. Marine Corps.
But also, understand that they're taking a chance in letting the journalists in here. There are a lot of, you know, old guard Marine officers who don't think we belong here. So it's a very sensitive thing that the Marines are doing within their own culture as well. I want to stress that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week four: Burnett is with an artillery unit moving just behind the front line, 20 miles south of Baghdad.
JOHN BURNETT:
One of the unnatural things about the embedding process is we don't get a sense of how Iraqis are reacting to this really enormous invasion. And, you know, I see them on the streets and I just wish I could get a translator and jump down there. This is what I usually do when I cover a war zone is to kind of mix with the local population. And we can't jump back and forth and talk to town folk and cover the military at the same time. It's either/or.
And as far as I know, there's only one reporter who's able to do that – Dexter Filkins with The New York Times. He's a lone wolf. He's a unilateral. He's traveling with one of the fighting regiments. He has been able to unofficially embed himself, and he's stopping and talking to Iraqis - you know, how people in the towns are reacting to the Americans. He's getting great stuff, and I'm envious.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week five: only three weeks after the start of the war: Burnett decides to cut his military ties and report on his own from inside Baghdad.
JOHN BURNETT:
Basically the embed process is kind of in tatters. I have gone wherever I can get a helicopter ride, wherever I can get a Humvee ride. I learned that the best thing to do is to use your own initiative and just go where I want to go and tell the public affairs folks later.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So as you look back on this, what, now about six weeks, how would you assess the whole embed experience?
JOHN BURNETT:
I'm not sure this is a workable arrangement, the whole embed process. I think it's an unnatural way to practice journalism. But one of the good things to come out of this is that the whole experience has helped, I think, bridge the gap of distrust between the military and the media which is going to yield better defense reporting in the future because they're going to be more open with the media, and I think we'll understand them better.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week six: our last conversation. Burnett is now back in Kuwait packing for home.
JOHN BURNETT:
Remember when we talked several weeks ago and I said, very matter-of-factly, well, this will work if the unilaterals come up behind us and do the other half of the reporting and get into the villages and talk to people and give our audience the balance that they expect?
Well, that really didn't happen. The importance of going back to the places that the Marines charged through and find out what were behind the smiling faces and the importance of finding out where the bombs hit was really driven home to me when I did a story this last week on my way out of Baghdad.
Just by happenstance, really, I stopped into a small village, Al-Taniya, which had been bombed by the U.S. Air Force. Thirty men, women and children were killed in their beds as they slept, as we reported on All Things Considered on Friday.
The U.S. Air Force says that they were precision-guided bombs aimed at tanks and track vehicles and they all struck their targets, and they really had no explanation for what I saw and what the villagers told me. Now, embeds couldn't see that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
If you look back on the history of war reporting, you can see that there have been two ways that militaries have dealt with the press. One was to exclude them and the other was to co-opt them. The embed experiment was an exercise in, at least, attempted co-optation, I think. Do you agree?
JOHN BURNETT:
Well, sure. It was. And I think to an extent it worked. You know, many of us were cheerleaders during the four weeks in spite of ourselves because that's the story we had access to.
I've been thinking about what my 11-year-old son got for Christmas recently. He got a G.I. Joe that was an Ernie Pyle doll.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
Actually, it's the first toy journalist that I'm aware of it. It even comes with a little plastic Smith-Corona typewriter.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
And I kind of marveled that, you know, gosh, war correspondent as hero. And I think about the embed process and, you know, living with the troops. And certainly there will be no wars again, you know, like World War II when there was a unanimity of the righteousness of the cause. You know, I just - I wonder if there are going to be any Ernie Pyles again?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Burnett is right to wonder. Ernie Pyle was the bard of American's fighting forces. His stories were soldiers' stories of heroism without ambivalence. It's hard to imagine another war where reporting just one side will be enough.
The Pentagon still believes that critical reporting of Vietnam sapped the nation's will to fight, so ever since it's kept reporters far from the theater of war. But the Defense Department was unhappy that its successes in the first Gulf War went unchronicled, so it sought a solution to the problem of bad coverage versus no coverage and found it in the newly-minted embed program.
Hundreds of reporters would be assigned to military units. If at any point they chose to leave them, they would lose their places to the next in line. They could write what they wish if it didn't compromise operational security, but they would be tethered to the troops responsible for their safety.
The military brass was delighted, including Major General Victor Renuart.
GENERAL RENUART:
In terms of bringing the media onto the battlefield, I think this has been really an historic event.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And Brigadier-General Vince Brooks.
BRIGADIER-GENERAL BROOKS:
We have embedded media so that the truth does come out.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And General Tommy Franks.
