The following video (after the jump) is from PBS News Hour‘s broadcast from last Friday. James Foley, a reporter with GlobalPost, was in Afghanistan, embedded with an American infantry unit, when they were ambushed by Taliban insurgents.
As gunfire rained down on the American forces from surrounding cliffs, a 19-year-old Private, Justin Greer, manned a turret-mounted grenade launcher. The video shows Greer being shot in the helmet. He reels back, but his helmet has saved his life—the bullet only breaks the skin.
Later, we see that the lead truck in the convoy is on fire. The driver, the most seriously injured soldier in the attack, lost his arm to the elbow. The video shows his fellow soldiers carrying him to an evacuation vehicle.
On Monday, Pia de Solenni, a regular contributor to the National Review Online whose brother was killed while serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, objected to PBS airing the video:
“The journalists who prepared the segment would argue that they’re just reporting the facts. Ah, but these are selective facts. Did they show footage asking the soldiers whether they have any positive interactions with the Afghans? Did they ask the soldiers what they think of their mission? No, and they didn’t even allow them the expression of an f-bomb. So much for hearing the soldiers in their own voices. Instead, they were exploited by the graphic images of their activities. As the saying goes, if it bleeds, it leads. But if an audience is too fragile to hear certain words, surely it’s too fragile to see real life casualties.”
“Segments like this convey nothing but fear and futility. They give no context to the situation. To me it seems that they undermine the concerns of our soldiers insofar as they create greater fear and anxiety for families, precisely what the soldiers don’t want, all in the name of journalism so slanted that it looks more like propaganda aiding the enemy.”
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After seeing the video, do you think it’s too graphic, or that it is “so slanted that it looks more like propaganda aiding the enemy”? I don’t.
I can’t possibly understand what it’s like to lose a loved one to war; nor can I imagine how heartbreaking it must be to see the same war fought in one’s living room on a Friday evening two years later. In the column, de Solenni rightly faults PBS for failing to warn viewers that they were about to see graphic footage.
She is also correct when she says, “this is real life.” The war is real, and the sacrifices of American servicemen are real, and more than ever, the American public must be reminded how real it is.
Unlike the Vietnam War, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being fought by volunteers—as a result, the realness of these wars, and the sacrifices they have required, have been borne by a disproportionate few brave Americans and their families. For the rest of us, it is far too easy to live our day-to-day lives without giving these wars (yes, we are still at war in Iraq) a second thought.
This video contains “selective facts,” but that’s what journalism is—-and de Solenni, a journalist herself, ought to know that.
She also ought to know that Americans aren’t “too fragile” to see accurate depictions of war because the FCC doesn’t allow cursing on TV.
As for creating fear and anxiety, I can’t speak to the feelings of military families. But I have to imagine that they would prefer that all Americans know what their loved ones are facing as they defend our freedom.
The instinct to censor and control media coverage of war has never been based on concern for the anxiety of military families—it’s based on the desire to control the anxiety of everyone else.
When I watch this video, I am reminded that while I sit comfortably on my back porch, tapping away at my laptop in the cool September breeze, guys my age and younger are halfway across the world facing gruesome realities that I can hardly imagine.
The war isn’t some vague abstraction, fodder for phony pundits and politicians. It’s real. And the more I see of it, the more I appreciate these guys, and their willingness to face death on my behalf.
About Henry P. Belanger
Whew, from reading the title, I though you were going to say they needed to tone it down. What really grinds my gears is that we have soldiers facing death and then the Universities are giving courses in Harry Potter. Thanks for saying that the public damn well better be adult enough to see the consequences of our actions.
On the contrary, I think the American people need to see more of this and realize that war isn’t a game, it isn’t a movie, and it sure as hell is deadly.
And to really support our men and women in the services, we ought to be calling for them to come home to their families and their communities – imagine what all of that energy, time, and money could do in our own neighborhoods.
Pia de Sorenno faults the embedded journalists who risked their lives to report this slice of combat reality for so many things.
First, for not composing a feature on what soldiers think of the war. You see, they omitted to ask the soldiers who got an arm blown off or a scalp creased by a bullet or otherwise narrowly escaped death whether they had had any “positive interactions” with Afghans. Such omissions damn their story, she says, as being based on “selective facts.”
