You Had to Be There

Though they are the beneficiaries of the most powerful military on earth, the majority of Americans have never had direct experience with modern warfare. Last April, the writer-director Alex Garland—himself a Brit—issued a corrective in Civil War, his film about the decimation of the United States by a future, vaguely identified armed conflict. American viewers could now flock to theaters in order to watch the Humvees and choppers come home to roost. War by America is a global reality; war in America is a fantasy, an opportunity for citizens to binge on spectacle and morbid pyrotechnics.

Many of Garland’s viewers, particularly in America, still left dissatisfied. As critics like Osita Nwanevu have pointed out, Garland’s civil war lacks a certain realism. The movie does not adduce a cause or rationale for the fighting; no side declares a political motive, even as the combatants indiscriminately tote around the symbols—a Hawaiian shirt here, a Trumpish strongman there—of American fascism. Garland’s references to contemporary politics feel algorithmic, in that they are both random and boring. One character makes passing mention of an “Antifa massacre.” Another shoots a man for being Chinese.

Tasked with bringing the war home, Garland’s political imagination falters. His only recourse in narrativizing his shapeless war is to focus the film on a quartet of reporters who view the war with as much confusion and distance as the audience. On a cross-country drive to D.C., the journalists document executions, suicide bombings, and mass graves. Their efforts in each new state are prettily and philosophically vignetted by Garland, who has insisted on the importance of journalists during times of political strife. “I have a belief in the . . . necessity of journalism,” he remarked during the film’s promotional tour. “I wanted to put the press as the heroes.”

Garland may have meant this in more than one sense. While his journalists begin as bystanders—none voice an opinion about the vying sides, not even in private—they become increasingly protagonistic in the fighting, embedded as they are with its combatants. They are pursued, shot at, and attacked like belligerents. By the end, they are storming the White House with a group of rebels, from whom they have become indistinguishable. It is remarkable how little Garland focuses on the civilians and regular people of his dystopia. For the most part, the journalists talk to soldiers or to other journalists. That the real war is witnessed by these two professions, living and working in close quarters, is the inadvertent insight of Garland’s undercooked apocalypse.

Since World War II, when a young Walter Cronkite flew out on a 1943 mission with airmen, reportedly commandeering the bombers’ machine guns alongside his fellow reporters, the American soldier and the American journalist have been locked in a collegial embrace. American journalism has always needed the military for access and information, but the military has also come to realize just how much it depends on the press for credibility. (“The media is a primary way for the military to spread word of their accomplishments,” insists one earnest study at the U.S. Army War College.) In 2014, researchers surveying the American press and its war coverage found a consistent bias in favor of the military, concluding that “the press is failing to meet its Fourth Estate challenge.” The idea that the journalism industry supports American war is decried by the left and held as an inviolable duty by the right. But it is not just a matter of complicity or consent manufacture. In vivifying for the public the fact—obvious but ungraspable—that war is hell, the soldier and journalist have served, like they do in Garland’s movie, as the human faces of American war.

Civil War was released during the ongoing destruction of Gaza, in which the national symbiosis between war-making and the press remains in flagrant display. At same time, the genocide in Gaza has largely happened outside the usually privileged perspective of the American abroad. There are no U.S. troops on the ground in Gaza; there are no independent foreign journalists. Accepting the premise that Gaza is one of the United States’ wars—which it is—makes this a unique moment, in which the American public is viewing its country’s violence without the presence of American mediators. What does this mean for those who wish to bring the war home and those who wish to end it?

Though it is a common canard that the press hated the Vietnam War and caused the nation to lose it, it was during Vietnam when the American soldier and journalist became more reliant on one another and more sought after for their testimonies. The most acclaimed American representations of the conflict were grounded in firsthand experience; in the words of historian Keith Beattie, “You had to be there” to understand Vietnam. Until years after the war’s end, Beattie writes, the home front craved accounts that were “typically, if not exclusively, written by authors who either participated in the war as soldiers or witnessed it firsthand as journalists.” Perspectives from Vietnamese civilians were out of the question, unless they were conveyed by the American media; meanwhile, anti-war protesters at home were met with derision and straightforward hatred. What America wanted were photographs of, and books about, soldiers. It was these that the journalists provided.