GENERAL FRANKS:
I'm a fan - of it. I think it was a very good thing to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We spoke to Chris Kramer, then head of CNN International, after it aired a live firefight between U.S. Marines and Iraqi snipers near Um Kasar.
CHRIS KRAMER:
I thought as I drove home that night that, you know, no longer would many children around the world have to ask their fathers what they did in the war, because in one way they could actually witness it on television. And that's when I realized that television news had made a paradigm shift.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
For the six weeks of what came to be called major combat operations in Iraq, NPR's John Burnett was embedded with the Headquarters Battalion of the First Marine Division slated to lead the invasion. We spoke to him shortly before the war began after a military briefing in Kuwait.
JOHN BURNETT:
We had a meeting here in Kuwait City with some of the public affairs people with the military last weekend, and some of the Q&As they had emailed to us said that you will all have an escort while you're in the theater of operations. And, well, whoa! What's this? I mean any reporter who gets an "escort" is, is immediately suspicious that this is a "minder" - this is someone who's going to be, you know, the eyes and ears of the Pentagon.
And so I raised that with the Marine public affairs guy who will sort of be in charge of us, and he said, let me tell you about escorts. An escort is somebody I pay 75 dollars a night for and take to a hotel room. [BROOKE LAUGHS]I don't care for escorts.
Ha, ha, ha. The press laughed it up. And then he followed up and said, what you're going to have is a Marine buddy. And so, all the laughing stopped. And we all looked at each other - and what is a Marine buddy?
And he said, this Marine buddy is going to be assigned to each one of you and he's going to keep you safe and he's going to explain how we war-fight, and he's going to help you get interviews, and you'll be glad you have him. We're very curious what our Marine buddies are going to be like.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Are you concerned that you'll come to love your military colleagues, your comrades, so much that you'll be less included to report the warts?
JOHN BURNETT:
You really get to the heart of what my greater concern is. I'm not as worried about how the Pentagon wants to control our message. I'm more concerned about human nature and what's going to happen to me when we get in a combat situation, and we are with these men and women who are fighting, and there's incoming, and they may have to save my life. How much am I going to identify with them?
One of the things that a veteran war correspondent told us when we trained at Fort Benning to do this is the greatest threat out there is to remember you're not one of them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We also wondered what would happen to John, so we called him every week. And in the next segment, you'll hear what he told us about reporting the war through a soda straw.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What came to be called major combat operations in Iraq began with shock and awe on March 19th and ended with the President's announcement of mission accomplished on May 1, 2003. There were two ways to cover this war – as a so-called unilateral, unprotected and on the periphery of the fighting, or as an embed.
NPR's John Burnett was embedded with the First Marine Division and we called him every week. On March 14, he had just been embedded.
I remember last week you were a little skeptical about the presence of an escort – not an escort – of a Marine buddy to help you along your -
JOHN BURNETT:
[LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
- newsgathering tasks. Has your buddy presented himself?
JOHN BURNETT:
Yes. [LAUGHS] In fact, the U.S. Marine Corps has assigned me my Marine buddy. He's a very sweet young corporal, 19 years old. His name is Kwana and he is anything but a censor or a minder or anything that we would associate with trying to spin the content of what I'm doing. If anything, he's here to help me get my gas mask on when we have chem-bio alerts. He's here to show me around the camp.
And so far, I'm really encouraged that the military is following through with what they said they were going to do. I mean, I've only actually been out here in the desert with the troops for three days now.
But in those three days we've met the commanding general of the First Marine Division, we've met the chief of staff, we've met the assistant commander. They've all said - what can we do to help you do your job, which is just not something you really expect from the Department of Defense. So I'm encouraged so far.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Are there any concerns that remain as you look ahead to covering a possible war?
JOHN BURNETT:
Well [SIGHS] a sense - I mean, this is all a dress rehearsal, Brooke. Nothing really matters until the war starts.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week two: The coalition forces invade Iraq. Burnett returns to Kuwait after a brief incursion by his Marine battalion over the border.
It's obvious you really like these guys, and they're protecting you. Do you think that some judgment other than news judgment is going into what you choose to report?
JOHN BURNETT:
I don't know. I mean [LAUGHS] I don't feel any constraints to say what I want to say, and if the time comes to rake them over the coals for an operation gone awry that's exactly what I'll do.
What's interesting is that I think when you come over here and when you embed with this group and you, in a sense, become sort of part of the project of the invasion and pacification of a country, you cease to hear the dissonant voices against that project.
We're not going to have as much access to the civilian centers where there are going to be collateral damage and civilian casualties, and so we're going to depend on our colleagues tremendously to come behind us and to do that important reporting, to find out how this invasion is influencing, you know, the people of Iraq and what they think about it.
