Finding the News

by Peter Copeland

  That night we crowded into a large tent with a television to watch General Schwarzkopf talking about the attack on Khafji. He tried to make light of the Iraqi attack, but the fact that he personally gave the briefing made me worry. When he belittled a news story about the fighting as being “bovine scatology,” the soldiers in the TV tent hooted and hollered, stomping their boots on the plywood floor and cheering the boss. After the briefing, nobody but me wanted to watch the news, so we watched a video of “Internal Affairs.”

  By February 1, I was back in Dhahran, still waiting for the ground war. I was anxious to get it over with, but at the same time I welcomed the delay because I knew US planes were bombing the Iraqis around the clock. The more the Iraqi force was “degraded,” the safer it would be for me during the ground invasion. I knew that “degraded” was a euphemism, but I didn’t care what they called it, as long as they kept doing it, relentlessly.

  I felt a constant, achy fever of low-level fear. I remembered Ernie Pyle writing about the dulled sense of danger, and now I understood why his stories always included each soldier’s name and home address, and sometimes the names of their parents and girlfriends. We had to remember that these were people from back home in mortal danger, not characters in our dispatches. The grand strategy seemed important in the hotel and at the briefings, but not in the field. Out there the only things real were the cold and discomfort, the fear, and the person next to you.

  I was tired all the time, partly because there was nothing to do and partly because of the uncertainty. My nerves felt scraped. That’s how a Marine I had interviewed described his feelings here—“scraped nerves.” Now I understood what he meant. I was afraid to stray too far from the hotel because I knew the call to go forward could come at any moment. I hated being dependent on the military and the other reporters for a pool slot. We had allowed ourselves to be penned up in little groups, and then we fought among ourselves.

  I called my mom 7,000 miles away to tell her I was fine, still waiting. She wanted to know when I was coming home, but I didn’t know. Maru was not taking it well, my mom said, and was going back to Mexico for awhile. I felt terrible about upsetting them, but I never considered leaving the war. My self-respect, the way I saw myself, depended on doing a good job here. This was not about needing a paycheck or feeling obligated to cover the war. The desk would have let me come home any time, no questions asked. This was about pride and doing the right thing and the story of a lifetime.

  My mother and wife were under more stress than I was because they got a distorted view of the war from television. If my nerves were scraped, my mom’s were rubbed raw. She was a faithful newspaper reader (having grown up as the daughter of two journalists), and now she watched CNN all day and most of the night. She was hardly sleeping. She said the war seemed to be bogging down and not going well at all. I told her to turn off the TV. The coverage was misleading her about the war, and scaring her needlessly about my safety.

  The war I was living was not the war she saw on television. Saddam launched Scuds at Israel and Saudi Arabia, where most of the reporters were based, so the missile strikes dominated the TV coverage. Camera crews slept wrapped in blankets on the hotel roofs waiting for Scud attacks to light up the sky. The real story was a few miles to the north, where Iraqi forces were being pounded into the dirt. Their air cover was gone, their tanks were being destroyed, and their supply lines and communications were cut. Nobody was there to report it because of the danger, however, so it was as if it never happened.

  Because television coverage was defined by video, the Scud had grown in stature from a wildly inaccurate, flying car bomb to the most feared weapon on the planet. In the TV war, military success was not measured in combat effectiveness but in airtime. No matter what the US military reported in briefings, the images of the Scuds were more powerful. The missile stories were so ubiquitous that NBC reporter Arthur Kent, poor guy, was nicknamed the Scud Stud.

  I was discouraged that television was distorting the reality of the war, and furious that my mom was frightened by the coverage. I grabbed a stack of pool reports for quotes and color, checked with military people I trusted, and banged out an explainer about how US pilots were free to fly across Kuwait and Iraq without challenge. They could drop whatever bombs they wanted, wherever and whenever they wanted, and there was nothing Saddam could do. This all seemed obvious to me, but I wrote the story because of the media-induced misperceptions of my mother, my one true barometer of US public opinion.

