| war correspondents | notable | memorials | embedded |

Chapter 4: The Seduction of Battle and the Perversion of War

 
There is in wartime a nearly universal preoccupation with sexual liasons. There is a kind of breathless abandon in wartime, and those who in peacetime would lead conservative and sheltered lives give themselves over to wantom carnal relationships. Men, and specially soldiers, are preoccupied with little else. With power reduced to such raw level and the currency of life and death cheap, eroticism races through all relationships. There is in these encounters a frenectic lust that seeks on some level, to replicate or augment the drug of war. It is certainly not about love, indeed love itself in wartime is hard to sustain or establish.

(Hedges, War Is a Force p.100-1)

 

War Correspondents

Articles

Hedges, Chris. The Hedonists of Power TruthDig (June 23, 2008).
Washington has become Versailles. We are ruled, entertained and informed by courtiers. The popular media are courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are courtiers. Our pundits and experts are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games. We are being had.

Bullock, Tom. Life in War: Journalist's Assignment in Iraq Ends NPR (October 22, 2007).
The first thing I saw in Iraq? An American soldier lounging in a plastic lawn chair. He was manning a checkpoint on the Iraqi Jordanian border. I was speeding past in a Chevy Suburban, trying to get to Baghdad as soon as I could. It was just after the invasion, and this was the golden era -- or at least that's how it seems now.

Sloan, Robin. Chris Hedges on War & the Press Poynter Online (March 19, 2003).
Chris Hedges is a former war correspondent with fifteen years of experience in places such as El Salvador, Kosovo, and the Persian Gulf. He's worked at the Christian Science Monitor, the Dallas Morning News, and most recently The New York Times, where he shared in a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. Now he's written a book called "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." It's a slim but stirring volume, a meditation on the culture of war and war reporting.

Notable Correspondents

W.E. Pidgeon - Australian (1909-1981)
When William E. Pidgeon became a war correspondent in the Australian Army during World War II, the name, WEP, was already a household word in Australia through his amusing illustrations and brilliant cartoons for Consolidated Press and Women's Weekly magazine.

Bill was attached as a correspondent to the Australian troops in Northern Australia, Papua New Guinea and Borneo. In his work he recorded their daily lives around the camps, at hospitals, at race meetings, at church parades. As a participant in their lives he drew and painted his subjects with a marked sense of involvement and an unmistakably Australian feeling of casualness. There is no straining after effect in his compositions which are almost always of groups of figures in their appropriate settings. Their style is quite opposite to the style of the official war artist's portrayal of troops in heroic action. The paintings are usually small in size, with a limited colour palette and restricted by what material was available on the run. They all have a marked air of freshness and immediacy well suited to their subjects.

You have guessed, I hope, my uninspired letters are due to the overwhelming enervation of the tropics plus the lack of comfort in the tent. I'm sitting on an oil drum which grinds the flesh off my behind, my eyes are full of coral dust, I'm due to start turning yellow from a surfeit of Atabrin tablets which they say are necessary to counteract the excessive loss of bodily salt in sweat and god knows what else. The half of me that is alive is tolerably happy. (Pidgeon Coop)

Ernie Pyle - American (1900-1945). Correspondent for Scripps Howard from 1935 until his death in combat during World War II. His articles, about the out-of-the-way places he visited and the people who lived there, were written in a folksy style much like a personal letter to a friend. He enjoyed a loyal following in as many as 300 newspapers. For more information, see Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II by James Tobin (University Press of Kansas) 1998. Also, see War is a Force p. 176 for a quote from Pyle's unfinished last column.

  • Christiane Amanpour (1958) covered the Gulf War and the Bosnian War.
  • Al Gore (1948) covered the Vietnam War.
  • Dan Rather (1931)
  • Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998); covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Vietnam War, the Six-Day War and the U.S. invasion of Panama.
  • Winston Churchill (1874-1965) covered the Siege of Malakand, the Mahdist War and the Second Boer War.
  • Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
  • Steven Crane (1871-1900) covered the 1897 Greco-Turkish War

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Memorials to Journalists

"Journalists Memorial"
The Newseum - Washington, DC

The Journalists Memorial, located in the Newseum in Washington, D.C., pays tribute to reporters, photographers and broadcasters who have died reporting the news. The names of more than 1,800 individuals from around the world are etched on the glass panels of the soaring, two-story structure. The memorial is rededicated each year to add the names of journalists who lost their lives on the job in the preceding year. Adjoining the memorial are photographs of hundreds of those journalists, and electronic kiosks containing data on every honoree. (Newseum.org)

"War Correspondents Memorial Arch" Dedicated: October 16, 1896
Location: Gathland State Park at Crampton's Gap, Boonsboro, MD

The Gathland State Park property, which surrounds a small triangle of federal land, is part of the South Mountain State Park cluster of battlefields. The site includes the War Correspondent's Memorial Arch, erected in 1896 by George A. Townsend, a Civil War newspaper correspondent who purchased 110 acres of the gap in 1885..