So, you know, once again, we see what we see and we don't see what we don't see in this operation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week three: Burnett is inside Iraq somewhere between the Euphrates River and Baghdad.
JOHN BURNETT:
We are clearly being used by the Pentagon and, in some cases, for propaganda purposes. And let me give you an example. We talked with the head of the Intelligence section a week or so ago and he was telling us all about the fearsome firepower that the Marines were going to bring to bear in this battle and how, you know, they were going to overwhelm their opponents with air power and ground forces and really send a message to Baghdad that it's pointless to fight.
And I commented, it sounds to me like you're using the journalists as your mouthpiece for this. And he said, you know, well yes, we are.
At this point, John Kifner with The New York Times, who's with us, just kind of leans back in his chair and says, I think I'm getting queasy. So there's that sort of covert use of us. And then also it's kind of an ongoing commercial for the U.S. Marine Corps.
But also, understand that they're taking a chance in letting the journalists in here. There are a lot of, you know, old guard Marine officers who don't think we belong here. So it's a very sensitive thing that the Marines are doing within their own culture as well. I want to stress that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week four: Burnett is with an artillery unit moving just behind the front line, 20 miles south of Baghdad.
JOHN BURNETT:
One of the unnatural things about the embedding process is we don't get a sense of how Iraqis are reacting to this really enormous invasion. And, you know, I see them on the streets and I just wish I could get a translator and jump down there. This is what I usually do when I cover a war zone is to kind of mix with the local population. And we can't jump back and forth and talk to town folk and cover the military at the same time. It's either/or.
And as far as I know, there's only one reporter who's able to do that – Dexter Filkins with The New York Times. He's a lone wolf. He's a unilateral. He's traveling with one of the fighting regiments. He has been able to unofficially embed himself, and he's stopping and talking to Iraqis - you know, how people in the towns are reacting to the Americans. He's getting great stuff, and I'm envious.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week five: only three weeks after the start of the war: Burnett decides to cut his military ties and report on his own from inside Baghdad.
JOHN BURNETT:
Basically the embed process is kind of in tatters. I have gone wherever I can get a helicopter ride, wherever I can get a Humvee ride. I learned that the best thing to do is to use your own initiative and just go where I want to go and tell the public affairs folks later.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So as you look back on this, what, now about six weeks, how would you assess the whole embed experience?
JOHN BURNETT:
I'm not sure this is a workable arrangement, the whole embed process. I think it's an unnatural way to practice journalism. But one of the good things to come out of this is that the whole experience has helped, I think, bridge the gap of distrust between the military and the media which is going to yield better defense reporting in the future because they're going to be more open with the media, and I think we'll understand them better.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Week six: our last conversation. Burnett is now back in Kuwait packing for home.
JOHN BURNETT:
Remember when we talked several weeks ago and I said, very matter-of-factly, well, this will work if the unilaterals come up behind us and do the other half of the reporting and get into the villages and talk to people and give our audience the balance that they expect?
Well, that really didn't happen. The importance of going back to the places that the Marines charged through and find out what were behind the smiling faces and the importance of finding out where the bombs hit was really driven home to me when I did a story this last week on my way out of Baghdad.
Just by happenstance, really, I stopped into a small village, Al-Taniya, which had been bombed by the U.S. Air Force. Thirty men, women and children were killed in their beds as they slept, as we reported on All Things Considered on Friday.
The U.S. Air Force says that they were precision-guided bombs aimed at tanks and track vehicles and they all struck their targets, and they really had no explanation for what I saw and what the villagers told me. Now, embeds couldn't see that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
If you look back on the history of war reporting, you can see that there have been two ways that militaries have dealt with the press. One was to exclude them and the other was to co-opt them. The embed experiment was an exercise in, at least, attempted co-optation, I think. Do you agree?
JOHN BURNETT:
Well, sure. It was. And I think to an extent it worked. You know, many of us were cheerleaders during the four weeks in spite of ourselves because that's the story we had access to.
I've been thinking about what my 11-year-old son got for Christmas recently. He got a G.I. Joe that was an Ernie Pyle doll.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
Actually, it's the first toy journalist that I'm aware of it. It even comes with a little plastic Smith-Corona typewriter.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
And I kind of marveled that, you know, gosh, war correspondent as hero. And I think about the embed process and, you know, living with the troops. And certainly there will be no wars again, you know, like World War II when there was a unanimity of the righteousness of the cause. You know, I just - I wonder if there are going to be any Ernie Pyles again?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Burnett is right to wonder. Ernie Pyle was the bard of American's fighting forces. His stories were soldiers' stories of heroism without ambivalence. It's hard to imagine another war where reporting just one side will be enough.