  Tim couldn’t stand the waiting and was ready to be strapped to the first tank going into Iraq. Just for something to do, we decided to drive from Dhahran to the capital city, Riyadh, to attend a military briefing. The live performance by both sides was even worse than what we had watched on television. The official information from the military was thin, and the questions from reporters were weak. The military was crowing about having destroyed six hundred tanks. They thought the number was impressive, but I kept thinking about all the remaining tanks. If we were going to roll into Iraq and Kuwait, I wanted the path to be clear of tanks, all of them.

  After the briefing, I visited one of Schwarzkopf’s advisers. He wanted to know about the pools, and I said they were working well for the military but not so well for journalism. He was upset with reporters ignoring the ground rules and even reporting the exact location of specific units.

  “You have obligations,” he said. “I want to see what happens when the first journalist is responsible for the death of a soldier. You say, ‘Don’t worry about our safety; that’s our problem,’ but when Bob Simon is missing it becomes our problem and we get called every day.”

  The desk in Washington, as bored with the waiting as I was, suggested a light feature about Desert Storm humor. It sounded like a good idea at first, and I collected a few jokes, although most were too racist (against Arabs) or too vulgar for family newspapers. The bigger problem with the concept was that the closer we got to a ground war, the less funny everything seemed. I kept putting off the story, hoping Dale would forget about it. I wasn’t in a humorous mood.

  A wall of tears was dammed behind my eyes, and I could feel the pressure of sadness and fear. I finally broke down when I couldn’t find my wedding ring. I didn’t even remember taking off the ring, until I noticed it was gone. My finger had a white line where the gold band should have been. I panicked. It felt like such a bad omen; I imagined refusing to go forward without the ring. I went through all the drawers in my hotel room, dumped the trash onto the floor, and finally found it under the bed. I suddenly felt all alone and imagined Maru leaving me. That wouldn’t happen in real life, I thought, only in my waking nightmares. It was a comfort to know she was waiting for me.

  I put the ring on a chain I wore around my neck with a dog tag. Soldiers advised me to wear the ring on a chain because otherwise it could get caught on a hatch or piece of machinery and tear off my finger. When I first was issued dog tags by the military, I tried to make a joke about not being in the army. Why do I need these? I asked. I’m just visiting! The tags were stamped with my name, blood type, and “Christian.”

  Maj. Barry Bomier, a friend from Washington, advised me to lace one tag on my boot and wear one around my neck. The reason, he explained, was in case I was sent home in pieces.

  Then we got the call: the ground attack was on, and I was going. The low-level fear kicked up to full-blown, near-paralyzing dread. Packing my stuff in the hotel, I was half watching the movie The Great Gatsby on television, and I wanted to wear one of those sharp suits and to party and have fun at least one more time. Instead I obsessed over an interview with a soldier who had told me about “Bouncing Betty” landmines. You heard the mine “click,” it popped up in your face, and it exploded. The mine, he said, turned you into “pink mist.”

  The tiredness and lethargy, the depression, were gone, replaced by a buzzing fear and anticipation. Even Tim was afraid, which was both scary and comforting. I was glad Maru had gone to Mexico. She would
be busy with her family, and I wouldn’t be distracted worrying about her worrying about me.

  After rushing back to the desert at King Khalid Military City, we waited. It was Day 30 of Operation Desert Storm. This was the regular rhythm of military life and the reporters who covered it: we stood by for a call, hurried to go, then waited some more. I pulled my cot out of the tent to sit in the sunshine and read a book called How to Make War. I was interested in the topic, I wanted to write with authority, and what better time than now to learn about warfare?

  Engrossed in my book, I heard shouting back and forth, soldiers talking in excited voices. Something was up. I walked over to the TV tent and waited for the Today Show. The news came on, and we learned there was a deal to get Saddam out of Kuwait peacefully. There would be no need for a ground attack. The soldiers cheered and exchanged high-fives, but some voiced skepticism. I felt tremendous relief and excitement that I could return home. Tim sobered me up by saying we should hurry to Kuwait City for the Iraqi withdrawal. He was right, but I just wanted to go home.

