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The Dance --
The press & the military

“Is it enough,” his eyes queried, “Am I protected?” The frequently aired photo of Jordanian reporter Tareq Ayyoub revealed a journalist who, in somber retrospect, appeared visibly uncomfortable in army gear. Ayyoub, though hunkered behind a wall of sand bags and outfitted with a bulletproof vest and helmet, didn’t look much like a soldier. Clearly, he was a storyteller in a soldier’s world. After an American missile struck the Arab TV station where he worked, he died of his wounds in a world that ultimately destroyed him.

Did the Coalition forces intentionally target or fail to protect him? Does not the war correspondent knowingly choose a dangerous assignment, placing himself in harm’s way? Whatever the answers, one thing is apparent; there is a strange and complicated relationship between men of war and men of words.

“The pen is mightier than the sword,” said (with obvious bias) author Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Is it really? The pen can incite events and reinterpret history; the sword can undo “iron-clad treaties” and silence timid thinkers. They each win a round now and then.

There has always been a symbiotic relationship between men of the pen and men of the sword. A world devoid of conflict would offer little challenge for the writer’s gift; a world without writers would provide no wordsmith to fashion stirring prose from the soldier’s memoirs. Clearly, they need each other.

Do journalists get too close to war’s deadly force? Sadly, yes. Many get hurt and some die. On the other hand, are war efforts compromised by the power of the press? Yes to that as well. Each is a danger to the other.

Like mating scorpions, they increase and decrease their distance to each other. A bristly old married couple, they embrace, “embed,” fight and accuse one another all in one day. On a good day, they hold hands and smile for the cameras. By night they sleep with their backs to the wall. It’s an ageless jig, an intricate dance between the pen and the sword.

As long as there are soldiers, they will have bards. The writer makes a hero of the soldier each time he reports the downing of another dictator’s statue. In turn, the soldier makes a Pulitzer prizewinner of the writer when he gives him an exclusive on the story. The dance goes on.