Retired War Reporter -- Still on the Job

By: Greg Mitchell Legendary war reporter Joe Galloway retired this month and returned to his home in Texas, but it was only a strategic retreat. He has continued to file a weekly column on military affairs, distributed by Tribune Media Services, and still featured at the newspapers of his most recent employer, Knight Ridder.

On Monday, I'm off to, of all places, Las Vegas, for a different kind of strategic retreat -- our parent company's annual gathering -- and my main function there will be to sit down and interview Galloway on stage after the closing night dinner.

This will be something of an honor, for me, as I have never met the man. Since 2003, he has written columns on Iraq for E&P, and I have penned several columns about him. Who can forget his recent lunch with Donald Rumsfeld or his blistering e-mail exchange with a Pentagon flack? We've also covered some of his adventures in our news section and we broke the story of his June 1 retirement.

Galloway is a kind of hero for me, and also for my son. I'm not sure we ever shared a hero before, even back in our baseball days (we both loved U2, but ... Bono?), so that really means something to me.

Our entry points were different, though. My son Andy, a college film student, is a war movie nut, and "met" Joe through the Mel Gibson flick "We Were Soldiers." This even got him to read the book (no easy feat) that the film is based on, co-authored by Joe.

There's a terrific scene in the film where Joe (played by Barry Pepper), then 24 and working for UPI, has just been helicoptered into the middle of a fearsome battle in Vietnam in 1965, often called the bloodiest of the entire war. The leader of the American forces, Col. Hal Moore, recognizes Joe's bravery, but still has to ask: Why isn't he in uniform?

Joe replies that he came from a long line of war veterans but, these days, he thought he might be able to do more for the cause with a notepad and a camera.

Moore later recalled: "I looked over and saw Joe Galloway sitting with his back against a small tree, camera in his lap, rifle across his knees. I knew why I was there. I'm a professional military man and it's my job. But what the hell was HE doing there? Turned out he was doing his job too."

And he kept doing it, through half a dozen or more conflicts since -- right down to the current one. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf once said, "Joe Galloway is the finest combat correspondent of our generation -- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend." He earned a Bronze Star for valor, in saving a soldier's life at that 1965 battle.

So what has Joe been up to with his post-retirement columns? His first, last week, looked at Haditha.

While he argued that any troops who committed crimes there must pay the price, much of the blame rests instead with officers who allowed it to happen and "political leaders" who have never "experienced the stress and insanity of combat, who took this nation to war in Iraq on a whim and a grudge."

Those who started the war, he added, have "managed it with the greatest accumulation of arrogance and ignorance and incompetence seen in wartime since World War I, or perhaps the Charge of the Light Brigade."

Then, this week, he observed that amid the current focus on Iraq, "no one appears to be noticing that Afghanistan...is heading south at an alarming pace."

He noted that "Mullah Omar's Taliban are on the comeback trail with a vengeance, operating in well-armed and disciplined battalion-size units in the south. Drawing on the experience of the Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban forces are employing more sophisticated improvised explosive devices as well as mines and ambushes against Afghan government forces and foreign military and aid officials.

"This is happening just a month before U.S. forces are scheduled to begin turning over responsibility for that volatile region to some of our NATO allies."

He then chronicled the errors in efforts to secure the situation after overthrowing the Taliban, caused by a White House "hell-bent on jumping off into a much higher-profile war in Iraq ....Before 2001 even ended, the administration began siphoning off some of the resources needed to finish Job One in Afghanistan to prepare for the invasion of Iraq.... Afghanistan would languish as a backwater, an afterthought, a 'victory' in the global war on terror to be trotted out occasionally to take people's minds off Iraq.

"If there was one place where we should have maintained full focus, it was Afghanistan. If there is one place where you never take your eye off the ball, it is Afghanistan. That's a lesson learned the hard way by invading armies from Alexander to the British Empire to the Soviet Union."

See you Tuesday, Joe.