Babysitting the Press in Kuwait

Some 500 of my colleagues have literally gone into combat by embedding with troops. Scores of others have made suicide runs into Iraq without the benefit of being escorted by M-16-toting Marines. What many lack in brains, they make up for in balls. They are guys like Slate’s Nate Thayer, who is camped out in Baghdad, and more willing to become a human shield than a journalistic deserter. They are guys like Newsweek’s Scott Johnson, who just flipped his truck in the desert after having it riddled with bullets, barely escaping with his life. They might not do these things for the lofty, noble purposes of duty, honor, and country. But they do them–often for no other reason than that they’re there to be done.

The counterpart to the war reporter is the military public affairs officer. They too suffer sometimes unfair stereotypes–many of them perpetuated by journalists. We often cast them as neutered soldiers and company men–the friends of bureaucracy and obstructionism, the enemies of access and truth. But Major Chris Hughes, a Marine public affairs officer, is not one of these.

Hughes works the graveyard shift at the Coalition Press Information Center here at the Kuwait City Hilton. (It’s actually the day shift back home, on account of the time difference.) My advance men in Kuwait told me to get to know him, and to become his fluffer–that he was a gregarious sort you could do business with, which is necessary for unembedded reporters, since what stands between us and any military access is the often uncooperative figure of the public affairs officer. When I initially called him, we set up an appointment for midnight, which he had to move to 1:00, then 2:00 A.M. Still overwhelmed with calls at the appointed time, he kicked our interview to 5:00 A.M., which he then moved back once more until he knocked off at 8:00 in the morning. I initially tried to sweeten the pot, offering to bring over some special-recipe “Listerine.” But he declined politely. “Can’t do it,” he said. “There’s a war on, man.”

When I met up with him outside the press desk at the end of his normal 12-16 hour shift, he was bleary-eyed and haggard. The night shift, he says, is “kind of a self-inflicted wound. Bad things happen at night. And last night was a bummer.” Indeed, it was. After this conflict is over, historians will debate its various turning points. But Sunday, March 23, will be known as the day the war became realer and darker–when bad things happened to good people.

A British RAF Tornado had been accidentally blown out of the sky by a U.S. Patriot missile. An attempted fragging incident at the 101st Airborne Division’s camp in northern Kuwait left one soldier dead and 16 injured. Throughout southern Iraq, soldiers and Marines were getting chewed up by non-uniformed militia types after towns had supposedly been taken. Dead Americans began showing up on Al-Jazeera, their bodies set out like grocery window displays. Unembedded journalists, cowboying around hostile territory without military protection, were being felled. Three ITV news crew members were missing and presumed dead after coming under fire in southern Iraq. And in the north, an Australian television cameraman was the victim of a car bomb.

After spending all night discussing these horrors, Hughes makes his way with me to the incongruous Songbird Café, where pretty Filipina waitresses offer salmon on focaccia to anyone who still has an appetite. Hughes doesn’t. He sticks with the Diet Coke he brought himself. He’s much more interested in sleeping than eating.

Looks-wise, Hughes is all Marine, squared off and squinty, a young James Caan whose eyes slant upward from their outside corners in, forming quotation marks around his expressions. He has worked numerous media operations in some pretty hairy settings–places like East Timor and Afghanistan. And it never ceases to amaze him the cavalier attitude journalists often bring to war. “With the old guys and gals,” says the 37-year-old Hughes, “they know the deal. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t. With the work-up for the whole embed [of which he was a big champion], the mentality was kind of ‘We’re going camping.’ No you’re not. You’re going to war. People will die.”

Hughes says that coverage-wise, embedding was the way to go. A former combat engineer and artillery guy, he never had designs on being a journalist himself (“though if Ollie North can be on TV, maybe I can too,” he jokes). But he is a huge fan of the you-are-there stylings of Ernie Pyle, who, he kindly reminds me, was shot dead on Ie Shima island while covering World War II. Though he admires their nerve, in this conflict, Hughes is not a big endorser of unilateral reporters. “No one has any business running for that border as an independent operator, that is foolish. No story is worth dying for. And these guys running pell mell through the battlefield, have no situational awareness. That’s what’s getting them killed. The people running around the battlefield present an incredible dilemma to the operational commander. Suddenly he has to think twice before engaging a target, because, ‘My God–is that a news crew?'”