  11

  THE GROUND WAR

  ——— ON LOYALTY ———

  The peace deal didn’t last long. Preparations for a ground attack accelerated. The military handlers divided our pool for broader coverage, and Tim went off with the Seventh Engineers. He, of course, was thrilled to be in the first wave. I was grateful I was not chosen to cover the clearing of landmines, but I missed him.

  The military gave me an assignment that was almost the opposite of Tim’s spot at the tip of the spear. They chose me to cover the Second Corps Support Command, which supplied the beans and bullets for the troops. I would have electricity, the ability to file stories, and a tent to keep me warm and dry. The bad news was that I would be near the fighting but not in it, and forced to rely on second-hand pool reports.

  I had to think about this: How was I going to cover the war from the rear? I ate breakfast and noticed there was no line at the so-called shower, which was an upright, coffin-sized box made of plywood and topped with a bucket of water. Tugging a rope tipped the bucket and dribbled the icy water onto my head and shoulders. Shivering naked in the cold, I soaped up and rinsed, trying to wash away the sand that had found its way into every crevice of my body. The shower felt wonderful. I remembered reading that Ernie Pyle and the soldiers he lived with went weeks without bathing. What would people say about me? “His stories weren’t much, but he was always clean.”

  I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and I really did appreciate the role of the support troops, but I had to go forward. With my hair still wet from the shower, I went to see the military handlers to negotiate a way to cover the fighting. The compromise was that I would write a couple of stories from the rear about beans and bullets, and then I could pick between the artillery and the attack helicopters. Could I fly with the helicopters? Of course not, they said. I chose the artillery.

  While the handlers looked for an artillery unit that would let me ride along, I took the advanced course on army life. The soldiers happily taught me important survival techniques, such as how to use the stiff collars on the flak jacket to sleep sitting up while appearing to be awake, and how to warm an MRE field ration in your armpit for thirty minutes. Even better was how to heat the heavy plastic pouch on a tank engine. I learned to prepare a decent peach cobbler from dehydrated fruit, crumbled crackers, sugar, and powdered creamer. Just add water and serve!

  The nightly entertainment was passing around a flashlight with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The army was a giant repository of bad jokes and one-liners. Why does that thing have a head on it? So you don’t lose your grip. I understood why comedian Bob Hope, a self-deprecating wise guy, had been so popular during World War II.

  A big soldier was wheeled into our field hospital on a creaky gurney. He was a black man, but his face was gray, and someone had pulled up his uniform shirt to reveal a thick chest and stomach. He had been in a truck accident. I thought the guy looked bad. Later someone told me that when I saw him, he already was dead. My first casualty of the war.

  ABC’s Jim Wooten, one of those solid newspapermen who became network correspondents, took me aside after dinner. “It’s good that you were upset by seeing that dead body at the hospital,” he said. “Don’t ever lose your sense of horror. You are going to see more bodies, and don’t ever stop being shocked by it.”

  I felt such heaviness here, and there was so much idle time to wallow in it. I despaired because I was witnessing a tragedy. If Saddam kept up whatever he was doing—it wasn’t clear to me exactly what he was doing—there would be a massive war. The two sides were hurtling toward each other, and there was no way to avoid the crash. I felt like a passenger in a fast car slipping on ice; all I could do was hold on.

  The deepest, heaviest sadness came from the weight of all this military hardware, all these tanks and trucks and planes, and all these people armed and picking up steam, readying to roll on Iraq. There was little discussion in the US media about the long-term consequences of a war, and I personally never thought about it. Afterwards we would ask whether it was worth it.

  Right then, I didn’t think about what it meant. I thought only about how bloody and rough it was going to be, and about how long we were going to be there. The right or wrong of it seemed too far away to bother with. I knew that when the fighting started I would hope it went fast and hard so it ended quickly, much the way I appreciated the beautiful sunny days for bombing. I wondered about the Iraqi soldiers in their trenches and couldn’t (and didn’t) imagine how they were suffering. At night we saw flashes like heat lightning when bombs exploded on Iraqi positions, and the ground rumbled from miles away.

