War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘But how can we forget? We’ll never forget any of it, never. Admit it. Go on, admit it!’

  Christopher John Farley

  MY FAVOURITE WAR

  The Gulf War of 1991 will always be remembered as a media paradox – no other war in this century could be followed on television for twenty-four hours; yet nobody, least of all the press, seemed to know what was really going on.

  Christopher John Farley’s satirical novel, My Favourite War (1997), tells the story of a young black newspaper reporter who is unexpectedly sent to the Gulf to cover the war.

  NEVER HAVE SO many known so little about so much. I had finally arrived at the bureaucracy of dunces that was the media community of the Persian Gulf War. When I stepped off the plane at the airport in Dhahran, I was hit by a blast of light and heat; the desert sun was unblinking, unforgiving. I had read that the temperature was supposed to drop to something manageable during the winter months here, but that certainly wasn’t the case today. It would be hard for me to get my bearings in this draining desert heat, in a country I knew next to nothing about, and in wartime no less.

  After Sojourner and I arrived at the Dhahran International Hotel, I realized I wasn’t alone in my confusion and bewilderment. The five-star hotel was packed with reporters from all over America, journalists from small papers and large papers, TV crews and radio announcers. None of them had a clue either. They couldn’t speak this country’s language, they didn’t know about the customs, they were all complaining bitterly about the relentless heat.

  As a reporter, I knew firsthand that journalists weren’t gods, that they weren’t superheroes, that the stories they filed were patch jobs, hastily arranged, usually riddled with errors. But I guess in wartime that last little scrap within me that was optimistic and idealistic expected something different. I expected a press corps filled with grizzled supersleuths, willing to go anywhere and brave anything to get to the sludge at the bottom of the barrel of this war. But here they all were. Some of them were twentysomethings like me, waiting expectantly to see their first war. Others were fat, soft forty-year-olds, finally freed from their desks and hoping for a taste of action.

  What disturbed me most was that these reporters wanted war. They were impatient for the action to start. They were tired of this foreign minister meeting that foreign minister, of the UN issuing resolutions, of the pollsters taking polls showing support for the use of force. They had come too far and had been waiting too long. They were tired of the sun and the sand and the prospect of stumbling upon the six-inch scorpions said to be somewhere in that sand. They were tired of the restrictions on alcohol and drugs. They had seen war in movies, read about it in books, heard the bitching about war from their draft-dodging Vietnam-era fathers and uncles, and now they wanted their own war. Covering a war was the culmination of any reporter’s career and they wanted the culmination to begin. The diddling, the foreplay, the sloppy deep-throated kissing, the nipple-tweaking had all been going on for months. They were hot, sweaty, bothered, and they were ready to come, shouting ‘Hallelujah,’ and bucking their hips while simultaneously popping quarters into the vibrator bed. They wanted a wargasm and they wanted it now.

  The hotel was overbooked. Sojourner and I would have to share a room.

  When we got to the room, we realized we’d have to share a bed as well. A very small bed. It was more of a cot, actually.

  I thought this was a five-star hotel, I said.

  ‘There’s a war brewing,’ said Sojourner, tossing her luggage on the bed. ‘You want me to call room service, see if they can send up a more comfortable war?’

  On-site media coverage of the Gulf War was organized into a pool system. The US military claimed it couldn’t accommodate the flood of media people, so members of the press were forced into a cooperative in which rotating groups of reporters would be allowed to go out into the field with troops, each group accompanied by a military guide. The reporters would then file pool reports that would be shared by the whole cooperative.

  The pool system was a perfect fit for a generation of reporters weaned on corporate newspapers, press-release reporting, and celebrity press junkets where ten reporters sat around a table interviewing one Hollywood star and then called it journalism. The pool system was part of what helped Bush sell the war; it effectively castrated the press. Reporters would think twice about risking their lives or reputations to get a story when it was just gonna be part of a pool report anyways. Pool reporting was notoriously slipshod. No gain, no pain, was the operative philosophy for many of the journalists involved.