After blurting out this harsh judgment, Hughes almost seems contrite: “That’s a helluva statement for me to make–saying they have no business there. In their mind, they have every right to be there, that’s where the story is. But the thing that concerns me is that they’re putting the young Marine’s life at risk. The kid’s now got to think, ‘Is that a news crew I saw earlier, or is that my enemy?'”

Hughes volunteers that military public affairs shops have screwed up in the past–keeping journalists away from battle in nearly every post-Vietnam conflict. “The thing I’ve always liked about having media present is it tells that Marine or soldier just how important their job is. If CNN is in your fighting hole, what you’re doing is important. And that’s tremendous. I think Marines and soldiers will do anything they’re asked, but I think they want people to know what’s happening. They want the folks to know how it went down, what they did. They don’t want to die and not have their story told.”

It is nearly a journalistic article of faith that if you have to deal with public affairs types, you are best off dealing with Marines. While every service has a good story to tell, the smallest and feistiest service regularly tells theirs best. Hughes says that this perception is largely fueled by the kind of ethos set forth by retired Marine Lieutenant General Victor Krulak (father of former commandant Charles Krulak) in his book First to Fight. “He basically laid it out,” says Hughes, “that the United States does not need a Marine Corps. The other service branches could divvy up our mission, and cut us up and do away with us. But his conclusion was that the United States wanted a Marine Corps. And that’s a big difference–the need vs. the want.” They are the service that has most come to stand for service. “I think the better Marines I’ve ever worked with recognize that and use the media as a vehicle to communicate to the American taxpayer what we are doing with their money and their kids. There’s an idealism. It’s a great story to tell–particularly one in an environment like this, what the Marines are willing to sacrifice. Not to take shots at the other services at all–but this one,” he says proudly, “is mine.”

As a gatekeeper, he recognizes the natural tension between serving his commanders and serving the journalists seeking access to them. To get that access, he and his public affairs cohorts have seen it all: attempted bribes, verbal violence, and sex-appeal sorties, where news organizations will put their most attractive news bunnies and Scud studs forward to try to bat their lashes at both male and female PAOs. Not only would succumbing to female charms jeopardize his credibility, Hughes says. But it would also land him in trouble with his wife.

Differing missions, aside, however, Hughes says something I have never heard another uniformed type offer: “We are more like each other than we are different. Any Marine or soldier worth their weight wants to be where things are happening. They want to find out if they’ve got what it takes, if they can function at the highest level. And this is it. I think people that work in the media are the same way. And I think that’s gonna be one of the great lessons learned from this experience. We knew that once, and we forgot it.”

Around this point, Hughes worries that “I’m making a complete ass of myself,” by blathering on. “I don’t like seeing stuff written about me and PAOs,” he says. “It’s an interesting story, I hope to write on it someday myself. But there’s got to be a level of humility. If I were the commander, the question I would ask would be, ‘Hey, while you were running your mouth to the media, did you think maybe there was a lance corporal that should be talking to them?’ They’re our best spokesmen. It doesn’t get any better than having some 19-year-old kid talking to you.”

As he says this, he yawns. It’s about time for him to rack out. “I’m beat, man. I’ve had a long, ugly night.” But not before I get off one more question. I ask him what about this job–a job that people like me have derided–gives him the most pleasure. He suddenly looks revived. “You know when you really hit a long ball,” he says, “when you’ve got the leading news organizations on planet earth covering your op, putting really good stuff down range. It’s a rush.” This sounds like a statement of elation, but as he says this, his voice catches abruptly, and his eyes grow red-rimmed. He stares hard at the table, and scribbles furiously on a post-it note until he can regain his composure. A full minute goes by before he can talk, and watching him, I am the same. He has spent an entire night talking about dead fighting men and journalists. “It’s been a long night,” he says quietly, finally looking up. “We’re losing guys left and right. And so are you.”

Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.