Lately I’ve found myself watching some of the news and being slightly amused at some of the goings on there. I’m talking about the most likely soon-to-be former news reporter Brian Williams being suspended for “misremembering” his own experiences while covering the war in Iraq. It’s beyond me how one could not remember clearly an event like your helicopter being shot down but that seems to be the story they’re going with. Shortly after that there were accusations that Bill O’Reilly had embellished stories of his involvement in the Falklands conflict in the early 1980’s. I would guess there will probably be more accusations like this, be they true or not for whatever motivations people have in doing so.

We always seemed to have reporters embedded with us. Many were from the Army Times, which were actually soldiers that were reporters. They carried weapons though the only thing they used were their cameras. We had foreign reporters, magazine journalists, network reporters and every other kind you could think of that would go with us. This made it rather difficult for me to try to keep my parents in the dark so to speak about the challenges and dangers that we were actually facing, which I would have preferred to do. But as it were they could just watch the news each night and see our activities. If it were up to me I wouldn’t have let them know what exactly was going on as it just made their situation worse, but I also had no control over that and understand people’s desire to know what is happening and also see it for themselves.

I usually made it a point not to interact with reporters when I was there. They would show up and wanted to see death and destruction where I had slightly different hopes for how to spend my time there. It was made clear to them that they were to stay with us and stay out of the way but they very often wanted to do things and go places that put us unnecessarily in harm’s way. However they were also exposed to the same dangers that we were. One of the other platoons in our company had a reporter that was riding along with them when their vehicle drove over an enormous IED that was buried under the road. The bomb was so powerful that it ripped the 30 ton vehicle in half and tossed it around killing six soldiers inside as well as the reporter that was riding with them. Unfortunately, that was one of those events that made it into the news. The one time I did spend a lot of time talking to a reporter was during the largest operation we participated in. It was called Operation Arrowhead Ripper and coincidentally NBC news had sent a reporter along with us for that mission that lasted several weeks. One night after a long day of walking through the city and periodic fighting, I was sitting on the roof on my several hour guard shift while guys were eating or sleeping and the NBC journalist Jim Neceda (not sure of the spelling) was on the roof with me with his video camera. As it was just me and him I didn’t have a lot of options but to make conversation with him, which I did for several hours. At the end my shift he asked if I would mind if he filmed me with my machine gun to which I agreed.

Coincidentally again, his story and that video ended up on the NBC Nightly News being reported by Brian Williams and I had a number of friends and family that recognized me in my brief 10 second appearance on the news. The reporters were always around and always listening and filming and we were always warned to be mindful of what you do and say as you could find yourself in trouble if you acted inappropriately. In that way they were a bit of a nuisance but at the same time everyone wants to see what’s happening in the middle of a war zone so I suppose you can’t blame them for being there. I know that if I was going to be there I would at least want a weapon to defend myself which reporters weren’t allowed to have, so I wonder now if they were really brave or really stupid.