Journalists Clean Out Kuwait City's Spray Paint

By: Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press Writer (AP) They're journalists in hand-spray-painted desert camouflage -- reporters, photographers, and camera crews massing outside Iraq for U.S. forces' largest-ever experiment in taking the media along for the fight.

Fully 662 journalists representing news organizations from around the United States and the world are going through a process known in military parlance as "embedding," the majority of them assembling in Kuwait. If war starts, they'll cover it while "embedded" within a military unit -- moving with the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.

Embeddees include retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, now with Fox News, and other conflict veterans, and journalists who've never been outside their home country, heard a shot, or seen a desert. "There are quite a lot of unsettled people around here," said producer Ruth Sparkes, helping to set up an embed for a Japanese TV station.

While news crews wait for the call-up to their assigned units, military field trips for journalists have helped demonstrate the troop build up and kill the time. Atypical was a tour of a British regiment, where a serviceman -- no insignia visible -- wore a green towel and a large embarrassed smile to show off the regiment's new shower units.

Throughout the week, news media members have been arriving by the planeload as the expected call to war nears. At the U.S.-led press-mustering point in a Kuwait City hotel, camouflage-uniformed Army reservists measure journalists' heads for gas masks.

About 300,000 U.S. service members already are in the Persian Gulf or on their way.

Although journalists have worked alongside U.S. military units in previous conflicts, they have never done so in such numbers, in such an organized fashion, and potentially for the length of a war. The near military-wide opening of units was born partly out of frustrations over coverage of the 1991 Gulf War and other recent conflicts. Journalists complained about being kept far from the action in the Gulf War and last year's fighting in Afghanistan. In the Afghan conflict, the American public saw little of their troops fighting.

"This is really a concerted effort to try to figure out, 'Is this the best way?'" said Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, who is helping organize the media deployments. "It's a historic opportunity to see if this can be done" in a way "that doesn't compromise security. We're going to allow them to cover the war -- the good, the bad, and the ugly."

To that end, the military provides the embedding journalists with long shopping lists of flak jackets and bulletproof helmets, goggles against the sand, antibiotics against anthrax, and the like.

Press crews have bought out the city's supply of spray paint in green, khaki, or brown colors -- needed to camouflage their helmets in desert hues.

Savvy speculators, meanwhile, have made one-month fortunes cornering the Kuwaiti market on squat, civilian-modified Humvees -- initially snapped up by news crews worried about keeping up with the military in the desert.

For their part, the embedded journalists sign ground rules the military says are meant to protect the operations, the troops and the troops' privacy -- such as not revealing ongoing rescue operations, or not showing the faces and names of newly fallen service members.

Traveling with the military brings some extra dangers for the media. One newspaper reporter cites the Geneva Convention clause stipulating -- in effect -- that noncombatants who cannot reasonably be distinguished from combatants shouldn't be surprised to be shot.

The safety benefits, of course, are traveling to the story under U.S military air and ground cover.

"They say, 'Don't worry, man! We're going to look out for you, man!'" photographer John Partipilo of The Tennessean of Nashville said of the privates in his unit.

Journalists more normally travel with the military for shorter periods -- as short as hitching a ride on a plane or car -- or eschew the troops entirely to try to get directly to the action, without interference.

How close to the action largely will be the call of each unit's commanding officer.

"If there's flexibility and mobility, then we might have a good chance of doing significant coverage," says James Nachtwey, a prize-winning, contributing photographer for Time magazine who has covered armed conflicts for more than 20 years. He'll be embedding with the 101st Airborne Division.