The Media and GI Joe

How the press gets the military wrong -- and why it matters.

Chris Bray from the February 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

October 2000 was a very different time than October 2001. In 2000, the most pressing issue facing the U.S. military -- judging by media coverage -- was the topic of hats. Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army's chief of staff, had ordered every soldier in his organization to wear a black beret with his or her uniform while in garrison. For the last couple of decades, that piece of headgear had been exclusively associated with the Rangers, the elite force that carries machine guns and organizes in rifle companies of 200. News coverage focused on the insult to elite troops who would be forced to give up their special hats to ordinary enlistees; the Rangers, reporters calmly explained, were something not quite of this earth.

"One of the things you learn quickly in the military is to never, ever rile an Army Ranger, as foes have learned the hard way from Normandy to the Middle East," wrote Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Kilian, with near-audible grunts and chest blows. How tough are the Army's elite infantrymen? So tough, Kilian explained, that Rangers brag about parachuting into Alabama -- and walking all the way back to Fort Benning, Georgia.

It's worth pointing out that Fort Benning, Georgia, sits on the Alabama border. In fact, part of Fort Benning sits inside Alabama, including the part with the parachute drop. Parachuting into Alabama and walking back to Fort Benning, Georgia, would require a Ranger to hike up a road a couple miles, and across a small bridge.

What happens, in this kind of reporting, is the awe of intimidation -- inexperience deferring to experience. Back up, for a moment, to the Washington Post story about machine-gun-toting Rangers. If you don't know how a normal infantry unit is composed, or even what kind of weapons they ordinarily use, how confident are you going to be in questioning what a military officer tells you about what they've done? (How about the commander of a nuclear submarine, or a bomber wing?)

Kilian's remarkable piece in the Tribune ended with dire warnings that there was no earthly way the rest of the Army will possibly be permitted to switch to the black beret; the Rangers, he reported, are opposed. And that's that. In fact, he warned, there would probably even be violence if Rangers saw ordinary soldiers in their distinctive headgear.

"There are ways to get things done," Kilian quoted a retired Ranger as saying. "If we can't get it done through the front door, a lot of us unconventional warriors are going to get it done the unconventional way."

The rest of the Army converted to the black beret in June, right on schedule. The Rangers quietly switched to tan berets shortly after, and that was that.

There's a theme here that stretches between war and peace: In the case of military elites, things generally turn out to be less remarkable than reporters believe. None of which is to say that elite forces are anything less than exceptionally brave, highly trained, and unusually fit. But they are also something that you don't quite get from the news. They are men, often young men, with the standard-issue human body that still doesn't react well to bullets -- or to chaos, confusion, and the horrible noise of battle. It's useful to remember that the first Ranger casualty in Mogadishu was an elite commando who fell off a helicopter.

Paul Fussell has seen all of this before. Having served as a combat infantryman in the war against Hitler's military, he came home to write an extraordinary book, Wartime (1990), about the way that news media communicate information. Fussell wrote about the tendency of reporters and editors to accentuate the positive, speak with one voice, adopt a posture of high-mindedness, and assert, in early stages, that war would be "fast-moving, mechanized, remote-controlled, and perhaps even rather easy." But his most telling chapter carried the heading, "The real war will never get in the books."

"What was it about war that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt?" Fussell asked. "It was not just the danger and the fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was rather the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable."

Fussell lives in Pennsylvania, retired from a long career teaching literature. When I finally get him on the phone, he is not especially anxious to talk. But he has, in the first days of the U.S. campaign, been watching and reading the news, and has noticed the usual reporting about precision bombing and the sharply executed actions of elite ground troops.

"Those of us who've been through World War II know how empty that is," he says. "Americans have no idea what war is about. And it turns out to be about mass murder....It gets out of hand very quickly."

But here is one of those instances of falling through the looking glass: What do you say about wars that start out with mass murder, then develop order and boundaries of behavior? Just a few weeks after I spoke with Fussell, the news from Afghanistan began to suggest the possibility that the U.S. war there could genuinely be all of the things that war has always been sold as: fast-moving, mechanized, remote-controlled. And perhaps even rather easy.

It's impossible to say just how much that represents an accurate picture, and it probably will remain impossible for quite a while. It would be good to believe that the real war will get in the books; but even through the inevitable euphemism and optimistic publicity, it seems that something has changed.

Superpowers have fought guerrilla forces before, relied on superior firepower, and lost. Air power proved empty, more than once, and then drove Al Qaeda and the Taliban to a desperate scramble for safety.