COVERING
THE WAR
For the Unilaterals, No Neutral Ground
By
John Donvan
Three
days into covering the war in southern Iraq — not embedded,
not in a tank, but getting around the old-fashioned way in a plain
old civilian four-wheel-drive — my crew and I decided it
was time to rip the duct tape off the car. This is the tape that
spelled out — in eight-inch letters — “TV”
on every side of the vehicle. It is how reporters send the message:
“Don’t shoot! I’m a journalist!”
We were peeling off the tape because, in this war,
if you weren’t an embed, you were, like it or not, a unilateral
— a term the Pentagon came up with and emblazoned across
your military-issued press card. In other recent wars, most journalists
were, in effect, unembedded. The safest thing for journalists
was to shout from the rooftops that they were present at the conflict
as reporters, not combatants. This time, the opposite may have
been true.
It came down to this. The Iraqis saw journalists
as part of an invading force. And the invaders — the coalition
forces — saw unilaterals as having no business on their battlefield.
There was no neutral ground.
The Pentagon’s stated reason for discouraging
unilateral reporting was, I think, genuine. “It seems like
stating the obvious,” said Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon
spokeswoman, in the first week of the war, “but it is very,
very dangerous out there.” The military not only didn’t
want reporters getting hurt taking risks outside the embed system.
It also didn’t want to have to rescue them when they got
into trouble.
This was not just hypothetical, as I learned almost
as soon as I drove north from Kuwait, through a hole in the border
fence (amazing as that sounds, but there it was!), and into the
Iraqi city of Safwan.
As my team and I tooled about Safwan, the first
real city the coalition rolled through, we heard that just a little
to the north of us a unilateral British TV reporter had just been
shot dead. A few miles to the east, we then heard, a Lebanese
news crew, also unilaterals, had run into snipers. And up the
highway, toward Nasiriya, a Newsweek writer and his photographer,
also working outside the embed system, had been chased by Iraqi
forces and were about to be captured. One of their Newsweek colleagues,
who was still in Safwan, was urgently seeking British army help
in rescuing them.
All these reports reached us within the space of
an hour, late on that first afternoon in Iraq. Given that we had
just been discussing a forward advance of our own into this territory
before nightfall, it gave us pause. Iraqi troops, clearly, were
going after journalists. They weren’t reading the duct tape
on the car. Or, more chillingly to us, maybe they were.
But if the Pentagon’s Clarke was right (and
she was), if this was so obviously dangerous (and it was), then
why go unilaterally at all? The answer came that first day in
Safwan. There was a story there that hadn’t been told. The
Iraqis of Safwan were not dancing in the streets. In what would
become a pattern elsewhere in Iraq, U.S. troops (and the reporters
embedded with them) would often witness a warm welcome at the
front end of the coalition advance. But later, when the tanks
had rolled by, that would change.
Safwan is the city that gave the world that widely
broadcast image of a just-liberated Iraqi slapping Saddam Hussein’s
portrait with his shoe. But only hours later, we encountered hostility.
Everyone we met voiced suspicion of U.S. intentions, outrage over
civilian casualties, and skepticism over promises of U.S. aid.
The message from the people of Safwan — now voiced by many
Iraqis in many places — was that the U.S. has its work cut
out for it. Just getting rid of the dictator is not enough to
win the hearts and minds of the people.
To the early credit of ABC News, which insisted
on unilateral reporting to complement its embedded coverage, we
broadcast all this in the war’s first few days, while most
television coverage stayed focused on the combat. It was a part
of the story no embedded reporter could see. And it was vital
to forming the big-picture answer to the question: How is the
war going?
It seemed crazy-dangerous to be knocking about southern
Iraq, with Iraqi troops trying to get us; with a local population
inclined to be unfriendly (Iraqi civilians had already, on the
first day, rushed our parked cars and stolen our phones, our radios,
and a camera); and with a U.S. military that didn’t want
us there. Yet we wanted to stay independent, behind the lines,
and among the civilians. The question was: How to stay unilateral
and also stay safe?
The first solution we came up with seemed workable:
work days in Iraq, sleep overnight in Kuwait. After our day in
Safwan, we exited Iraq, returning to Kuwait and a farmhouse ABC
had rented for us a stone’s throw from the border. Yes, it
was still effectively a war zone, but Kuwait felt safer. Nights
in Kuwait also let us replenish the three vital items that were
impossible to come by in southern Iraq: water, gasoline, and power
for our camera batteries.
Good plan. Except that when we returned to the hole
in the fence to re-enter Iraq the next day, it had been closed.
We drove to the official border crossing, hoping to talk our way
past the Kuwaiti and American soldiers serving as border guards.
Instead we found a long line of our fellow unilaterals who were
being told by coalition soldiers that Iraq was closed to them.
Embeds Only, their orders said.
We did not make it into Iraq that day.
Then came day three, and a new plan. We would perch
near the border crossing, hope for a convoy of vehicles carrying
humanitarian assistance workers who had permission to enter Iraq,
and when we spotted one, try to fold ourselves into their ranks.
That was the day we tore off the duct tape. We needed the disguise.
And it worked.
For the next several days, we slipped in and out
of Iraq in the company of aid workers, often reporting on their
efforts, which became an essential aspect of the hearts-and-minds
story, and exploring the south, pretty much at will.
Within a week, however, virtually all the unilaterals
entering from Kuwait were helping themselves to the aid convoy
gimmick, and the U.S. military shut it down. The border was truly
sealed after we made one last crossing into Iraq.
At that point, we got lucky. A U.S. military unit
inside Iraq adopted us, offered us food, water, and most important,
a safe place to spend the night. By day, we worked unilaterally,
covering the looting of Basra, visiting a vacated Iraqi prison,
filming a village of Shiites worshipping in their unique way for
the first time in decades, and gathering impressions of what the
Iraqis made of their American occupiers.
By night, we slept, soundly in our tents, with U.S.
military protection like embeds, but not exactly embedded. It
was a nearly perfect solution. And we kept up our end of the bargain,
by staying out of trouble.
On that point, an afterthought: as my crew and producers
and I traveled the south, we talked about what we would do if
we got into trouble. Did we as unilaterals have the right to expect
the military to rescue us? As one of us said, “How are you
going to explain to some marine’s mother that he died trying
to save an idiot journalist?”
Fortunately, we never had to ask that question in
practice. We came out of the war grateful that we never did get
into serious trouble, and that the story we told counted —
no matter what it said on our press cards.
— John Donvan is an ABC News correspondent.
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