On returning to her Washington, D.C. broadcasting studio after a
week-long visit with U.S. troops in Iraq, Laura Ingraham ended one
of her talk radio monologues with words to the effect that she’d
learned more about what the U.S. military is doing in the first two
days of her visit than she had in months’ worth of reading
beforehand.
That honesty, and a pair of stories in the news since, got me
thinking again about the franchise discussion in Robert A.
Heinlein’s 1959 novel, Starship Troopers.
Science fiction buffs may recall that Heinlein’s
coming-of-age-in-the-galactic-infantry yarn imagined a milieu in
which voting rights were not afforded to any citizen until
completion of a two-year term of “federal service.” For sketching a
society where every voter and political officeholder had
demonstrated through “voluntary and difficult service” that he or
she “placed the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage,”
Heinlein was denounced in some quarters as fascist or worse.
Jim Crow in battle dress uniform would be unwise and unworkable,
but we needn’t go that far to wonder whether the shortage of
professional journalists with military experience has been a
handicap in the civilized world’s ongoing struggle with Islamism.
If you ever meet a reporter with paratrooper wings, shake his hand,
because J-school and Jump School are too often worlds apart.
The hole in our information roster can’t be blamed exclusively
on journalists themselves; it’s part of a hole in the culture at
large. Consider the paucity of military figures in prime-time TV
listings. Kiefer Sutherland’s portrayal of muscular
counterterrorism in 24 may be enough to ensure that he
never has to buy a drink in bars near Fort Campbell and Camp
Lejeune, but Jack Bauer is technically a civilian. And while the
now-defunct
J.A.G. was military-friendly, shows about characters in
the armed forces come few and far between. You can go back in TV
history as far as Rat Patrol (1966-1968) and still find
that doctors and lawyers command more small-screen time than
soldiers.
There are journalists doing yeoman work to correct public
ignorance about military matters. The late Michael Kelly was one
such person; Robert Kaplan, Bill Roggio, and Mike Yon are three
others. Sadly, their reporting is too often brushed aside for
you-are-there bromides from the well-traveled but inexpert likes of
correspondents like Christiane Amanpour.
Consider my own locale: San Diego remains a Navy town, but in a
story about the fall of former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham
published last Friday, February 24, a staff writer on the biggest
of the local newspapers leaned heavily on a report from a Beverly
Hills psychiatrist who opined for Cunningham’s defense team that
the Vietnam ace convicted of corruption was brought down by a
“mantle of invulnerability” born of a fighter pilot’s love for
“aggressive tactics.” The psychiatrist also had the temerity to
suggest that although Cunningham was expected to behave differently
in Congress than he had while shooting down Soviet aircraft
(imagine!), “the psyche cannot make such a U-turn easily.”
The first stunner in that article is that Cunningham’s lawyers
apparently decided to defend their bribe-seeking client by smearing
the mental and ethical capacities of every warrior who ever traded
dog tags for the low-level notoriety of being recognized by the
Speaker of the House when it’s time to fill C-Span air with a few
words about mohair or honey subsidies.
The second stunner in the piece is that although the reporter
notes in paragraph four (of 40) that the psychiatrist’s
speculations about Cunningham are disputed by other doctors and
“another former Navy pilot,” comeuppance comes late to the party.
It’s on the jump page and 14 paragraphs into the account that we
hear from Cunningham’s former executive officer, who reveals his
contempt for the speculation of Dr. Saul Faerstein with the
says-it-all quote, “I don’t think naval aviation ever trained
anybody to be a crook.”
Point made, but since the article leads with a report to that
effect and depends on inducing credulous readers into cutting some
slack for its author, sanity gets short shrift — and for the same
reason that Mike Yon spent time in his first book debunking the
idea that soldiers in elite units are taught “secret” punches.
Hand-to-hand combat goes back as far as Cain and Abel, Yon
observed, which means that by now there’s nothing secret about it.
Neither Green Berets nor Shaolin monks nicknamed “Grasshopper” are
initiated into the fraternity of the secret punch. That some people
punch properly and some don’t is a function of training and
experience rather than gnostic martial mastery.
If more journalists had military experience, the New York
Times would not necessarily have published a faked missile photo from a Pakistani
village in the aftermath of an American attempt to kill a
marquee-level terrorist two months ago. Lacking that experience,
editors at that publication and several others did not realize that
the ordnance shown could not have been fired from a Predator drone
or from a helicopter. Accordingly, they accepted an erroneous
caption first written by a stringer for Agence France Presse.
As the source of that particular debacle makes clear, ignorance
of military matters is not unique to American journalists. Last
week in Moscow, embarrassed officials yanked a poster meant to
honor veterans of the Russian military from 20 billboards after
belatedly discovering that it used the image of an American
battleship rather than a Russian one. Britain’s Guardian
newspaper reported that the U.S.S. Missouri
appeared on the poster because employees at the
civilian firm handling that billboard contract for the Defense
Ministry mistook the Mighty Mo for a Russian cruiser. The
Guardian quoted a former commander of the Black Sea Fleet
railing against what he called “the incompetence of the designers”
even as he graciously allowed that it wasn’t a big deal to confuse
“two heroic ships.”
True, any one episode of confusion over martial matters is not a
big deal. But when paying moderate attention to current events
gives one enough ammunition (pun intended) to dredge up several
such examples in a few minutes, it’s time to recommend remedial
reading in military history to any journalist who has never worn
khaki that he or she couldn’t find at a Banana Republic outlet
store.
Revolutionary War artillery chief Henry Knox was a bookseller by
trade, and Gettysburg hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a
teacher before and after donning Union blue, but experience made
both of them role models for any civilian writing even tangentially
about the armed forces. As smart-mouthed Josh Arnold said to
alingering relative Jimbob Buel in Richard Bradford’s magnificent
Red Sky at Morning, by way of torpedoing Jimbob’s ignorant
discourse on naval strategy during a farewell dinnner for a family
relocating during World War Two, “Is that khaki you’re wearing?
Because in the candlelight, it looks more like seersucker.”
Journalists tread beyond their expertise all too frequently, and
we who depend on them to varying degrees deserve better, especially
in wartime.
