DISPATCHES
Grunts and Pogues:
The Embedded Life
BY
GORDON DILLOW
As
an embedded reporter during the war in Iraq, I found myself at
what the U.S. Marines call “the point of the spear.”
Along with Mark Avery, an Orange County Register photographer,
I was assigned to Alpha Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marine
Regiment, an infantry or “grunt” company based at Camp
Pendleton, California. The 200 men of Alpha Company (there are
no women in Marine infantry units) would be the first major U.S.
ground combat unit to cross the Iraq border on the first night
of the war and then would push more than 300 miles across Iraq,
all the way to Baghdad. During the war they would arguably engage
in more intense combat than any other Marine infantry company.
Journalistically, there was no better place to be. But covering
the spear point wasn’t always easy.
Marine grunts are often an insular, standoffish bunch even among
other marines; they pride themselves on being leaner, harder,
somehow more marine-like. Rear-echelon types are dismissed as
“pogues” — rhymes with “rogues” —
a term said to stand for “Persons Other than Grunts.”
And to the marines, no one occupies a lower, more miserable place
in the pogue world than reporters.
They had been warned about us, I found out later. Be careful what
you say to them, the marines of Alpha Company were told before
we joined them in early March, while they were camped out in the
barren Kuwaiti desert. Don’t bitch about the slow mail delivery,
don’t criticize the antiwar protesters back home, don’t
discuss operational plans, and for God’s sake, don’t
use ethnic slur words for Arabs.
Better yet, don’t talk to the reporters at all. They’ll
just stab you in the back.
Some marines didn’t take the advice; they were open and approachable
from the start. (For example, it took about five minutes to learn
that the marines called Arabs “hajis” — pronounced
HA-jees, derivation unknown — and that, in the marine grunt
view, antiwar protesters were traitorous scum.) It also helped
that I’d already had some war experience. I’d been an
Army sergeant in Vietnam, an ancient, almost mythical war to the
grunts, most of whom are nineteen or twenty.
But most of the Alpha Company officers and senior NCOs initially
acted as if having journalists along was like having snakes crawl
into their tent; some were convinced that reporters were little
better than spies. It took a couple of weeks of sharing their
hardships and dangers before they realized that we weren’t
using our Iridium cell phones to alert the Iraqi army high command
to the Marines’ next move.
The physical hardships were constant. Sandstorms, rainstorms —
once in southern Iraq there was a rainstorm during a sandstorm
— mud, dust, suffocating heat in the day, teeth-chattering
cold at night, sleeping on the ground, or in the ground in shallow
“fighting holes” that we had to dig ourselves with entrenching
tools. In the desert, precious water was for drinking only; like
the marines, I went more than a month without a shower. (Because
of a packing mix-up, I had to wear the same unwashed underwear
for three weeks, until I could rinse it out in a scummy canal
on the outskirts of Baghdad; then I wore it another week.)
Compared with the constant physical misery, the periodic danger
seemed almost like a minor irritant. Although the Iraqi army didn’t
put up much of a fight, Alpha Company got into two serious scrapes.
One was at the dawn of the war, at an oil-pumping station just
across the border, where a few die-hard Iraqi soldiers in a speeding
truck shot and killed Lieutenant Shane Childers. (Three other
marines were wounded by a mine.) The other was deep in Baghdad,
where fedayeen fighters with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades
blistered the company with thousands of rounds of fire during
a running four-hour firefight, killing Gunnery Sergeant Jeff Bohr
Jr. and wounding twenty-five Alpha Company marines, half of them
superficially.
The Baghdad fight was a close enough thing that at one point a
marine gave me a hand grenade to throw if the enemy started to
overwhelm us. It had been more than thirty years since I’d
held a grenade, and I knew that my having it violated written
and unwritten rules. Still, it felt comforting in my hand. (I
never had occasion to throw it.)
The discomforts and dangers of the war were easily dealt with;
accurately conveying the reality of it to the readers back home
was not.
Part of that was unavoidable. The astonishing crudity of young
men in wartime — your average marine wouldn’t say “I
have to go on guard,” but rather, “I fucking have to
fucking go on fucking guard.” It wouldn’t fly in a family
newspaper; neither would the constant jokes about sex and bodily
functions. The result was that the marines sounded much more like
choirboys in my stories than they really are. And some things
were simply too gruesome to describe in detail.
Reporting casualty figures also presented problems. The ground
rules for embeds prohibited reporting the names of dead or wounded
until their relatives were officially notified, usually within
forty-eight hours. It was a sensible rule, but I also knew that
back home a large network of First Battalion, Fifth Marines families
were following our reports in the paper and on the Internet —
and when I reported that the battalion had suffered an unidentified
KIA or WIA I knew it could, and did, cause all of them great anxiety.
But the biggest problem I faced as an embed with the marine grunts
was that I found myself doing what journalists are warned from
J-school not to do: I found myself falling in love with my subject.
I fell in love with “my” marines.
Maybe it’s understandable. When you live with the same guys
for weeks, sharing their dangers and miseries, learning about
their wives and girlfriends, their hopes and dreams, admiring
their physical courage and strength, you start to make friends
— closer friends in some ways than you’ll ever have
outside of war. Isolated from everyone else, you start to see
your small corner of the world the same way they do.
I didn’t hide anything. For example, when some of my marines
fired up a civilian vehicle that was bearing down on them, killing
three unarmed Iraqi men, I reported it — but I didn’t
lead my story with it, and I was careful to put it in the context
of scared young men trying to protect themselves. Or when my marines
laughed about how .50-caliber machine gun bullets had torn apart
an Iraqi soldier’s body, I wrote about it, but in the context
of sweet-faced, all-American boys hardened by a war that wasn’t
of their making.
And so on. The point wasn’t that I wasn’t reporting
the truth; the point was that I was reporting the marine grunt
truth — which had also become my truth.
I’ll leave it to others to decide if it was good journalism.
But it was easily one of the greatest experiences of my life.
And for all the misery and hardship and pain, I was sorry when
it was over.
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Gordon Dillow is a columnist for the Orange County Register.