  In Vietnam, reporters roamed the countryside freely, hunting down stories, exposing atrocities. That kind of coverage, the ability to expose the war’s horrors, helped shape public opinion and put a stop to Vietnam. In the Persian Gulf, the post-Vietnam military wasn’t about to make that same mistake. All reporters were to be accompanied by military-provided press representatives, chaperons for this Prom Date from Hell, supposedly to look out for the safety of reporters and show them around, but in truth, these press officers were passive-aggressive censors. They weren’t always blatant about shaping coverage, but it was hard to write a story that was critical of the war when your guide was one of the warriors.

  There were four main pools – the TV pool, the radio pool, the photo pool, and the print pool.

  The head of the print pool was a guy named Nick Adams. Back in the States he was a small-time editor for the Chicago Tribune. Running the print pool involved pushing a lot of papers, stroking a lot of erect egos until they spurted out contentment. It was a thankless, time-consuming job that paid nothing. Adams volunteered for the position and took to it as eagerly as a televangelist at a hookers’ convention. You just know that back in high school, Adams was one of those slimeballs in the safety patrol – the losers with the orange sashes that told other kids to stop running in the halls and gave them a ticket when they failed to comply. In the States, Adams was a small-fry journalist; here, he was a big shot, in control, wearing the metaphorical orange sash.

  Every day a list was posted containing the names of the reporters allowed to go into the field and the military units they would be assigned to. It was a long list, a rotating list, and it took a while to ascend to the top. That is, unless you got to know Nick Adams. If he knew you, if he liked you, Adams could hook you up with field slot, and you could finally get out of the hotel and do some real reporting. If he didn’t like you, you might as well hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on your hotel-suite doorknob, ’cause it was going to be a long, indoor war for you.

  Sojourner and I went to talk to the print-pool czar. Adams was a small pimply man, dressed from head to toe in Banana Republic pseudo safari gear and a cowboy hat. When he took off his hat you could see he was a hopelessly balding man, with just a few Charlie Brown/Homer Simpson strands of hair stretched and spun and teased across his bald pate.

  Sojourner didn’t have much luck trying to get herself inserted on to the list. Adams didn’t like her. He was familiar with her columns in the Post and he didn’t like her attitude, didn’t think her perspective would be one that would really contribute to the field. After all, she was into black issues, women’s issues, human-interest stories. He didn’t come right out and say it, but Adams thought this was a man’s war, and it should be covered by men. It was bad enough that the military had women in probable combat zones, but he wouldn’t make the same mistake with the print corps. He wanted the pool reports that came back to have a hard, male, five-o’clock-shadow, big-swinging-hairy-brass-balls, Y-chromosome edge. He knew the way men like that thought. He knew the kind of stories they’d bring back. The kind of stories he could predict.

  ‘Listen, I think I get your gist here,’ said Sojourner. ‘It seems to me that you want me to prove I can hack it out in the field. I’m a reporter for the Washington Post. You’ve got a male reporter from GQ filing stories from the front, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘L-I-l-listen,’ said Adams, who had a stutte
r. ‘I-I-I-I have two reporters from the Post out in the field already. W-w-w-what can I do? If a slot comes up, I’ll call you. That’s the best I can d-d-d-do.’

  ‘Goddamn military doesn’t need to censor the press,’ Sojourner muttered as we took the elevator downstairs to grab a bite to eat. ‘We’re censoring our own goddamn selves.’

  How so?

  ‘The guy knows I’m the shit,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. ‘He doesn’t want any real reporters in the field. Just his buddies, the men, the ones who are gonna play by the rules and do the stories that don’t rock the boat, or that rock it in a way everyone can anticipate. So the public gets bland coverage and General One-hundred-and-seventy-IQ Pinpoint doesn’t have to raise a finger to enforce the homogeneity.’

  Clark Gorrelesmen, a.k.a. ‘the Girly-Man’, was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He wasn’t gay or effeminate, but everyone called him the Girly-Man because there was just something about the guy that called for it. He was a redhead, but he was considered the Los Angeles Times’s Golden Boy. Here he was, just twenty-six years old, fresh out of Stanford, and he was covering a war, with real bullets and everything. One look at him and I was disgusted. Here he was, in the desert, wearing a blue blazer, a button-down white shirt, striped tie, khaki designer pants, and Dock-Sider shoes.