Today, we recall the famous atrocities perpetuated against the Vietnamese—the massacres, the flaming villages, Eddie Adams photographing the point-blank execution of an NLF commander. Conservatives draw on this legacy when they moan about an anti-war press. But if anything, American journalists were too susceptible to the military, particularly in the war’s early years. As the scholar Daniel Hallin writes, television coverage in America’s first living-room war was “a series of more or less timeless images of men—or more precisely, of Americans:” pilots gearing up for missions, soldiers describing life under fire. “Almost all television coverage after mid-1965 was about Americans ‘in action.’” The press was against the war, but for the army; the analysis was that America should be in Vietnam, just in a better way. Journalists now famous for their dissent—the likes of David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan—were not particularly unpatriotic in their critiques. They saw Vietnam the same way many of the army men did, as soured by error and needless peril.

The military was not killing enough enemies; it was our allies in Saigon who were disgraceful; bombing was ineffective, not unjust. Even if they disliked the war, the journalists remained, in the words of William Prochnau, “too close to, not too distant from, the military.” The newsmen underwent Vietnam alongside the soldiers, undeniably liked the soldiers; Prochnau writes in Once Upon a Distant War, his history of American correspondents in Saigon, of the lasting buddyship of the journalist and soldier. The men marched side by side and exchanged congratulatory telegrams. In their bloodied proximity, the distinction between journalist and soldier could blur; the reporters were starting to bring their own guns into the field. They were taking on, in Prochnau’s euphemistic phrase, “mildly participatory combat roles.”

And as Halberstam and his peers investigated the military leaders and the White House, there were few qualms about imperial ambition. America was a world power; Vietnam was a catastrophe because it scritched an ignoble scratch onto power’s surface. Years later, after a Pulitzer Prize and a seeming change of heart, Halberstam would lament how his reporting failed to discuss Vietnam as “a neocolonial” venture: “What is interesting is how—in terms of the larger policy—how mild what we were reporting was. We weren’t saying we shouldn’t have been there . . . I am haunted by that.” The journalists had criticized Vietnam from the perspective of the soldier; the soldiers, in this framing, were professionals saddled with a hard job or war-strafed draftees just trying to survive. Few outlets would seriously repeat the stronger critiques of the war issuing from those condemning it at home—the New Leftists, old leftists, Civil Rights activists, veterans, and black radicals who saw Vietnam as a product of larger forces, and who the press routinely demonized. Hallin notes not hearing the word imperialism once in his survey of television coverage.

By the 1970s, the majority of Americans wanted withdrawal from Vietnam, yet 71 percent of them disapproved of anti-war demonstrations. Almost 60 percent believed that student protesters were to blame for the killings at Kent State, and around the same number said they would physically attack any individual who blocked traffic in protest of Vietnam’s ruination. For much of the war’s duration, the newspapers had refused to acknowledge the protesters’ political logic; they undercounted crowds at rallies, and contemptuously discussed the protesters as “Vietniks.” Rejection of the war was not the same as disgust with—or knowledge of—one’s country. The American media had given public dissent a set of conventional bounds; being anti-war could be its own opportunity for critical and moral negligence.

In an account of his time in Vietnam, the writer Michael Herr said of the American soldiers he met that they were “so innocent and violent, so sweet and so brutal, beautiful killers.” Herr, one of the most prestigious of his New Journalism cohort, was hardly pro-war. He saw America’s military presence as morally unjustifiable, the mission as an “intertwined ball of baby milk snakes,” Westmoreland an idiot. And yet Dispatches, his renowned collection of essays, was with the GIs; it followed their maneuvers, recorded their afflictions, and ventriloquized their language—which Herr correctly understood to be ace material. Getting stoned with American infantrymen in the Highlands, Herr finds himself one night presented with a bag of human ears. The moment is irreducible horror, but he defers to the book’s reigning strategm: quote a fellow American. “Someone had told me once, there were a lot more ears than heads in Vietnam; just information.”

“Just information” was the point. The GI may have participated in war crimes, massacres, and legitimate sadism, but these retellings maintained the exculpatory voice of the dataset. When CBS newsman Don Webster came across a separate incident of American soldiers cutting ears off dead Vietnamese, he prefaced his ensuing report by warning audiences that it was “not a pretty story”; but added that viewers at home had to accept the “emotional state . . . the anger and sorrow” that these men felt. Atrocities were symptoms, the soldier’s succumbing to an ugly rapture—warfare—that had no origin in politics. Back home, the protesters were calling it genocide.

