Life with the 7th Cavalry
The cover story of your February/March issue, “The Burning Tip of the Spear,” by Rita Leistner, was pure propaganda. The ostensible idea of “embedded” journalism is to share the experience of war with soldiers and thus to experience them as human beings. In fact, this practice is how the American government ensures that the mistakes of Vietnam will never be repeated. In that war, the media took us close to the “enemy” so that we could see their human faces as they were being killed, while, at the same time, dehumanizing and distancing the soldiers so that their actions were shown as brutalizing. As a result, the public turned against the war.

Today we learn to care for the soldiers we come to know so well as ordinary people; we are never shown the anguished faces and torn-apart bodies of those they have killed, nor do we learn why the Iraqis continue to fight against a force that has vast technological superiority. This seems like a particularly manipulative manner of propagandizing for the war on Iraq.

Leistner’s prose style reveals the inherent bias in this kind of journalism. The whole piece is written in a breathless, almost pre-orgasmic, tone – a strange attitude for a Canadian “pacifist.” The beefcake cover image of a bare-chested soldier with sensitive eyes shows the real meaning of “embeddedness.”

The images in the article itself were particularly disturbing. They portray these young men as regular folks from real places in America. They are shown in all their boyish silliness – just kids playing around, sitting with bare bums on ice, wrestling, sunbathing. These innocuous pictures could be found in a family album. The embedded journalist is unable to show the pain and suffering that these boys are inflicting on the others.

The practice of embedded reporting has to be questioned. It sanitizes and legitimizes acts of war and encourages us to applaud and romanticize soldiers for being human beings in a tough situation. We need to remember that war is killing that is sanctioned by the state. Embedded reporting leads us both to glorify war and to reduce it to a mundane, workaday activity at the same time. Not only does it hide the faces of the enemy from our gaze; it ultimately obscures the faces of our own soldiers as well. In the end, we can no longer see what is going on.
Ellen and Steve Levine
Toronto

Rita Leistner responds:
I was surprised to read Ellen and Steve Levine’s criticism of my story on American soldiers in Iraq. It is my point exactly that these men are “regular folks from real places in America,” inclined to sit on a block of ice, or sunbathe for a few unsatisfying minutes on the top of a building in dusty, burned-out, bombed-out Baghdad, in an effort to find some kind of normalcy in the wake of the horrors they had seen, inflicted, and suffered.

During my fifteen weeks with the troop, I never witnessed the kinds of photo opportunities the Levines find wanting – images such as Eddie Adams’s famous photo of a Vietnamese man being shot in the head, images that contributed directly to anti-war sentiment back home. But I did photograph soldiers interrogating and tormenting Iraqis, as well as holding them at gunpoint.

I think the jury is still out on how embedding journalists affects war coverage in general, but as I made clear in my story, my status as an embedded journalist was anything but typical. And far from sanitizing and romanticizing what I saw, I described, among other things, an incident in which innocent civilians were fired on by American troops; in addition, the magazine published a highly disturbing photograph of an Iraqi detainee, bagged and tied.