Through Veterans' Eyes

by Larry Minear

  EIGHT

  Dealing with the Media and Public Opinion

  Reflecting on their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, many soldiers express strong views about the roles played by the media. Most level sharp criticism at its perceived lack of accuracy. Many also hold the media accountable for what they see as a widespread lack of awareness among Americans about the conflicts and the U.S. stake in them. Individual soldiers offer their own correctives in the form of e-mail dispatches and blogs designed to keep families and friends in the picture. Yet those cyberspace connections, a major development in American military history and a significant complement to traditional media coverage, have their own limitations and liabilities.

  MEDIA AS MIRROR

  Many veterans express disenchantment in the strongest possible terms with the accuracy of the media’s portrayal of what is taking place on the ground. “Reporters are a bunch of bullshit,” exclaimed Army Sgt. E-5 Bobby Lee Lisek, who served seven months in Iraq. “Oh, God. Do they lie!”1 From his vantage point on the frontlines, the Air Force’s Amn. Mark Kaplan expressed the view that “the media gave a twisted picture that has nothing to do with reality.”2 Many of the boots on the ground believed that the media has a negative agenda that exaggerates the difficulties experienced by the troops while downplaying their accomplishments. Soldiers commented regularly on the media’s perceived fixation on the carnage and its lack of attention to constructive developments, including hearts-and-minds activities. Soldiers frequently “lash out at the media for only reporting when a bomb is detonated and not when a school or water treatment plant has been rebuilt.”3

  One who sensed a strongly negative media bias was Spec. Brian P. Clousen of the Indiana National Guard. If you rely on the media, he said, “You don’t see the soldiers going out and building schools and setting up hospitals for the Iraqi people…. They don’t show the people just trying to actually live their lives and get through another day. They’re not all over there trying to kill us or plotting our destruction. They don’t all hate America. That’s all you see on TV…. It seems that the news people there want you to think that this is the worst thing that happened in the world: that we went over there. A lot of the people there hate Saddam and tell you that and are glad to see us over there.”4

  Media bias is confirmed for some by the attention lavished on the abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib. “Of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have rotated into and out of Iraq,” observes Army Capt. James R. Sosnicky, “a handful has embarrassed us” through their despicable conduct at Abu Ghraib. Yet it is they who capture the media’s attention. Forgotten in the hubbub are “the faces of countless Americans rebuilding hospitals, delivering text books to schools, or providing Iraqis with clean water to drink.”5

  Coverage of the “sick pranks” in which Iraqis were abused and humiliated went on month after month, complained Army Sgt. James J. Maddix Jr., while after only a few days the media moved on quickly from the beheadings of U.S. soldiers to other issues. “Which is more important,” he asked, “a person being humiliated or an American soldier getting his head lopped off?”6 “I just know the media will only let you know how bad something is, not how good it is,” added Mississippi Guardsman Justin C. Thompson following his time in Iraq. “I quit watching anything on the news about the war because it was mostly out of context or misinterpreted.”7

  Disenchantment with the media is deepened by its perceived lack of resonance with the soldier’s direct experience. Army First Lt. Derek Sutton commented on how all the news he saw is from Baghdad, with very little from Mosul, Iraq’s second city, where he was stationed. “The true story is not being told,” he concluded.8 Contrary to the media’s view, said Sgt. Nathan Fegan, a driver in an Army transportation battalion who traveled widely in Iraq, “most Iraqis welcomed us.”9 Navy Lt. Daniel Neville believed that the media was denying the American public information about positive developments in order to sell stories. “A school that reopened after a couple of years isn’t quite as big a headline as a U.S. soldier killed in the line of duty.”10

  On numerous occasions, troops returned from dangerous activities outside the wire to watch televised news that seemed unreal or unimportant. “Only the sensational gets reported,” fumes Sgt. Matthew Miller, a paramedic with the Maryland National Guard in Iraq. “You hear thirty Iraqis killed by a suicide bomber, but the one private that got killed in the Humvee, you don’t hear about. That happens a lot.”11 “I have lost all faith in the media,” remarked New Hampshire Guardsman Steve Pink, “a hapless joke I would much rather laugh at than become a part of.”12 The fact that media coverage was virtually continuous—“this war has been fought in our living rooms more than any other in our history,” an Army chaplain observes—increases both the media’s opportunity to present a balanced view and the troops’ disenchantment with its perceived failure to do so.13

  As the attention of the media—and the nation—shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq following the U.S. invasion in March 2003, some troops deployed to Afghanistan criticized the media strongly. “Everything’s Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,” observed a sergeant.14 “You don’t really hear anything about Afghanistan.” Yet there is “more progress” to report in Afghanistan, he believed, and Afghanistan, after all, is “the foundation” for the war against terror. But coverage of Iraq also came in for criticism. In the Global War on Terror study conducted by the New Hampshire National Guard, many returning troops expressed a sense of the “failure of the media to report on the progress made in Iraq.”15 The shift in late 2008 and early 2009 from Iraq back to Afghanistan had taken place too recently to be reflected in interviews with veterans.