Despite what the media couldn’t say about Vietnam, the war’s fateful reception back home had imparted to the military and to Washington certain lessons about the public image of American counterinsurgency. The main lesson seemed to be: no one get too close. Ten years after the U.S. military withdrew from Vietnam, it invaded Grenada, and during that time limited access to the press so severely that reporters were barred from the island for days. Over the ensuing decades, through the invasion of Panama, the Pentagon would refine a system of intense media control that attained perfection just in time for the internet to blow it open. This paranoiac need to dictate journalists’ access culminated in the Gulf War and its infamous mockery of military-media relations, the press pool system. Journalists had to apply to the Pentagon for credentials, accept round-the-clock supervision from military escorts, and submit content for review before it was sent to the States. No matter the medium—print, television, radio—reporters had to be specially selected if they wished to travel with troops, and the number of spots in these “pools” was paltry. By February 1991, there were 1,400 media workers in the Persian Gulf, but only 192 of them were with combat forces.

The rest were milling around the military’s press center in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, tethered to the briefing room and its posh orbit of hotels; the press, and therefore the American public, would be exposed to little on-the-ground conflict. Associated Press photo editor Donald Mell later recalled not seeing an image of a single “American tank being fired during the whole thing.” When General Norman Schwarzkopf speculated about the number of Iraqis killed—”50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 or whatever”—his vagueness exemplified the dwindling import of facts or human life. Tactical losses were left unseen and thus unreported, allowing for the perception that Bush pere’s invasion was clean, efficient, and procedural. Pentagon regulations prohibited controversial content, such as “visual and audio recordings” of American soldiers enduring “agony or shock” while being treated at military hospitals. The caskets at Dover Air Force Base, the sole casualty processing center of the war, were off limits; one enterprising reporter had to disguise himself as a mortician in order to confirm a KIA figure.

These were Vietnam’s lessons. In 1997, Senator John Glenn declared that it was “easy to see . . . people go off to war and the bands play and the flags fly. [But] it’s not quite so easy when the flag is draped over a coffin coming back through Dover.” Six years earlier, in the Desert Storm battle to retake the Saudi town of Khafji, U.S. marines had forced, at gunpoint, a French TV crew to surrender videotape of wounded soldiers. What became known as the “Dover Test” signaled a presentiment among Washington’s leaders that dead Americans, and photos of dead Americans, made war unpopular. Images of the massive bombardment of Iraq, however, were permitted and replayed endlessly, especially in the depersonalized form of distant, starry blasts or footage of bombs loaded onto fighter jets.

The Pentagon needn’t have gone to such lengths. The media was almost unanimous in its support for the Gulf War, and military contractors were already sitting on the boards of major news networks across the country. (NBC News was owned by General Electric, which had manufactured parts for almost every weapon system deployed in the Gulf.) Only 1.5 percent of all interviewed sources had been with anti-war protesters or sources—around the same proportion of people asked by networks how the war had affected their travel plans. When America returned to Iraq to invade and occupy it in 2003, the Pentagon reversed course and rejigged the pool system into the military embed program, which allowed journalists to travel with troops and report from their ranks.

Taken together, the two Gulf Wars seem to present a story of the military’s obstruction and manipulation of the press. But for all the anxiety journalists eventually voiced about regulations, it should be remembered that the military had felt comfortable enough with the media to pursue two opposite strategies in war coverage. The pool system had limited journalists’ contact with soldiers; the embed program’s intensified it. These impositions were less about evading the critical insights of a dogged media than an acknowledgment of a certain dialectical potency in the figure of the American soldier, whose presence justified war among the public, but whose death made it intolerable. This focus rarely wavered. The few reporters in the Middle East who had refused the military’s terms during the Gulf Wars, and whom the military deemed “unilaterals,” were still as likely as their pool counterparts to concentrate their reporting on U.S. military characters. In a series of interviews conducted by a researcher from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, military officers reported that the preferred reporter was not a unilateral or an embed, but simply one who was “willing to tell the Military’s side of the story.”

The story is recognizable to most Americans by now. Writing from the Middle East, many journalists portrayed American soldiers much as they had in Vietnam. Either the military was a bungling bureaucracy nevertheless staffed by good-hearted men, or the soldiers were crazed and amoral—but only errantly and individually. For Rick Atkinson, the Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post journalist, the soldier was mostly an American with a tough job—and the job was well done. “They took hardship in stride,” Atkinson writes in In the Company of Soldiers, the outcome of time spent with the 101st Airborne Division during its invasion of Iraq in 2003. Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, which follows an elite, all-male group of Marines during the same invasion, sees the soldiers more prosaically, as macho men raised on “video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn,” prowling the edges of empire for crude action.

