Boot Camp for Journalists

It’s small surprise that at some point most of us would like to impersonate one. For as Vietnam correspondent Malcolm Browne wrote of the psychopathology of war, it “eventually reduces even hardened veterans to vomiting funk, but nevertheless radiates a deceptively beautiful light that draws the likes of Ernie Pyle into the flame.” Few, if any of us, could ever follow such a writer as Ernie Pyle (nor would we want to, since he did, after all, get shot dead after moving one too many times to the front in World War II). But as we edge closer to conflict with Iraq, even those like me not entirely convinced of the war’s necessity are still inexplicably drawn. Getting in theater would mean a chance to use terms like “in theater,” to tell dramatic stories, and perhaps to act manfully–assuming my wife lets me go.

After Afghanistan, the Pentagon promised to increase access by “embedding” hundreds of reporters fulltime in military units. But even those who are selected for this might not get to the fight. In Desert Storm, what with restrictive media pools and a choke chain continuously yanked by military public affairs officers, only 10 percent of reporters in theater actually made it into battle.

So as journalists gird themselves for the sequel to Desert Storm, we are being bombarded by another type of faux war story: filed from war school. War school has many of the upsides of war without all the drawbacks. It allows you to feel warlike while brushing up against military types. But no one tries to kill you. To find out how to preserve our hides should we get to the fight, scores of us have flocked to the frost-covered hills of the Massanutten Military Academy in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where former British Royal Marines commandos from the U.K.-based private firm Centurion Risk Assessment Services charge $2,300 for a five-day course showing reporters how blissfully ignorant they are about war.

Since 1995, Centurion has shown over 10,000 reporters everything from how to take appropriate cover in a mortar attack to how to treat shrapnel wounds complete with lifelike polyurethane viscera and spurting blood. The Pentagon began a similar media boot camp last fall. Their version is as much about acclimating reporters to actually living with a military unit as it is about teaching survival essentials, so journalists have to wake up at dawn’s crack and haul rucksacks on five-mile marches. As a result, the softer British version is known by some as “wussy war school,” though in fairness to us, our Ramada Inn didn’t offer room service or pay-per-view, and the pool was frozen over.

The lack of hazing, Centurion founder Paul Rees tells me from his U.K. office, is by design. Military-sponsored courses, he says, can be “too regimented, too formal–some people are frightened to go boo because they might get a barking from some officer bawling his head off all the time.” That approach leaves the journalists “absolutely knackered–three quarters through the day you want to unravel your sleeping bag. We think you learn faster by having constructive, realistic training.” Besides, Rees adds, his way, journalists and instructors can end the day together in a place for which they share a natural affinity–the hotel bar.

During the Falklands War, in which most Centurion instructors fought, journalists gave away their positions, Rees says. Consequently, “We used to think journalists were a pain in the ass and didn’t want anything to do with them.” But his men, he says, have come around after years of operating in the field with journalists (you can hire a Centurion to escort you to Baghdad for around $400 a day).

That’s not to say they’re overly chummy. The instructors’ ringleader, Jan Mills, warns us that “the lads take a while to warm to you.” And with his David Niven air and icy delivery, it sometimes seems as if Mills would rather snap our necks than teach us the Seven P’s (Prior Planning Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance). As he rounds us up on the first day, one journalist tries to get too familiar too fast. “Go on and have your breakfast,” Jan says, as if removing a parasite.

IN OUR SUB-FREEZING CLASSROOM, maybe two dozen rumpled print reporters and photographers gather. The exception is an attractive Asian-American television reporter for the public-school network Channel One. She looks familiar. And when she offers her name–Janet Choi–it clicks. She was formerly a cast member on MTV’s reality show “The Real World.” Apparently the only one with bad enough taste to watch the show, I’m the only member of the class who recognizes her.

As I introduce myself, I am full of “Real World” inquiries. Just why did Seattle housemate Stephen slap Irene, for starters? But she beseeches me not to reveal her past to our classmates. She has opened a new chapter as a television reporter. My first reaction is, What’s a softee like her doing in a course like this? But then I learn Janet’s covered Afghanistan and Colombia, has been in North Korea under deep cover, and is just back from a stint in the Amazon jungle where she went four days without food. She probably thinks all the calamity, pestilence, and threatened violence she’s experienced impresses me. But it doesn’t–I’ve covered Reform party conventions.

