Letters to the Editor
Garry Owen
Published Letters: 2821 Editor's Choice: 151
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You're gonna hate my opinion, but I'll say it anyway
[Read the article: Will conservative bloggers apologize to Jill Carroll?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There's an old movie that comes around on Turner Classics from time to time in which a tipsy, careless journalist makes his way to the front lines where people are getting picked off right and left. The comedic foil in the otherwise serious story thinks he's bullet proof and he really can't understand what all the fuss is about. As he takes another pull from his flask, he jumps up out of the trench and mocks the cringing soldiers below, "See, there's really nothing to worry about." For most of the movie, he gets away with it. But in the third reel, he does it once too often and gets lit up by a machine gun. He has a look of astonished disbelief as he keels over in the mud. The soldiers are not moved. They are just relieved that they no longer have to put up with this annoying fool who mistakes incredibly good luck for a cloak of invincibility. They aren't going to miss a guy who is there for adventure and profit while they are there because of duty.
My heroes have always been journalists. During "my war" Vietnam, I admired the guys who would take the same risks and accept the same living conditions as I did. Photographers like Larry Burrows and Robert Capa died doing their jobs as journalists in Vietnam. I didn't know them, but I met a few others who came "up country" now and again. One look at them when they cleared the chopper and made for the tree line and you could tell the Burrows, the Capas and the Joe Galloways from the Geraldo Riveras and the other opportunistic parasites on the hunt for a Pulitzer or a Peabody.
According to Military Airlift Command Vietnam (MACV) 70 women were given press credentials from 1965 to 1973. Liz Trotta for one, was the same caliber as Ernie Pyle. There were many like her. You had to look twice to see if she was really a female because she wore the same bleached out O.D. green BDUs and scuffed, muddy jungle boots like the rest of us. She was welcome anywhere from the grunt's perspective because she knew how to look and act like the rest of us. She's but one example of a professional journalist covering a war, male or female makes no difference. Regardless of the stories she filed, favorable or unfavorable, you could count on her not to expect anything more than what we had, and you could count on her not to act stupidly and put herself and others at risk.
Vietnam and Watergate elevated the public perception of journalism from snooping creeps with a pencil and camera to the admirable role models of Woodward and Bernstein. Now we have a new type.
The war-tourist: Jaunty, devil-may-care adventurers and risk takers out for the big score. War-tourists aren't limited to journalists. Nick Berg was a war tourist, looking for a big score. In my opinion, and you are free to disagree, Jill Carroll was a war-tourist.
There are people who travel to active volcanoes to stand on the rim and look into the fiery pit below and love the adrenaline rush. They love putting themselves in places where nobody in their right mind wants to go. They aren't there because they want to study and report on volcanic activity. They are there because they feel most alive when they are at the razor's edge of death.
Some of them fall in. Some of them walk away but are drawn back again until they finally take one step too many. Some of them eventually confront their addiction and overcome it, like Chris Hedges explains in the first chapters of his book, "War is Force That Gives Us Meaning."
Putting aside for a moment any value you may place on Jill Carroll's contribution to journalism, in my opinion Jill Carroll was having the time of her life in Iraq. She was hanging it all out there way over the edge and getting the kind of rush that Hedges describes so accurately. Furthermore she was banking on parlaying her stringer status into a full time position at the CSM. She was on her way to land a big scoop when the odds caught up with her.
But like the damned freak luck that saved the drunken correspondent in the old war movie, she came out without a scratch. Cash in now, Jill. The book publishers are swarming around your door. Sell your story to Hollywood. But remember, there's a third reel in every movie.