But Pia has no idea what kinds of selections they made from what kinds of factual matrices, because she didn’t inquire. Instead she just took potshots from the comfortable distance between Seattle and the place where these journalists were earning their paychecks. Instead of asking them or their editors to speak, she tells us what they “would” argue.
Pia is a huge fan of “soldiers’ voices” — the title of her National Review Online column accusing the journalists of espionage, treason, or at the very least, being “un-American.” But she’s itching to silence the voice (and smash the camera) of any journalist who causes “any additional worry” to the families of soldiers. “No worries” is a helluva standard for covering a war.
And were these journalists guilty of causing any such worry anyway? This question brings us to the piece of factual selectivity in this matter that really does deserve censure. Reading Pia’s column, you would think the video was a live feed from the battlefield, or something awfully close to it. You would think that there was a clear and present danger of families seeing grievous risk and injury to their loved ones in real time, without knowing how they fared. But Pia de Sorenno’s column deliberately omitted to mention when the events reported in the September 17 video actually occurred. It’s right there in the narrator’s voice – “late August.”
In this day of instant telecommunictions, do our armed forces not have a procedure for notifying a soldier’s family of combat injuries in something less than 17 days or more? If they don’t, is that the journalists’ fault?
Pia’s column didn’t include a link to the PBS video, which would have made her factual selectivity painfully obvious. It also would have fatally impeached her insinuation that the journalists were practicing “if it bleeds, it leads” ethics. The video doesn’t show any blood, wounds, charred flesh, or other gore. Blood certainly was spilled in the events reported, and if the journalists had been guilty of the motivation she charges them with, it would have been easy enough for them to get it on film. They avoided the cheap shots. Too bad Pia didn’t have that kind of class.
But as Henry urges, watch the video and see for yourself. And then watch the following National Guard recruiting video, available on Youtube through this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppje4-wxuQU . It has been running in theaters just before the feature film for about a year now. You may not have seen it, if feature films in which lots of things get blown up are not your thing – films that attract the very young, mostly male, and easily seduced demographic at which the recruitment video is aimed.
The visual images weave combat scenes together with civilian disaster rescue missions – a good strategy for claiming some moral high ground; but the emotional heart of the piece is overwhelmingly martial. The audio is Wagnerian, with a huge choral back-up to supply the feeling of crusading fervor. The lyrics, which appear at the end of this post, are liberally laced with Latin phrasings – nothing like some impenetrable incantations to provide the mystical aura.
No more blood here than in the PBS video. No scenes of horribly maimed and mentally shattered vets languishing in second-rate Veterans hospitals. Nothing that would harsh on the mellow of the moviegoers.
So watch both videos and then ask yourself, who’s really exploiting the soldiers and their families?
I hope like hell some teeny-somethings and twenty-somethings thinking about soldiering were watching PBS on September 17.
“National Guard – Call of the Warrior,”
created by the Strength Readiness Support Center
of the National Guard Bureau.
Warrior the Ethos
Code of the Bellator (Warrior)
A hero will rise
Mos bellatoris (Code of the Warrior)
Ego primus omnium munus (I will always place the mission first)
Ego numquam cladem accipiam (I will never accept defeat)
I will live by this credo
I will protect the U.S. and I will fight to liberate all!
Numquam Deseram (Never quit)
Numquam commilitionem collapsum relinquam
(Never leave a fallen comrade)
I will never leave him!
I will live by this credo
I will protect the U.S. and I will fight to liberate
I will fight wherever called!
I will always place the mission first
I will never ever accept defeat
I will never quit, I never will
I will never leave a fallen comrade
Fiducia Officium (Loyalty, Duty)
Virtus Honor Veneratio (Personal Courage, Honor, Respect)
I am an American Soldier
Stipendium ante ingenium (Service before Self)
I fight for one and all!
erratum:
My comment misspelled the name of the National Review contributor referred to in Henry’s post: it’s Solenni, not Sorenno. Apologies.
preston moore
I am the mother of a severely injured Army Warrior. I cringe every time one of these comes on because there was a videography crew at the cache my son was taken to, yet I have to see to know what he went through so that I may better help him in his recovery. I applaud those who have the courage to show what war truly is like for the few brave men and women who are still signing up to serve today!
May the American public truly come to understand what they put on the line every day!!!!