It is clear, straightaway, that we’re not at military boot camp when an instructor, mindful of our lunch needs, inquires, “Anyone here a vegetarian?” But this is the last display of wussiness. For if the course had a prom-like theme, it would be “8 Million Ways to Die”–and the Centurion boys seem to be up on most of them. The room where we meet is blanketed in public awareness posters featuring everything from assault rifles to anti-tank mines to ways to detect letter bombs (oily stains, discoloration, irregular writing–not unlike most of my reader mail).

We go outside, then are walked through a booby-trapped house and tricked-out pathways. We try not to step in horse droppings while our untrained eyes struggle to pick out all manner of irregularities, from sniper’s nests to branches obstructing our path, forcing us into a tripwire, which none of us sees. Occasionally things go bang, sending us sprawling. “I love the smell of cordite in the morning,” says one sadistic instructor.

In grenade training, instructor Paul Burton asks us what we would do if a grenade came flying toward us. “Jump on it,” says one movie-reared journalist. “Clearly, we have a lot of work to do,” says Burton, who makes us hit the deck, feet together, since “if you keep your legs open, you’re going to end up with more than a smile on your face when it explodes.”

Instructor Paul Richard tells us to get in the habit of not looking up during enemy aerial attacks since nothing gives away cover like pilots seeing “a big load of white faces.” He teaches us to survey the near and middle distance for irregular shapes and suspicious patterns. “Sooner or later, things will move,” he says. “And it’s the person who moves first who normally dies. So be patient.” One journalist asks him what kinds of things we should be on the lookout for in Iraq. “Departure ground,” he says, blackly, meaning get evacuated.

Inside, we learn all manner of useful MacGyver-ish tips in the event “it all goes horribly wrong,” as the instructors frequently say. After years of arctic, mountain, desert, and jungle training, they may not be able to make convertible Jaguars out of toothpicks, but they come pretty close. Burton cheers us by warning that 97 percent of the world’s surface drinking water is polluted, so “you got to get it right, otherwise, you’ll kill yourself.” He shows us how to use socks or pantyhose for a water filter, then to spike our delicious sock-water with iodine, the neutron bomb of water purification.

A reporter asks, If we don’t have access to water, can we drink alcohol? “Leave it to a journalist to ask that,” Burton says. We shouldn’t, nor should we drink our own urine. Though he does show us how to make a solar still by digging a hole, placing a cup of urine and some green vegetation in it, covering it with a plastic sheet, then waiting for the sun to extract moisture, providing condensation, which drips off the sheet and back down into an empty cup, thus making safe drinking water. We can also extract water straight from plants, but be careful of the eucalyptus tree, Burton warns, “It will kill you.”

We watch the journalistic equivalent of snuff films–footage of journalists and other civil-disturbance attendees getting shot, maimed, mauled, and stampeded. It’s a cold reminder that the world is a dangerous place. Not that some of us needed one. A Knight-Ridder reporter tells us of the time his car was sprayed with bullets at a checkpoint in Nairobi. A Houston Chronicle correspondent relays being robbed at gunpoint in his cab in Mexico City (the cabdriver was in on it). An instructor tells us that an L.A. Times reporter who was enrolled in our class was yanked at the last minute after two of his colleagues were kidnapped in Colombia. A Wall Street Journal reporter, currently stationed in South America, says his last gig was out of the South Asia bureau, where he was replaced by Danny Pearl.

It’s enough to make you want to get some fresh air–which we do, when instructor Kenny Dalton leads us to a patch of dislodged earth covered by curious brush–a secret garden of things that he says will blow off your arms, legs, “todgers,” and pretty much everything else. “Try not to kick the foliage,” he warns, “cause it might go bang.” I ask him what kind of mines we’re looking at. “Don’t fawking care,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “Bad. Mines are bad. Bad mine.”

Kenny speaks from experience. In the Falklands, he spent eleven hours one night stranded in a minefield after watching a mate get his foot blown off. He breaks into a mock monologue of a cowboy reporter: “I’m going to be the journalist who finally meets Mr. bin Laden. Here’s my story on how I lost my leg.” Incidentally, he adds, “if anybody does lose a leg–if you’d send me the photographs for the next course, that would be lovely.”

Kenny tells us the key is to be constantly vigilant, to look for the “absence of the normal, the presence of the un-normal,” always to assess our risks. If we are traveling through a mine-laden country, he says, we may be better off using the bathroom on the road than gallivanting off into a field. A female reporter whose next assignment is Afghanistan asks, “Right in front of your Muslim driver?” “Would you rather show him your ass,” responds Kenny, “or kiss it goodbye?”