"Breathing" by Catalonian artist Jaume Plensa (dedicated June 16, 2008).
London, UK. Read the sculpture's poem by James Fenton

The sculpture, situated on the roof of the new wing of BBC Broadcasting House in Portland Place in London W1, is a glass and steel construction entitled Breathing by the international artist Jaume Plensa. Every night, a light beam, extending one kilometre into the sky, will illuminate the sculpture for 30 minutes, in tandem with the BBC's ten o'clock news bulletin.

Selected after an international competition as part of the BBC's public art programme for Broadcasting House, this artwork takes its inspiration from the audio life of the building (home to the BBC's Audio & Music division), shaped as it is in the form of a giant, 10 metre high, listening glass.It also creates a third spire in the trinity of spires made up by the BBC radio mast on the roof of the Grade II* listed Broadcasting House and the spire of the adjacent All Souls Church.

The words which are inscribed around the sculpture in a spiral of continuous text evoke the antithetical themes of speech and silence, life and death. The sculpture is dedicated to news journalists killed on location. (BBC Press Office)

"Journalists Memorial" Innaguration: October 7, 2006|
Bayeux, France

The French town of Bayeux and Reporters wihout borders inaugurate a "Journalists Memorial" on the eve of World Freedom Day. The memorial, unique in Europe, bears the names of 1,889 journalists killed around the world since 1944.

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Embedded Journalism

Journalists have long had a history of interactions with the military, although a term framing the press-armed forces relationship has only recently come into household usage. The press is "embedded" into military units involved in armed conflict. Correspondent Amy Goodman said in an interview, "We think that media in this country has reached an all-time low, and that this notion of embedding runs completely contrary to what media should be doing in this country. We're supposed to be holding those in power accountable, not embedded with those in power." Moreover, in the video documentary, "Independent Media in a Time of War," Goodman goes on to says of the pentagon, "... they research the most effective propagandistic name to call their operation. Everyday seeing Operation Iraqi Freedom you have to ask, 'if this were state media how would it be any different?' "

Cartoon by Jihad 'Awartani from Arabic newspaper issued in Jordan, Addustour
  • Camera/Iraq: US embedded journalism in Iraq. Camera/Iraq is a project by Carleton College's Cinema & Media Studies Department to gather news and commentary about public and personal photographic image practices associated with the War of Images in the Middle East. The site is a clearinghouse for thoughtful discussion rather than a locus of invective....We do not believe that everyone needs to see the most extreme images in order to understand the horror of war. On the other hand, we are convinced that citizenship is best served when all images are available, since often to witness is to be transformed.

  • History News Network: Is embedded journalism really new? by Thomas Englehardt
    Years ago, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm produced a book, The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she claimed that the essence of journalism was betrayal. Actually, she took an extreme example of journalism -- a reporter who entered into a contractual relationship with his subject -- but she made literal a certain feeling familiar to most reporters of betraying one's subject in the very act of writing a story. Still, when it comes to the essential nature of mainstream journalism, the kind practiced in our elite papers and the network news, she was, to my mind, quite wrong. There, the most ordinary act isn't betrayal but collusion.

  • PBS Newshour: Pros and Cons of Embedded Journalism Journalists are experiencing unprecedented access to the battlefield thanks to a partnership between the military and the media that has embedded journalists within specific military units. The embedded reporters have to follow several agreed upon rules as they live with the soldiers and report on their actions.

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Television

Generation Kill (2008) USA HBO miniseries
A Rolling Stone reporter, embedded with The 1st Recon Marines chronicles his experiences during the first wave of the American-led assault on Baghdad in 2003. Based on the book by Evan Wright, the seven part miniseries follows the Marine First Recon battalion through the early days of the Iraq War with an unprecedented representation of the reality these soldiers lived. (imdb)

The Road to Baghdad - David Simon's Generation Kill (The New Yorker) July 21, 2008.

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