BY CHRIS HEDGES
Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times, has covered several wars and regional conflicts. He was one of the forty reporters captured and detained by Iraqi soldiers at the end of the war.

THE UNILATERALS

On January 18, the day I arrived in Saudi Arabia, I was informed that the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Information Bureau had only one pool slot for The New York Times. This meant that I and three other Times reporters would have to sit through briefings in Riyadh, work the military for information, and rewrite pool reports that filtered in from the field.

This hardly seemed an auspicious way to cover a war, so the next morning, after receiving permission from R. W. Apple, Jr., who ran our coverage from Dhahran, I climbed into a jeep with several British reporters and headed for the border city of Khafji.

I would never return to work within the system. For two months several colleagues and I bluffed our way through roadblocks, slept in Arab homes, and cajoled ourselves into units. Eventually, following armored battalions in our jeeps through breached minefields to the outskirts of Kuwait City, we raced across the last stretch of open desert and into the capital before it was liberated. Our success was due in part to an understanding by many soldiers and officers of what the role of a free press is in a democracy. These men and women violated orders to allow us to do our job.

In the beginning I drove back from wherever I was to Dhahran to file, but these six-to-eight hour trips, through half a dozen checkpoints, began to eat up too much time. In early February, several of us rented jeeps with cellular phones that could make the international calls needed for filing stories. We filled our jeeps with bottled water and food, and began to spend days, and eventually weeks, in the field. I obtained permission from several Saudi families, with whom I spoke Arabic, to sleep on their floors. Sometimes I stayed with soldiers in the field, sometimes in depressing truck stops. It was lonely, often frustrating work. There were days when, after spending hours lost in the desert, I had little to show for it.

Late one evening, hopelessly lost near the Kuwaiti border, I came upon a long armored column snaking its way north with its lights out. Officers suggested I follow, and I did.

After a lengthy drive, we gunned our vehicles up over twelve-foot-high sand embankments and parked. I got out to meet a lanky captain and several lieutenants. I had stumbled onto the headquarters of the Sixth marine Division and the captain made it clear that I was to be handed over to the military police.

But while we waited I chatted with the officers, explaining why I had broken the rules and expressing my thoughts about the need for an independent press, even in wartime. The radio crackled. The captain went over to answer it. He returned in a few minutes. "The M.P.'s are on their way," he said. Then, "Get in your jeep," he said slowly, "and haul ass."

I was able to spend several days, with the permission of officers, with units preparing for war. Troops in the field usually received the press warmly. Many had spent months in the desert and welcomed the chance to tell their stories. Most had little affection for the public relations officers.

I spent some time with one infantry battalion and got to know many of its officers and soldiers well. I brought them daily papers when I visited, and later I phoned messages to some of their families. When the battalion was ordered to move up to the Kuwaiti border, the commander painstakingly drew me a map so I could find the new position.

When I showed up one February morning, I was taken to the commander's foxhole.

"The order has come down that there is to be no unescorted press here," he began. My heart sank. "I won't tell you how I personally feel about this," he went on, then paused for a few moments and continued: "As far as I go, you are not here. You must park your car away from the camp. If other officers come in you must keep away, and if you get caught you were here because you were lost and were looking for directions." It was agreed that I would never quote him by name or identify his battalion.

By February the order had gone out that M.P.s were to detain all members of the press found north of Dhahran and to confiscate their credentials. So while at first we had been able to run roadblocks so long as we wore khaki dress, now more and more cars were being stopped. One soldier gave me a helmet, which helped immensely.

By working outside the pool, we could speak with soldiers without the presence of an escort. This did not always mean that we wrote stories that criticized the military, although people were more likely to speak openly if they thought their conversations were not being monitored.

The fine stories on the Egyptian forces filed by Forrest Sawyer of ABC News and Tony Horwitz of The Wall Street Journal, for example, could only have been done by going outside the system. Managed information always has an unreal, stale quality. And while none of us broke scandals or uncovered gross abuses, we were able to present an uncensored picture of life at the front.