While this is depressing, Kenny promises, “Wait till Friday, you’re really going to be miserable.” Friday is chemical warfare day. And while there’s general levity as we suit up in our chem/bio suits, fastening our gas masks while pinching bad Star Wars dialogue like discount Darth Vaders, the party is soon over. We have to practice getting our masks on in nine seconds–roughly the interval before we’re told it’s curtains. With talk of everything from sarin to smallpox, and symptoms from uncontrollable salivating to rectal bleeding to loss of bowel control to death, it’s small wonder, as instructor Rick Strange tells me, that “after this course, lots of people say journalism’s not for me. They go into teaching.”

THE WEEK’S MOST DRAMATIC TURN, however, comes when the instructors take us hostage. After a loud explosion and bursts of gunfire, the instructors, in black balaclavas and armed to the teeth, pull a surprise attack on our bus. They tell us to shut up, put hoods over our heads, and make us file out. Unable to see, we are marched around in sharp zigzag patterns, until our tightly cinched hoods make us wheeze like asthmatic turkeys in an oven bag. I become so starved for oxygen that I have to loosen mine, hoping not to earn another light cuff to the head, which are regularly administered throughout the ordeal.

They throw us to the cold ground, strip us of all our belongings–including our wedding rings–and let us suck on it for what feels like hours, but is only about 30 minutes. Once it’s over, we all skulk off, sharing captivity stories. We talk about how we almost suffocated. The Independent’s Andrew Buncombe looks steamed: “Somebody hit me in the bollocks,” he says. Another reporter comes out of it with his rain-pants around his ankles. We don’t want to know what happened to him.

After returning to class, Jan asks dryly, “Is anyone injured? You did sign your indemnity forms?” A New York Times reporter is still missing after a dashing escape to the woods. But while Rick Strange tells me it’s more impressive than the last student who took flight (he forgot to take his hood off and nearly knocked himself out on a tree), our escapee would have been dead three times over. Strange tells me of all the sharpshooting laurels he has earned. I ask him what kind of targets he’s best with. “Live ones,” he says.

Back in the hotel bar each night, we continue our education. There is much frivolity–the random arm-wrestling challenge, Kenny singing the whale parts from Judy Collins’s “Whales & Nightingales” album. But occasionally, the instructors slip in a somber note on a bellyful of beer–telling how war will spoil your day, or sometimes the rest of your days. “I went through it from flash to bang,” says one, of his time in the Falklands. “It was no f– joke.”

I corral Kenny, who looks like a scuffed-up George Clooney, and his life story tumbles out. He grew up in a bleak English factory town, descended from a line of storied military men and barroom brawlers. He got into plenty of scrapes himself, spending three weeks in the clink in the middle of his Marine training (“Some guy stole something. I threw a chair at him. It just happened to stick in his chest”). In the brig, he learned there’s always somebody bigger and tougher, such as Mr. Tuesday (“We called him Mr. Tuesday, cause if he said it was Tuesday, it was fawking Tuesday”).

He briefly interrupted his commando career when he had it in mind to join the Royal Navy bobsledding team and try to reach the Olympics. “What do I know about fawking bobsleds,” he says. “I fell off my first time down the hill–70 miles an hour on my ass. End of bobsled career.” Instead he went back to something more dangerous–being a commando. He was nearly blown up when his foot glanced a tripwire in Northern Ireland, and he almost froze/drowned in Antarctica.

Of his Falklands stint he says, minefield experience notwithstanding, “Sometimes I feel a little guilty because we didn’t actually shoot anything” (his unit was held in reserve). But his survival instincts didn’t come cheap. On his way out, he says, “I’ll never forget it. There was a dead Argentinian on the side of the road. My boots had split. I don’t remember how his head was blown off. But I remember looking to see if his boots fitted me.”

After feeling himself going maudlin–“Enough of this bull–,” he says–we rejoin the crew. Kenny suckers me into a game of “Three Man Lift”–in which he vows to the bar that he can lift three people off the floor with one hand. As I take my place, laid out on the floor between two instructors, I smell a rat when their arms and legs lock me down. Kenny holds a glass of icewater high in the air, then soaks my crotch with it. It’s not terribly clever, but the locals seem to love it.

I jump up, feeling feisty on a snout-full of Maker’s Mark. But my Centurion training is paying off. Rather than taking a swing, I survey the bar. The British Royal Marines vs. me. Very bad. I make a quick risk-assessment calculation, and decide the next round’s on me.

Matt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.