  The low feelings were interrupted by pangs of guilt and doubt about Maru. I worried that she couldn’t get along without me, and then I worried that she could. I missed celebrating Maru’s twenty-ninth birthday and our fourth wedding anniversary. Instead, I visited an artillery brigade.

  My escort, a Public Affairs officer, wasn’t told exactly where to take me, but the artillery was somewhere to the east, so we put the setting sun at our backs and drove across the desert in a CUCV (or Commercial Utility Cargo Vehicle, and pronounced CUCK-VEE, even though it was a plain old pickup truck). We were hugging the Kuwaiti border, just south of where the Iraqis were dug in for the final stand. We passed a line of US tanks, some Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and then lonely groups of American soldiers in scattered foxholes.

  We kept going, and I looked back to see the soldiers staring after us. Soon we were alone in the desert and heading down a dirt road that ended abruptly at a tall sand berm. The bumper was touching the berm before we realized we had been going northeast, not due east, and we were now close enough to pee into Iraq. Resisting the temptation to do just that, the escort slammed the truck into reverse, the wheels spun, and we roared backwards until it was safe to whirl around. I slumped down in my seat, waiting for an Iraqi bullet to crash through the back window. We raced toward the American frontline, and the soldiers stood up in alarm, weapons pointing at our rapidly advancing truck. We waved a friendly greeting, but they angrily shouted at us to slow down.

  We found the artillery brigade, and that night the soldiers put me in a Humvee to watch a raid on Iraqi troops. The artillery had been pounding the Iraqis to clear the way for the eventual ground attack, which the soldiers agreed would happen soon. Everyone, me included, wondered what the ground attack would be like, and how we would perform in combat. The first sergeant, Lee Kane, said it best: “It’s like having a baby. You don’t know until it happens how you will react.”

  The Humvee smelled of hot coffee, cigarette smoke, and unwashed men—it reminded me of waiting in a duck blind, the same peaceful coziness and quiet anticipation that something big was going to happen involving loud weapons and adrenaline. The difference was, ducks could not shoot back, and people were going to die tonight.

  The empty desert was completely dark, and we observed light discipline,
meaning no unnecessary lights that would give away our location. I could barely see my hands. Command Sgt. Maj. Harold Shrewsberry was saying that Saddam was in trouble already, but if he really wanted deep shit all he had to do was launch a terrorist attack on army families back home. . . . I was dozing, comfy and warm.

  There was a flash of light and a whoosh that rocked the Humvee and shook me awake. Shrewsberry said, “Here we go.”

  Rocket launchers and howitzers were lined up in a row across the desert, suddenly visible in the dark because of the white flames shooting from the tubes. The darkness went to light so suddenly that the scene looked like a black-and-white photograph. Rockets soared in long arcs toward the Iraqi bunkers a few miles north. Each rocket carried 644 fist-sized bomblets that floated to earth and blew up on top of tanks or in the faces of the dug-in soldiers.

  Just as suddenly, the guns stopped like a switch had been thrown, and everything went dark and quiet. The troops, almost invisible again in the night, packed up the guns and rocket launchers to scoot out of range of Iraqi artillery returning fire.

  Shrewsberry handed me a pair of night vision goggles that turned the sand a cool, fuzzy green. I noticed an American tank off to our side. The tanker noticed me at the same time, and the turret swung menacingly toward us and locked on our Humvee. The sergeant major saw the tank, too, and he jumped out and waved off the tank, just to be safe.

  Still wound up from the raid, I threw down my sleeping bag in the sand and tried to rest. I had been asleep for a few hours when a soldier politely but firmly shook my sleeping bag. “Sir,” he said, “it’s already 7 o’clock,” as if I had missed half the day. I wandered over to a fire pit heating a tub of water to warm little tins of ravioli, which tasted surprisingly good for breakfast.