Finding the News

by Peter Copeland

  Hours later we were standing inside a hangar at Taif when the first F-111 strike aircraft pulled in after attacking Iraqi targets. The American pilot popped open the canopy. He was covered in sweat and trembling, exhausted but pumped with energy. He talked about flying over the targets and dropping the payload. The air force men and women working in the hangar crowded around to listen and cheer.

  The TV people in our pool, reporter Judd Rose and a crew from ABC, were happy with the good access to the pilots and their candor. Judd prepared the video to ship to the pool office, which would distribute it to the media of the world. Because we did not have a way to communicate other than through the military, we had to send the tapes on air force flights. I made hard copies of our print stories and gave them to the handlers to be transmitted by military fax to the pool headquarters. Then we waited. And waited. Our stories never moved.

  We badgered the press officers to deliver our stories. They told us they were “at the top of the stack” to go out, but then some other priority—ammo, medical supplies, vital wartime communications—knocked them to the bottom of the pile. Our handlers promised they were lobbying on our behalf, but the base commanders did not think news stories were as important as fighting the war. We couldn’t argue with that logic, but we assumed that an air force that could drop a bomb on a bunker hidden in the desert ought to be able to deliver a harmless little news story.

  We lived in tents on the flight line, just a few feet from a busy runway. The nights were cold, and I slept in my clothes, with a t-shirt wrapped in a turban around my head to keep warm. The roar of the jets kept me from sleeping more than a few minutes at a time, so I stayed up watching the planes being loaded with fuel and bombs. The energy on the base was electric: everybody, from the cooks to the men and women doing maintenance, felt as if they were flying on the bombing runs.

  When our pool reports eventually appeared on the TV and radio, it was fifty hours after we had filed. By then they sounded stale and not interesting. Jonathan Wiggs, a Boston Globe photographer, told me, “Don’t worry. It’ll be a long war.”

  We decided the only way to do our jobs was to get off the base. We weren’t exactly prisoners, but we could not just call a taxi into town. A couple of times, we scrambled to catch a military flight out, only to be bumped by someone more important. Finally, we boarded a C-130 and landed in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in the middle of the night. I was happy to get to a hotel, mostly for the phone. The porcelain toilet was nice, too. I called the office and filed my accumulated pool reports, at least the ones that were not “O.B.E.”—overtaken by events.

  I was too wired to sleep, so before sunrise I visited the Central Command headquarters. I complained to one of Schwarzkopf’s guys about how our pool was not allowed to file, and he predicted all that eagerness to be close to the action would stop when the first journalist was killed.

  On the way out of the building, I ran into a source from another story, long ago in another country. When we had met years before, we were just kids starting our new careers. Now we caught up a little, and talked about our wives and families. I told him about my frustrations trying to cover the story. I worried that the ground war would launch while I was still in a hotel far from the action. Relax, he said, the ground attack would not start for a couple of weeks. Until then, they were just going to pound the Iraqis from the air.

  I asked how he could be so sure. He just smiled. Then he risked his job, and his high-level security clearance, to tell me exactly where I should position myself to cover the eventual ground attack from up close. He knew me and trusted I never would reveal his name. He wanted me to do well. Normally I liked to have more than one source for a story, and I preferred documents to a hallway conversation, but this was a case where a single human source—one I had not tapped in years—surprised me with a most valuable gift.

  Now I knew where to be for the ground war, but I couldn’t get there alone. I needed the military to authorize a trip, assign an escort, and find a commander who would take a reporter along for the ground attack. I told Stewart what I had learned, without revealing my source. We were working together, even if we were competitors, and my information jibed with what he had learned from his own reporting.

  Stewart and I were in the media hotel plotting how to cover the coming ground war when I heard a deep muffled “whump, whump.” The sound was like someone moving a couch on the floor above us. Before I could say anything, Stewart was out the door, a notebook in one hand and a gas mask in the other, rubber straps flapping behind him. Running down the hall after Stewart, I followed other people racing for the stairs. From the yelling and the scattered shouts, I realized the sound I had heard was a US Patriot missile battery trying to shoot down an incoming Scud missile. There was no way for us to know if Saddam’s missile, about the size of a telephone pole, had made it through, or if it carried poison gas. We ran down the stairs to the basement and found places to sit on the floor.