Generation Kill was made into a TV show by David Simon (of The Wire fame), popular among real soldiers for the aspersions that Wright and his subjects cast on military hierarchy. The officers on the show are portrayed as amoral careerists, whose decisions cause their subordinates to kill innocents. The soldiers are just like us—guys with shitty bosses. For decades, accounts like these have introduced their slant critiques of war and its conduct, while still asking us to consider how American soldiers feel about what they’re asked to do abroad. That the answer doesn’t matter, that it is an airless thought experiment, was made clear only with Abu Ghraib. There, the reporter’s camera had been transformed into the soldier’s weapon; the soldiers’ means of torturing their captives were the same means of documenting them. There was no longer space between imperial supremacy and its representation; Abu Ghraib was not a lapse in humanity from within the timeless abjection of war but an act of dominance enacted and furthered through that memorialization. It was the signature of what American power meant to the rest of the world.

Today, every video or photo produced by an Israeli soldier is another Abu Ghraib: soldiers rifling through civilians’ underwear or dancing among the ruins of a Palestinian university have produced a record of their absolute estrangement from any redeemable form of conduct. Meanwhile, there are few accounts of the genocide by U.S. journalists on the ground—foreign journalists cannot enter Gaza unless they embed with the Israeli military, and if they do embed, they must submit their footage for review. American faces no longer obstruct today’s panorama of American atrocity. When it comes to reporting, legacy media now rely on Palestinian stringers and journalists for information, a deeply loaded arrangement, given that Palestinian journalists have been targeted for death by Israel.

If the public no longer looks to American journalists as the authentic witnesses of distant warfare, the U.S. media, whose monopolization on coverage has been diminishing since the emergence of Al Jazeera during the war on terror, has adapted to a new role. Rather than report from the frontlines, the press has come to act like an informational referee—questioning, minimizing, or rationalizing what Palestinians choose to post and portray. When Graeme Wood of The Atlantic says that “it is possible to kill children legally,” the ideologies of the media become more acute, but so does its interest in discounting the perspective of Palestinians.

Still, it is that perspective, and its horror, that has come to define the coverage of the genocide. The civilians in Gaza are not just being filmed; they are filming themselves. In this way, Americans see and hear from those on the infernal end of their own government’s weapons. They watch videos shot by Palestinian rescue workers and Palestinian children. They watch reports from Palestinian journalists, and then clips of Palestinian journalists learning that scores of their family members have just been murdered in targeted airstrikes. Because these come from survivors, the images represent both an unmediated truth and a political message—a concept the American media, which conflates factual accuracy with political neutrality, necessarily finds intolerable.

The most viral and horrifying videos are of the aerial strikes on civilians. They show not close fighting between combatants but the machinic force of empire bombarding and killing from the sky. Though the U.S. has long subjected vast areas of the world to aerial slaughter, we are now seeing this same slaughter without the intervening presence of U.S. soldiers, whose lives, trauma, and moral characters were once the dominating concerns of our wars. Presented with indescribable destruction, it is imperialism and domination that we so unmistakably see, rather than warfare as an exculpable litany of individual acts. 

The logic of the bomb has overtaken the humanity of the soldier to define, in an unprecedentedly public and visual way, America’s relation to the world. And yet, if the presence of U.S. soldiers had in many ways obscured the political meaning of our past wars, there is the terrifying prospect that it was only the costs these soldiers incurred—human and financial—that eventually made past wars untenable. What will end this one?

In Civil War, Garland presents conflict through the first-person view of the video game: its characters bust down doors, clear buildings, and snipe at enemies from windows. It is war from the vantage of the warrior and the journalist attending him. The movie does not depict forms of mass bombardment, or population control, or incarceration—three technologies that the U.S. has perfected, and that Israel has subjected Palestinians to for decades. Garland’s movie cannot show the more massive forces of imperial warfare, just as journalists in Vietnam and the Middle East once struggled to see beyond the human constitution and trauma of American soldiers during these forever wars. But we are seeing the truth of American power now because those in Gaza have, with unaccountable fortitude, showed it to us.

The corpses encircling the press conference at al-Ahli hospital. The small limbs in plastic bags. The craters, three-stories deep in the earth. To attempt to describe this is, in the words of Sarah Aziza, to know that “all language fails,” and in the process becomes susceptible to distortion. But there is still a reality to see. No matter how helpless acts of witness are in ending suffering, it remains true that to see clearly is a choice that begets further choices. To know what is happening in the present is to ask what one must do to live with, and bear, the future.