The Ripples of War, With a Dozen Dead While some in the press still make excuses for promoting the war, Knight Ridder offers a multimedia look at the consequences.
By
Greg Mitchell
(September 01, 2004) -- Joe Galloway probably thought he'd seen or read it all, at least when it comes to war. After all, he'd served four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam, and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan war and half a dozen other combat operations, including the first Gulf War, in 1991, and the second, in 2003. He received a Bronze Star for rescuing wounded soldiers in Vietnam, the only medal of valor the U.S. Army awarded to a civilian for actions during that conflict. And yet there he was, at a Knight Ridder bureau last month, "in a busy newsroom with tears streaming down my face."
That's because the story he was working on, he tells us, "was the hardest thing I've ever written or edited."
While certain major newspapers were still making excuses for why they bungled coverage of WMD and other issues in the run-up to the attack on Iraq last year, Knight Ridder was revealing the true costs of the media's tragic pre-war performance.
In mid-August, KR launched an unprecedented multimedia Web package showing, in word and image, how 12 U.S. soldiers from Echo Company, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., had recently died in Iraq, and the impact that caused on friends and family. Galloway contributed (with co-author David Swanson and the help of eight other KR reporters) a massive report on the same subject for the chain's newspapers.
"The Pentagon puts out, on its Web site, every day the names of casualties in Iraq but it's one-dimensional," Galloway observes. "It seemed to me it was time to paint a real portrait of a real human being who's lost his life in this war."
Echo Company has lost 22 of its 185 men, more than any other Marine or Army company. To paraphrase the title of Galloway's well-known book: They were soldiers once, and young.
The Web package (at www.krwashington.com) features articles, photos by David Swanson, audio, video, and letters, and is partly based on the Marines' classified After Action Reports obtained by Knight Ridder. The audio clips include moving testimonials from wives, friends and mothers.
"The fact that David Swanson was embedded with the Echo Company gave us an opportunity that is very rare," John Walcott, Knight Ridder's Washington bureau chief, says. But the package, he adds, "also gave us a chance to follow the ripples of war back home to towns all over America." Thanks to "unlimited space" on the Web, they were able to combine a variety of elements, including reproductions of original letters.
Swanson, a photographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, suffered the most for this exclusive. During his month with Echo Company this past spring, he had come to know particularly well one of the soldiers featured in the story, 2nd Lt. John T. Wroblewski, in Ramadi. Swanson says he "walked the marine supply route looking for IEDS (improvised explosive devices)" with Wroblewski the day before the soldier died. Swanson later went to visit Wroblewski's parents and brothers in northern New Jersey and his wife in California.
"We did this package to flesh out who these young men were," he explains.
Swanson, who has covered conflicts in Bosnia, Croatia, and Afghanistan as well as the 9/11 attacks in New York City, says he would not return to Iraq "any time soon. It's too dangerous. I have a 3-year-old daughter." But he's glad he met Echo Company. "I wanted to go to Iraq," he explains. "My mother always saved her Life magazines and I read them as a child. I always wanted to use the power of photography to show what the troops were doing." The soldiers in Echo Company, he says, "were more than a rank and a hometown. We wanted to show what sports they played, what music they listened to." In firefights, he adds, "They were 100% professional, although not all of them supported the war in Iraq."
Galloway takes issue with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's recent use of the word "fungible" to describe U.S. soldiers. "Webster's defines 'fungible' as 'interchangeable.' This package is proof they're not interchangeable," Galloway says. "They are not spare parts." Greg Mitchell
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The Ripples of War, With a Dozen Dead