It is worth remembering that during the first twenty-four hours of the fighting in Khafji in February the allied command insisted that only Arab forces were battling the Iraqis. They changed their story after an AP reporter climbed into a U.S. armored personnel carrier and drove into the city, where he witnessed marines engaging Iraqi troops. The U.S. wanted to build the confidence of the Arab forces, but at the expense of the truth.

I spent time in a ten-acre supply depot and wrote an account of how supply officers barter, beg, and pilfer to get what they need for their men. The article, which I had tried to keep whimsical, failed to amuse a few Marine Corps generals when they read it in the Times.

The battalion commander of the two officers I quoted in the piece, a man who knew nothing of my visit, was called in by his commanding general and told to keep reporters out of his unit if he wanted to keep his command. Apparently, his superiors had used a computer list to trace the names in the story to his unit.

An unexpected bonus resulting from this article was that the supply officers gave me a desert camouflage uniform and a flak jacket. it was now impossible for anyone who did not question me directly to tell that I was a reporter. Just before I drove away, one of the men reached down and took the blousers off his trousers. "Marines blouse," he said, putting the two elastic bands in my hand. I ran into trouble, however, a day later. I had just finished reporting a story about how, with the influx of soldiers, Saudi shopkeepers had tripled and quadrupled prices. The price-gauging was galling to the troops who, after all, had come as allies. This was the type of story that, although it had no military or strategic significance, would rarely get by a public affairs officer.

On my way back from the shops, I stopped to talk to some officers who ran a field hospital, in the hope that I might be able to write a story about how nurses and doctors whiled away their time waiting for the ground war to begin. But by this time, although I didn't know it, reporters were not just to be turned away from units when they showed up, but arrested. The hospital officials assigned an armed escort to me and I was driven to the headquarters of the Seventh Corps, some ten miles away.

I was taken to the trailers that made up the press center and turned over to a Captain Miller. A few pool reporters were seated at a picnic table. The captain said I was under detention. When I protested, one of the pool reporters told me to be quiet.

"You can't talk to him like that," he said. "They'll take away your credentials for good." A captain, armed with an M-16, was placed in the front seat of my car and a lieutenant in a truck in front of me, and I was escorted to King Khaled Military City. At the end of the two-hour trip, I was turned over to a Captain Archie Davis, who confiscated my Saudi press card. He told me that the rules were for my own good, that he and the other officers were just trying to protect me from the hazards of war. "There are a lot of soldiers out there with pretty itchy trigger fingers," he said.

I was sent back to the Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran, an eight-hour drive, to retrieve the press card from a Major William Fellows. "You have an attitude problem," he told me. But he returned the card.

More than a dozen of us, labeled "the unilaterals" by the military press office, had now been detained by military police. We had to decide whether to risk expulsion or abide by the rules. The next day I left without an escort, violating the rules again.

Those of us outside the system were not in a precarious position. We could be arrested for even approaching a unit. In the last weeks before the ground war, I filed stories on the Egyptian and Czechoslovakian contingents and one on a New York National Guard transportation unit known as the Harlem Hell Fighters, a group whose members felt they had been ill treated by the army. Two months earlier they had sent in an official request, which had never been answered, asking that a reporter from a New York newspaper be allowed to visit them.

The ground war was now only days away, and the military police were frequently stopping cars along the road that ran east to west along the Kuwaiti and Iraqi border. By this time, I had my hair cut to military regulations, my jeep marked with the inverted "V" that was on all military vehicles, and a large orange cloth tied to the roof to identify it as part of the allied force. I carried canteens and even a knife, the gift of some marines. I was waved through check points.

By the time the attack was launched, the JIB had issued new regulations: no reporters were allowed to wear military dress, to use cellular phones to file stories, or to mark their vehicles. The new rules came a little late.

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