  ‘Just work within the pool system and you’ll be okay,’ the Girly-Man told me.

  Are you one of the pool coordinators?

  ‘No, I just like to let the new people know that there is a pool and that people need to abide by the rules. If one person goes unilateral and breaks the pool and gets a scoop, the system breaks down.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Sojourner, elbowing me in the side as if to say, ‘What an asshole dweeb!’

  ‘If I’m going to forsake scoops to work with the system, I think we all have to do it,’ explained the Girly-Man.

  Sojourner was ticked about our meeting with Adams. We sat in the snackbar of the hotel drinking sodas.

  ‘See, this is what happens when you have gutless bureaucrats running news organizations instead of people who have some sort of moral centre, some sort of aggressive, transgressive take on the world.’

  Sojourner said newspapers had been co-opted by big money, corporate interests. There were fewer newspapers in America today than at any time in modern American history. Ten companies controlled more than half of all the newspaper business in America and the media was growing more oligarchic every year. the New York Times owns the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The Washington Post owns Newsweek. Time-Warner owns Warner Bros., Time magazine, and Life magazine. Knight-Ridder owns the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Jose Mercury News. The big companies that run these media outlets weren’t concerned with truth or justice or news, they were concerned with the bottom line, with profit margins, with purchasing other news organizations.

  So they hire gutless editors to staff their papers, I said.

  ‘Exactly. And only a gutless wonder would agree to a pool system. It goes against everything journalism is about! Can you imagine Watergate being cracked under a goddamn pool? The My Lai massacre? I mean, instead of just being out there and getting a story, we got to be dealing with this whole system, with personalities, and pencil pushers and acne-faced assholes like Nick Adams. That bastard! It’s a waste of my time. I should be out there reporting.’

  What we need to do is go over Adams’s head, I said. Right over his bald little head.

  Colonel George Willard was director of the military’s Joint Information Bureau. He was the guy that actually, physically matched reporters with military units in the field. Adams really just did the paperwork.

  The Colonel was a public-relations flack down to the bone. He would answer questions fully and completely and say absolutely nothing. He would promise you the moon with a smile and stall you and stall you and act like he was moving heaven and earth to get you what you wanted when actually he was doing absolutely zero. This guy was adept at screwing people over and making them like it. The guy would blow smoke up your ass and make you think he had transformed you into a fire-breathing dragon. And you, completely bamboozled as to what was going on, totally ignorant of the fact you’d just been fucked by this flack, would say, ‘Thank you, sir, thank you for transforming me into this flame-throwing, legendary, mythical flying lizard. Thank you.’

  Colonel Willard’s office was on the very top floor of the hotel. The shades were drawn, so you couldn’t see inside – I was told he spent most of his time behind closed doors, at his desk, quietly running things. It was a tastefully decorated office, like a room at an Ivy League club. He had a small bar in the corner of the room with miniature liquor bottles, like the ones they serve on airplanes. Behind his desk, on the wall, there was a sign that read: ‘Salus Populi Suprema lex.’ My high school Latin was rusty, but it meant either ‘The safety of the people is the supreme law’ or ‘Time to make the doughnuts.’

  And the Colonel had eaten his share of doughnuts. He was a large man, a fat man, which probably explained why he liked to keep to his desk. Unlike some of the other ya-hoos in the service, however, Willard struck me as very cultured, as well-read as some of my friends from college.

  ‘Bismarck once said that fools learn by experience, but wise men learn by the experience of others,’ Colonel Willard was saying. He had a voice that was a subtle cross between Thurston Howell III and William F. Buckley. ‘It’s good advice.’

  ‘Be that as it may, I still want to get out in the field,’ said Sojourner. ‘Can you make it happen?’

  ‘Sure, we can get you out into the field, Ms Zapader,’ the Colonel said. ‘And I’m sure there won’t be a problem finding a slot for your assistant either. Just tell me when and where you want to go.’

