Post Scripts: War – a man’s best and worst

Having been part of the military reporting system during WWII and the Korean "police action," I feel safe in making at least some readers aware they are not at all times getting the complete story of what has and is happening in Iraq. I can appreciate the position. Army "public information officers" are put in, simply because if an incident isn’t reported through the military information system, then the incident hadn’t officially happened …and if it hadn’t officially happened, it couldn’t be reported.

One of the first casualties in America’s wars is truth, particularly so in the Korean conflict and the war in Vietnam. The whole information system is, or has been, deeply flawed. I can only surmise it has not been altered for the Iraq adventure. Official statements of key U.S. officers and diplomats, who keep reporting progress, can be misleading or inaccurate. Thus, experienced American war correspondents are often suspicious of what they are told. Each new claim of progress in far too many instances, is met with suspicion.

High ranking officers manage to see progress where their own field officers see failure. Reports sent in from the battlefield can sometimes be rewritten to fit the official Washington-Pentagon-line. Senior officers often discourage reporters with combat units because their dispatches do not reflect "the official line" that all is going well. Another reason for faulty reporting during the Korean war was that the Koreans and Vietnamese only disclosed what they thought their generals wanted to hear. It made their life a lot easier as well.

The military’s reporting system in combat is not all that good. Sergeants report to lieutenants and they, in turn, report to company commanders (usually captains) who then report to battalion commanders (usually lieutenant-colonels). They then report to division commanders (usually generals). From there, the information goes to corps headquarters (usually three-star generals), and, quite often into a file cabinet. Occasionally, if a general along the way decided the report didn’t make him look too good, it was sometimes altered.

Each stage of the reporting system is vulnerable. At times fabrication was intentional to protect some officer’s backside. Body counts are often exaggerated. Civilian dead, wounded and captured frequently became "enemy dead, wounded or captured." The numbers of weapons and supplies captured or destroyed were routinely inflated. Combat action was sometimes embellished to make our side look good and to boost morale. Mistakes and cover-ups were quite common. Some soldiers got a medal while the real heroes kept quiet.

Journalists in that era tended to be as patriotic as anyone else and most tried to cover the war honestly. They didn’t worry about the effect their words and photos might have on public opinion. They sought the truth, the reality. Most Americans will never experience a soldier’s grief at the loss of a buddy, the love and loyalty between friends, and the sense of honor to the point of self-sacrifice. Some will never know the despair soldiers feel in combat as if it were they who were somehow responsible for having to watch a friend’s blood soaking a rice paddy, knowing the sacrifice will soon become a statistic and forgotten.

The world will become a much happier place when it becomes as hard to start a war as it is to stop one. We must never forget that it is the blood and misery of the common soldier that makes the generals great. The real tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do a man’s worst.