Good To Go

We were sometimes a disorderly group, though at the end of the week Captain Julie Misquitta, a public-affairs officer whose friendly, long-lashed eyes belie her toughness, praised our morale and our work overcoming a steep learning curve. One morning we were supposed to be marshalled at 0700 hours, and when some of us arrived a few seconds late Master Corporal Simmons chewed us out, yelling that a convoy would not have waited. But later he apologized, sternly telling us not to take it personally. He was missing the funeral of a fallen soldier and friend that day in Petawawa, and if he was hard on us it was only because “when you fuck up over there, people die.”

Another thing the army hopes this course will do is impress on us what is at stake. The military’s official view of the media has evolved in the past few years from at best tolerance and at worst antagonism to seeing it as “one of the players in the operational sphere,” as Brigadier General Thibault put it. The military has committed itself to not censoring the news unless it compromises operational security (with one exception: in the case of casualties, there is a temporary communications lockdown so families can be notified first). We were told that “the Canadian Forces recognizes your right to information that is unclassified” and that existing rules are “in no way intended to prevent the release of derogatory, embarrassing stories.” In this age of instantaneous communication, such a policy is only pragmatic, Thibault said. “We learned hard lessons in places like Somalia—that we could not in this environment possibly hope to control the information,” he said, and he acknowledged that one negative news item might have a “mission-ending effect.”

Dealing with the media has become part of basic training for soldiers; they now carry a pocket card with tips for handling interviews. Stevens later told me that while there was no vetting of interviews when she was at Kandahar Airfield, officers “watched and listened to and got transcripts of everything that was filed, after it was filed.” Still, embedded reporters are essentially on an honour system, and so far the only punishment for violating the rules has been expulsion from Kandahar Airfield, and only after the story had gone public.

But Thibault wanted something more from the media and he was characteristically direct: “We need you to go in with a sense of what we’re about and trying to accomplish, and of the people who are serving.” He was the Chief of Theatre Information Coordination in Afghanistan between January and August 2004 and he’s well aware that public opinion regarding the nato mission is wavering. Though he assures us he doesn’t want to “use journalists in any untoward way,” he believes the media are “critical for maintaining popular support.” And this is, of course, the crux of it: journalists are rightly wary of delivering propaganda.

The military may no longer try to control the reporting directly, but is something more subtle at play? I must admit that I often found the course disarming. The first morning, they taught us to rappel, first down the side of a low wall and then from a twelve-metre skid. I froze at the top, knees knocking together, but I was coaxed off by the patient, grinning, improbably named Warrant Officer Ken Gallant, who stood opposite me at the top. “Look into my eyes,” he said. “They’ll be the last thing you see.” I gratefully held his gaze as I jumped, and I didn’t get the joke until I landed. At Meaford I also learned this: it’s hard to be objective when you’re hurtling backward through the air. We’d entrusted the soldiers with our safety and in return we’d hoped to impress them with our courage. There was an exhilarating sense that we were all in this together—and it was only nine in the morning on our first day. As we stood around afterwards with our Dixie cups full of watery green refreshment, one reporter remarked that we were quite literally “drinking the Kool-Aid.” I can only imagine how difficult it would be to stay objective if your life actually depended on the soldiers around you.

In the United States, the Pentagon first trained journalists in advance of military action in 2002, provoking howls of outrage. Detractors saw it as a ploy to indoctrinate the media. In an interview with Robin Sloan of Poynter Online, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Chris Hedges scoffed at “this whole Boy Scout jamboree experience . . . going down and playing soldier for a week.” But the journalists I met were well aware of the problems inherent in embedding. It was a continual topic of discussion while we learned to prepare and protect ourselves. During the “Surviving Kidnapping” class, the hostage negotiator talked about Stockholm Syndrome—detailing the natural affection that may arise in victims for their captor-hosts—and one reporter wryly compared it to our situation.

I’ve spent the last hour on my belly carefully inching through a “minefield.” Now, as we’re driving back to quarters, I notice a glinting cylinder poking up from the brush. I scream “Gun!” and duck my head between my knees. What happens next is a blur because I never get my head up again. We screech to a halt. There is a lot of yelling in another language. Someone drags me from the car, throws a gunny sack over my head, and binds my hands. I am hustled into a truck, where I sit, trying not to hyperventilate, as it pulls away. I quickly lose track of how many turns we’ve made. I’m surprised at how terrifying this is, even though I know it’s just an exercise. The ties on my wrists are loose but the bag on my head is real.

Warrant Officer Cushman debriefs us afterward, but there’s not a lot to say. Aside from keeping quiet and not resisting, we really had no options. This last exercise merely drives home how vulnerable we would be leaving the base on our own. “Think about that if you are going out without us,” Cushman cautions. We wait for further instructions, but that’s it for the week. “You guys are good to go,” he says. The Journalist Familiarization Course is over.

At the beginning of the week, the brigadier general said to us, “You who will find yourself a part of telling this story will have an important part to play.” Leaving Meaford, I recall his words and wonder if he heard the irony. Becoming part of the story is not how journalists are trained to do their jobs.

We were surrounded at Meaford by first-rate instructors, committed to preparing us to do something they repeatedly told us they would never do: deploy in Afghanistan unarmed. In fact, the openness and the respect we were shown were in and of themselves disarming. Some news outlets prefer to send their reporters on pricier private courses, bypassing the army-sponsored training. But even these journalists will probably end up working side by side with the troops. I wonder whether the public understands, when they see the dateline or hear the sign off from Kandahar Airfield, just how unavoidably symbiotic the reporter’s relationship with the military is. As Christina Stevens said to me, “It’s important to tell the story and it’s too dangerous to do it any other way.” The paradox is this: it has become increasingly difficult for the media to cover the coverage.