  ‘Today. Anywhere,’ said Sojourner immediately.

  ‘Ooooo, today might be tough,’ he said.

  ‘Okay then. Anytime, anywhere.’

  ‘I’m gonna get back to you all on this. But I think it’s a doer,’ said the Colonel.

  A friendly, talkative private named Thelonious Webster picked Sojourner and me up at the hotel and drove us out to visit the 2nd Infantry Division of the Army’s XI Corps. Lying on his dashboard was a tin bugle with a mute in it that rattled as he drove. ‘My real first name is Walter,’ Thelonious confided amiably. ‘But I like jazz, so there you go.’ The public-relations officer who met us once we arrived wasn’t so friendly. His name was Captain Bardman and he was a bitter man. He had so much nose hair it was a wonder he could breathe and so much ear hair I was surprised he wasn’t deaf. Curiously, he had no eyebrows, which made his eyes look mean. He appeared to be about forty years old. The word was that he was stuck, careerwise, angry about it, and taking it out on the world. He was always grinding and clicking his teeth together in frustration. People called him Cap’n Crunch behind his back. He was not exactly pleased to be taking non-Army folks on a sightseeing trip.

  ‘I don’t want you people wandering around,’ said Cap’n Crunch to us as soon as we stepped out of the jeep. ‘You go where I show you. I say, “Jump,” you say, “How high?” Got it?’ He turned around and began to walk briskly toward the encampment.

  ‘Can you tell us a bit about the 2nd Infantry?’ said Sojourner, pulling out her notepad and walking alongside him.

  ‘Hey, I’m not here to hold your hand. We’re here to prosecute a war, all right? I’m gonna walk you to where you need to go, show you what you need to see, and then Private Webster will take you back. Are we clear?’

  He continued his fast-paced walk, grinding his teeth all the way.

  Public affairs officer Cap’n Crunch was true to his word. He was helpful not one little bit. He stood around as Sojourner and I talked to troops. He interrupted questions that seemed to be even remotely controversial. He finished other soldiers’ sentences during interviews. He didn’t let us talk to any officers.

  ‘They’re too busy,’ said Cap’n Crunch. ‘We got a war to prepare for, got a pro
blem with that?’

  Sojourner spotted one soldier who looked like he had lost a finger. His sleeve was drenched with blood. He was waiting for medics or something. Cap’n Crunch wouldn’t let us speak to him. I decided that this had gone far enough.

  Where’s the bathroom? I said.

  ‘I’ll have to come with you,’ said Cap’n Crunch.

  What, do you want to hold my fucking cock while I piss? I said, hoping this was the kind of gutter language a career Army man could understand.

  That gave me a chance to wander off. I walked in a generally straight line to the latrines, but, unencumbered by the evil Cap’n, I got a few quotes on the way. The troops I talked to were itchy to start the fighting. Most of them were really down on the living conditions; it was a lot worse than what was being printed in the papers. They wanted the war to begin and to go home. Poor saps. It was gonna be a bloodbath for them. And it wasn’t gonna be quick.

  Cap’n Crunch was watching us. Occasionally his head would tilt back sharply and he’d throw down a gulp of some sort of pinkish liquid he kept in a small bottle, and then his mean eyes would refocus on us. Now and again, when we’d talk to soldiers, he’d pull out a tape recorder and start taping.

  ‘What’s that for?’ said one spooked nineteen-year-old private from Tennessee.

  ‘It’s for the fucking Secretary of Defense,’ said Cap’n Crunch.

  The private didn’t say much of anything after that. The whole trip was a waste in terms of getting some good raw-meat copy. So Sojourner and I decided to go back to the hotel and plan our next move.

  ‘Okay, I got a column out of that, but not a very good column,’ said Sojourner, smoking and flipping through her reporter’s pad. ‘I tried to talk to this private and Crunch pulled out a piece of paper and read a very long warning to the guy that essentially said he didn’t have to say word one to me.’

  That’s standard practice. They call it the Miranda warning. These Army flacks read the soldiers their rights and then make it impossible for reporters to get candid quotes out of them.