Good To Go

“You go—your women stay with me,” the soldier tells my male companions. We’ve been stopped at a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere. I am lying face down in a ditch next to the other female journalist in our convoy, hands behind my head, heart thumping against my flak jacket. Armed soldiers stand over us. We’ve offered to take their photos and tell the world their story, to no avail. They’ve found maps in our car, and—despite the duct-taped letters “TV” on the windshield—they’re accusing us of being spies.

It’s moments like these that make you wonder if reporting from a conflict zone is really such a good idea.

Which is, perhaps, part of the point. Because we’re not actually in a conflict zone yet: we’re in Meaford, Ontario, and the checkpoint soldier (fake Russian accent notwithstanding) is a member of our own Canadian Forces. This is the final morning of the army’s fourday Journalist Familiarization Course. Everyone here is planning—at least at the beginning of the week—to be in Afghanistan within the next few months to cover the 2,500 Canadian troops serving there. The woman lying next to me in the ditch leaves for Kandahar Province tomorrow.

For the past four days, twenty-two of us from across Canada (six provinces and two languages are represented) have lived in barracks and tents, eaten rations and mess-hall meals, and risen at 5 a.m. for lectures and field exercises geared toward preparing us to work in a conflict zone. Our group includes television correspondents, print reporters, camera operators, photographers, and me. My reporting may take me overseas at some point, but right now my interest is in how we get our news—and what that means for the news we get. The practice of embedding journalists—attaching them to a military unit to cover conflict—is highly controversial. Can reporters hope to stay objective while working, living, and experiencing combat with soldiers who might provide them with protection and, of course, who do provide them with access to the stories they are reporting? I’m in Meaford this week to seek answers to such questions.

We never do get through that checkpoint. The men in our group stubbornly refuse to leave us with the soldiers, though they do concede (under pressure) that we are ugly and useless. At the debriefing afterwards, Master Corporal Jeffrey Simmons takes the men to task for this, saying it jeopardizes us all to show disrespect for each other. He suggests that the best approach would have been to negotiate a retreat. Our course leader, Warrant Officer Mark Cushman—a gruff but thoughtful soldier with forearms covered in faded tattoos who has served six tours of duty, including one in Afghanistan—is even more blunt. He says the checkpoint exercise is a leftover from the days of the Bosnian conflict and no longer all that relevant. “Basically if the Taliban get you, there’s no negotiating,” he tells us. “You’ll probably just end up on Al Jazeera.”

An earlier session titled “Surviving Kidnapping and Hostage Taking,” new to the course this year, was more to the point. A forensic psychiatrist and a hostage negotiator covered everything from the best times to attempt escape (while you’re being moved, and only if you know where you are) to proven ways of coping with the boredom of long-term captivity (imagining one of your hobbies, such as building a yacht nail by nail, can help). One of the biggest hazards, they told us, is “McKidnapping”—indiscriminate abductions where the captors sell you to the highest bidder. They cautioned us to make adequate preparations before we go overseas: speak to our families, arrange our wills, purge our laptops, see the dentist, and even bank our dna.

Their slide presentation was laced with disturbing photographs of tortured and decapitated bodies. Experiencing such images was meant to inoculate us against the real thing, but I found it had the opposite effect, making me sick with dread. Others in the group concurred. “I have to admit that Meaford was like a wake-up call,” Marco Fortier of the Journal de Montréal wrote me later. “Becoming fully aware of the mission’s dangers made me think twice about going to Afghanistan. I have two young girls. I want to see them getting older.” Despite his qualms, Fortier says he hopes to deploy this year.

The danger to journalists is very real. At the time of the course, the fighting in southern Afghanistan was at its most intense since 2001, and journalists themselves had become targets. The day I drove to Meaford, the Associated Press quoted a Taliban commander saying, “I want to tell journalists that if in future they use wrong information from coalition forces or nato we will target those journalists and media. We have the Islamic right to kill these journalists and media.” In such a climate, it may be unrealistic to expect many reporters to stray from the relatively protected confines of the Canadian Forces base at Kandahar Airfield.

Despite the current controversy, embedding is nothing new. In previous wars, journalists often wore uniforms and submitted articles to military personnel for vetting before they filed. Since Vietnam, though, there’s been a rise in “unilateral” reporting, which sees journalists work independently of the military. The Balkan conflicts were covered almost entirely by unilaterals, for example, and we’ve come to expect coverage that arises from, and thus reflects, multiple points of view. But the nature of the current conflict in Afghanistan and the targeting of the media have meant that almost all of the journalists reporting from southern Afghanistan are embedded.

The checkpoint exercise was the first in a series intended to test the skills we learned during the week. After the debriefing, we drive on into the wilderness until we are startled by a muted explosion ahead. Rounding a corner, we come upon a smashed-up jeep and “casualties”: a man in uniform wanders aimlessly, speaking nonsense; another is covered in blood, unable to move his leg; one is still in the jeep, white-lipped, clutching his shoulder. I check him for signs of shock. Up close, I can see the tiny feathers of white makeup under his nose. When I steady his arm, bloody entrails pour steaming from his side. I’ve uncovered a hidden, more grievous chest wound (actually raw meat from a nearby slaughterhouse).