  The basement filled with hotel guests and staff, most of them wearing gas masks. Sitting on the cool concrete floor, we looked like anteaters. My mind wandered to stories I had read about Israelis in bomb shelters, also hiding from Iraqi Scuds. Some Israelis had panicked inside their masks and suffocated, the stories said, the gas masks actually causing their deaths instead of preventing them. Could that happen to me? My heart started racing and my breathing got harder. I actually was talking myself into a panic attack. Was I going to suffocate? The more I breathed, the more difficult it was to get oxygen. Slow down, be calm. Focus on your breathing. I pretended to be scuba diving.

  There was little talking. You couldn’t really talk with the masks, and no one wanted to. Everyone was waiting for a sign the danger had passed. A pretty woman was sitting in front of me, pretty even with a rubber snout. I saw her pale hand resting on her leg. I looked at her and she smiled a little with her eyes. I wanted to reach out and touch her, to hold her hand. Breathe, I told myself, just breathe. If gas had started coming down into the basement, I would have taken her hand, one final beautiful thing.

  After about forty minutes, the all-clear sounded. We took off our masks and wiped sweaty faces. I scratched my head where the rubber had plastered my hair. People were laughing, still jittery but now relieved. I stretched my legs and back. The woman in front of me was even more attractive without her mask.

  She smiled at me.

  In the afterglow of our shared danger, I told her my name and said that if this had been a real emergency, I would have taken her hand.

  She introduced herself as Della from CNN.

  I don’t know what I would have done if you had rejected me, I confessed.

  I would have taken your hand, Della said, and suddenly we were close.

  We talked comfortably, like we had known each other. She seemed to feel what I was thinking, and I wondered what would happen next. The contact, the intimacy, was the other side of fear.

  If she had invited me upstairs, I would have gone with her. It would have been a huge mistake.

  My happy marriage was momentarily eclipsed. It wasn’t that I debated breaking my vows to Maru, or wondered if I could get away with it; right then my marriage did not exist. Nothing existed outside that moment on the floor of the basement when we realized we were still alive.

  Fortunately, Della brushed herself off and said good-bye, and I did not see her again. My thinking returned to normal, and the moment was forgotten. Adrenaline, like alcohol, blocked rational thought and loosened inhibitions. Not always in a good way.

  I watched military briefings, worked out in the hotel gym, and nibbled nervously on local delicacies: dates and pistachios. US and coalition planes were bombing Kuwait next door, but the war seemed remote. I looked through the pool reports to find a nugget of news. I felt guilty taking stories from other reporters—in normal times this was considered plagiarism and one of the few things absolutely forbidden by our code—but independent reporting on the troops was difficult outside the pool system. I w
as selective about which pool reports I tapped, however. Reporters were not equally talented, so I used only pool material that sounded accurate or was filed by someone I trusted.

  Finally, our pool was called back into action. By action, our handlers meant a behind-the-scenes look at a maintenance company that kept all those trucks running. We went along, happy to get out of the hotel. The lieutenant colonel who greeted us said he wanted to make a few things clear. “Before you roll,” he said, trying to use the lingo, “I don’t want you to ask anything negative. I want you to accentuate the positive.” Simon, the ABC cameraman, was rolling the entire time, but he had taped over the camera’s little red light that indicated it was recording. I almost warned the colonel, but kept my mouth shut.

  ABC correspondent Judd Rose decided to use the trip to the maintenance company—and our earlier hostage situation at the air base in Taif—for a story on how the military was controlling the press. His timing was good: the day the story aired, CBS reporter Bob Simon and his crew, driving in the desert without a military handler, went missing. No one was saying whether the reporters were lost, captured, or killed.