  Air Force M. Sgt. Mark Kaplan, a fighter pilot who deployed to Germany when the Vietnam War was winding down, faults the media for its coverage of events in Iraq. The perceived negative slant does not surprise him, however. The media’s unrelenting hammering away at abuses by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib reminds him of its witch-hunting during the Indochina conflict. Stationed in San Francisco in the late 1960s, he had mixed and mingled with antiwar demonstrators and now implicates the same leftist and communist elements for fomenting public disapproval of U.S. involvement in Iraq. Those elements, he believes, had planned demonstrations against U.S. policy even before the U.S. invasion in 2003. “‘You supply the war and we’ll supply the protests,’” he heard them saying. Kaplan also saw parallels between Iraq and Vietnam in the overly restrictive rules of engagement; policymakers and the media alike place the troops, also branded as “baby killers,” in a no-win situation.16

  Soldiers and Civilians

  Gregory Marinich (AFC2001/001/54920), Photographs (PH01), VHP, AFC, LOC.

  * * *

  In this photo Lt. Col. Gregory V. Marinich offers candy to a child in Mazar-e-Sharif, northern Afghanistan. The encounter took place in March 2005 on the city’s main airfield. On that day, a steady stream of civilians passed along the dirt road en route to an area hospital that had been built by U.S. and Jordanian troops. The area was heavily mined with unexploded ordnance.

  The photo was taken by U.S. Navy Commander Tom Cawley, who, like Marinich, was among the American troops attached to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The United States and some forty other countries joined the effort to promote security and reconstruction around Afghanistan. Marinch’s duties included medical evacuation of wounded troops and civilians, while Cawley served as the chief of operations for the ISAF Tactical Air Operations Center.

  Looking back, Marinich, now a professor of military science and leadership of the Army ROTC program at the University of Memphis, says that “the photo reminds me of all the good that is going on in that country that never gets reported and the generosity [of NATO and U.S. forces] toward the people of Afghanistan that I consistently witnessed.”

  * * *

  A more nuanced view is offered by Bryan Groves, captain of a Special Forces team in Iraq for eight months beginning in November 2004. H
e presented his perspective during a panel discussion among veterans who, upon returning to the United States, had resumed their studies:

  From what I have seen, the press does not provide adequate coverage of the positive actions taken by our military, the Iraqi military, or the Iraqi government. Most of the airtime allotted to the war focuses on the violence that occurred that day, not on the bad characters that were removed from the streets, the infrastructure projects that were completed, or the political negotiations conducted. The broadcast media could do a better job of highlighting the political sticking points the Iraqi government needs to navigate in order to achieve national reconciliation: oil-revenue sharing, revision of de-Baathification, demobilizing militias, and amending key points of their constitution. Those are the issues of utmost importance for Iraq and America alike.17

  In short, the media did not meet its responsibility to help educate the American people about the issues and the progress of the war.

  Lt. Col. Jude Ferran, an Army operations research officer stationed in Kabul, had a less critical take on the media’s coverage of events in Afghanistan. The day-to-day priorities of his unit—including monitoring poppy cultivation and eradication, strengthening the Afghan national army, and finding sites for reconstruction projects—did not “rise to the level” of issues attracting media attention, even though his unit had a public relations officer who informed journalists of such developments. “I realized that different things were going in Afghanistan than Iraq,” where the media at the time was focusing its attention, “but I didn’t feel disrespected.” Having been on the scene, he feels now able to “read between the lines” and sense the importance of what does get covered.18

  If one of the major criticisms of the media concerns its accuracy and balance, a second involves its perceived failure to convey a sense of the wider importance of what was taking place. The stakes of the global war on terror for the United States and Europe—to say nothing of the Middle East—are perceived by veterans as far exceeding what the media conveys. “Is this war in the present tense, here in America?” asked Brian Turner, an award-winning poet who served as a captain in an Army combat brigade in Mosul in 2004. “Iraq is on the other side of the globe and the events there are mostly reported in the past tense.”19 While some soldiers hold the media accountable for the limited engagement of the American public with the issues of the wars, others fault politicians for prevailing on the media to limit coverage of certain aspects of the war, thus avoiding fuller ownership of the conflicts by the general population.

  Many soldiers in both theaters are frustrated that Americans seem so minimally engaged. Marine Col. Benjamin Braden, who served in the Special Operations Command in Operation Desert Storm and then in ground operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, believes that the media has failed to capture the essence of nation-building, a more rigorous challenge for the military to meet and for the media to convey than that of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm.20 Tyler Benson, a specialist E-4 in an Army signal battalion who is pictured on the cover of this volume and in this chapter, is critical of his fellow citizens, particularly in the American South, for provincialism and prejudice against Islam—and implicitly of the media for not widening their perspective.