  I called Maru, my mom, and the office to tell them I was going to appear in Judd’s piece for Primetime Live. No matter how many stories I wrote for newspapers, my family was always more impressed seeing me on television.

  The next day, Dale said the consensus in the office was that I should stay off TV, at least if I was going to complain about the military. People back home were rallying behind the troops, Dale said, and if they were going to take sides, they weren’t going to line up with the reporters. Judd told me ABC took a lot of calls, all saying the whining reporters should shut the hell up. Maru and my mom said I looked handsome.

  I never thought of myself as being on the opposite side of the US military at war. True, our interests were not the same: the military wanted to keep secrets, and my job was to expose them. But if I had to choose, and sometimes I did, I considered myself an American before a reporter. The simple proof was I did not reveal the most sensitive information from the US side, but I would have quickly published classified information from the Iraqis. My duty as a reporter required me to tell the truth about the military, good and bad, but I was careful not to endanger the US troops. So I didn’t consider myself an enemy of the US military, even if I refused to be an unquestioning cheerleader.

  At thirty-three, I now completely thought of myself as a reporter. It wasn’t just what I did; it was my whole identity. My younger, leftist political ideology was gone, replaced by a belief in nonpartisan, fact-driven journalism as a calling and a mission. I had the same level of passion, but I had changed from activist to observer. Having once been steered by my own strong political beliefs, I was suspicious of all ideology in others, whether on the left or the right. My goal was to see and explain things for what they were, not how I wanted them to be.

  Journalism also fulfilled my need for a sense of purpose and community and gave me an identity I was proud to share. The same craving for belonging and being part of something important that I had sought in college activism was fully satisfied by journalism. That’s also why the infighting over the media pools was so painful. When the pack tightened ranks, I was left outside.

  I felt emotionally secure in the pack, but it wasn’t always enough to protect me. I was reminded of this one clear dawn when I sat in my hotel room and watched the horizon lighten over the Persian Gulf. The view was vast and calming, shades of deep blue water and sky. The mornings came as a relief, because I knew Saddam would not be dumb enough to fire a missile during the daylight when US aircraft could track and destroy the launchers. Then BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—explosions rattled the window.

  Now I recognized the sound of a Patriot battery firing at an incoming missile. I grabbed my gas mask and dove to the floor, putting the bed between me and the sliding glass door. Then everything was silent. My face on the carpet, I could hear the air conditioner whirring. There was no other sound. Was it a Scud? Was it armed with chemicals? If it had a conventional warhead, why didn’t I hear it explode?

  After a few minutes, the curiosity drove me crazy and I crawled to the window. I looked around and didn’t see anything unusual. Traffic was light but normal. The water was empty except for fishing boats. I slid open the glass door, stood on the balcony, and sniffed the air like a dog, which was about the stupidest way to check for poison gas. Nothing. Then the air raid sirens went off, which made me tighten up again. I leaned over the balcony, but there were no fires or rescue vehicles. False alarm?

  I was shaking a little when I went back into the room and turned the television to CNN. Two reporters I knew, Charles Jaco and Carl Rochelle, were live from the roof of the media hotel down the road. They were reporting on the explosions I had just heard, answering questions from the anchor in Atlanta. Suddenly Jaco grabbed his gas mask and fumbled to put it on. There was real fear in his eyes. I grabbed my own mask and shoved it to my face, holding it on with one hand and staring at the television, my heart pounding.

  Then Jaco removed his mask, took a breath and sheepishly apologized. He had smelled something funny and felt dizzy, he said. Wasn’t anything.

  I laughed and relaxed a little. I had calmed myself looking out the window at the flat blue water of the gulf, at reality, but the reporters on the television screen almost gave me a heart attack. So much for feeling safe in the media pack.

  At the end of January, our pool went to the front. The military believed the bombing had weakened the Iraqis, but ground troops would be necessary to drive them out of Kuwait. I needed to be with those ground troops. My strategy, based on what I had pieced together about the still-secret battle plan, was to hook up with the VII Corps, the massive armored force preparing for the ground attack. I was taken to King Khalid Military City, the Saudi base that was an operational hub in the northern desert. I carried a change of clothes, some camping gear, a laptop computer and battery-operated printer, a helmet and flak vest, and a chemical suit, which came sealed in a thick, plastic bag.

  I froze the first night in the desert. The weather was totally different from when I had been here in the summer. Now it was gray and rainy, chilly during the day and freezing at night. I had a cot that got me off the ground, but it offered little protection from the cold. By the morning I could see my breath, and I woke with my sleeping bag covered in frost.

  The soldiers taught me a few tricks to keep warm, such as putting a bath towel on the cot for insulation, and the plastic poncho on top to trap the heat. I looked forward to the warm breakfast in the mess tent: a scoop of scrambled eggs, a scoop of potatoes, and a scoop of creamed beef (“On top or on the side?”). Lunch was packaged Meals, Ready-to-Eat, or MREs, and dinner was a piece of meat, vegetable mush, and a scoop of potatoes. I looked for tables with bottles of ketchup because the taste reminded me of home.

  On the first clear day, I gladly stripped off layers of bulky clothing and curled up on top of a sandbagged bunker with a bunch of soldiers, all of us happy as cats in the sun. Smaller things, even an hour of sunshine, felt more meaningful. I was thrilled when I scavenged a piece of cardboard to put on the sand next to my cot. Then, when I woke up, I had a clean place to pull on my stiff, icy boots. I remembered to shake out the boots first, in case a scorpion had taken up residence during the night. Four days and then a week passed without a shower, and my hair felt like a straw broom. I debated a “high and tight” haircut, and plenty of soldiers offered to provide the shears.

  There was nothing to do while we waited for the ground attack. The military handlers tried to keep us busy with feature stories, but our focus was on the actual fighting, which was difficult to cover because it was not safe to drive around the battlefield that was being bombed. Many reporters believed they were neutral in the conflict and should have been allowed to go anywhere. While that was true in theory, it was difficult to cover the bombing without being captured by the Iraqis or hit by a bomb. We learned later that reporter Bob Simon
and his CBS crew, driving around the desert, had been taken prisoner by Iraqi forces. A few extraordinarily brave journalists covered the war from Baghdad, under tight restrictions by the Iraqis, but most of the reporters were working out of hotels in Saudi Arabia.

  One feature story I enjoyed writing was about scrounging, a venerable tradition in the military. So while the handlers took us to cover “The World’s Largest Laundry,” I snuck off and talked to soldiers about trading crates of fruit juice for ammo or radios for blankets. The trading wasn’t for personal gain (that I saw), but there was no way a distant headquarters could anticipate every soldier’s needs, so a freewheeling barter system filled the gaps. There was a cash-free market for everything from clothing to food to weapons.

  A military handler tried to prevent me from talking with guys from the 101st Airborne, and he accused me of conducting “unauthorized interviews.” I ignored him and kept talking with the soldiers about scrounging.

  A different problem emerged when a senior officer from the 101st confronted me. He was big and solid and squared away, and he knew it. I introduced myself, but he already knew who I was.

  He snarled: “You’re the one who called us the ‘Screaming Chickens.’”

  Well, I tried to explain, I was just quoting the guys you went up against at the training center, and wow, great memory, that was like two years ago. All in good fun.

  He pretended not to get the joke, but in the end, that little story probably helped more than it hurt. At least he knew my name.

  One of my poolmates, Tim Collie, declared he was fed up with features and went on strike. He refused to write anything that wasn’t directly related to combat. Tim’s patience broke when Iraqi ground troops surprised everyone at the end of January and punched down into the Saudi town of Khafji. The attack was a shock because we were assured the Iraqis were dug in on defense, and it played against the US military’s preferred narrative of a weakened Iraqi force. This was actual ground combat not far from us, but we were not allowed to cover it.