  Criticisms notwithstanding, many veterans credit the media with playing a significant role in promoting popular appreciation of the contributions of the military in Afghanistan and Iraq. Amn. First Class Quincy A. Boggan, an Air Force transport logistician stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, appreciates the thank you’s received from strangers and friends for his work, although, he sensed, nobody really comprehends the extent of the sacrifice and inconvenience involved.21 Navy Petty Officer Samuel Main is guarded in his judgment about the media. “Are we getting the right news?” he was asked by an interviewer. “I don’t know,” he replied, “because we only saw what we saw. It’s hard to say what is really going on,” in part because most people keep things to themselves. Sometimes, he said, “your best information is through the media,” even though the news often seemed “light compared to what was really happening.”22

  In Afghanistan and Iraq, as in earlier wars, the media have functioned as a point of entry for the American public into the issues of the conflict. That role is noted in an editorial in the Rutland Herald, written upon the return in 2006 of 170 Vermont National Guard troops from eighteen months in Iraq. “From a safe distance,” the paper wrote, “Vermonters have been trying to comprehend the full complexity and tragic cost of the war—the competing values, the clashing goals, the frustration and sacrifice.”23 In this context, the question asked by so many of the troops is an important one: How well has the media conveyed to the American public as a whole the progress and the longer-term importance of what is taking place?

  The interview data are largely silent on a number of issues involving the media that sparked discussion among policymakers and the general public during the decade. Apart from one mention of a Reuters’ photographer, there were few comments by soldiers on the embedding of journalists within the ranks, a development heatedly debated among journalists themselves. Similarly, the Bush administration’s ban on photographing the offloading of caskets at Ramstein Air Base in Germany or at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, an item decried in some quarters as an example of “managing the news,” does not draw comment in the interviews selected.

  An Obama administration review of the no-photography policy, initiated during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 during the George H. W. Bush presidency, found people divided. According to the New York Times, “Supporters of the ban say it protects family’s privacy and keeps the deaths from becoming politicized; critics say the government is trying to sanitize the wars and reduce public awareness of their human cost.”24 On February 26, 2009, Obama’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, announced that news media would henceforth be permitted to cover the repatriation of remains, subject to the agreement of the families involved.25

  Similarly conspicuous by its relative absence in the interviews is reference to soldiers from other countries, whether as part of NATO forces in Afghanistan or of the multinational force in Iraq. By and large, the wars seem to be regarded by veterans as largely an American project. The troops do not picture themselves participating in a wider war on terror which, Bush administration rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, strikes them as global neither in the nature of the threats nor in the ownership of the response.

  BEYOND THE MEDIA

  One corrective to the perceived limitations of the media has been information conveyed by the troops themselves. Veterans’ communications from the field represent an important—and alternative—source of information and opinion. “More than any generation of troops before them,” observes the editor of a compendium of dispatches from the front, “servicemen and women today have the ability to see and hear what the media are reporting back home and how the conflicts in which they are fighting are being portrayed.”26 If newspapers offer the proverbial “first draft of history,” dispatches from soldiers may provide significant corrections for the historical record. Some have even suggested that by virtue of the photos they take and transmit, cell phones have replaced newspapers—which are experiencing problems of their own—as history’s first draft.

  Although American troops stationed in the Balkans a decade earlier made use of the Internet, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are the first wars in which most soldiers in theater have been in instant and regular communication with friends and family. Thanks to developments in satellite technology and to the efforts of several private foundations and the military itself, cyberspace has given those deployed overseas a virtual seat at their own kitchen tables. “A person can now keep his commitment to his family and keep his commitment to his country,” noted an official from Freedom Calls, an organization facilitating such contacts.27 The group has “enabled 30,000 service members in four camps to reach relatives [for] free in the past two years, setting up
live teleconferencing to broadcast the births of babies, birthday parties, weddings and graduations.”28 In no earlier war had a soldier stationed overseas been able to engage in a real-time game of Canasta with his wife in the States, a pastime that Marine Sgt. E-5 Terry Bruns looked forward to following completion of his daily shift of guard duty at the Abu Ghraib prison.29 Nor were earlier generations of fathers able, as was Marine Lt. Col. Robert C. D’Amico, to help his daughter nightly with her homework.30

  * * *

  The blogging phenomenon began in 1999. In those early days, Web logs (better known as blogs) were mostly online diaries and homepages, but they’ve evolved into portals about current events, politics and economics, law and medicine … and more, including the military. Like everything else, blogging changed after September 11, 2001. The United States and its allies were officially declaring a war against terrorists worldwide. Soldiers were being deployed in massive numbers to the Middle East. The world was rapidly changing. People were nervous and curious about what was going on with the government and the military—curious beyond their nightly or cable news. In Afghanistan and Iraq, technologically adept young soldiers were making sure they didn’t lose contact with family and friends back home. Blogging was the perfect way to maintain contact, to tell their stories. And those blogs—soon known as milblogs (military blogs) were ideal for filling in the gaps that both the media and the military left out of the war. Now anyone with an Internet connection had the ability to find out what was happening overseas from the soldiers themselves.